Scrapbooking with a Toddler

The last time I did much scrapbooking was about two years ago, when Sunshine was just barely crawling and I could keep her entertained with a few toys while I worked.  Recently, I discovered a package of pictures in my desk from my trip to Jasper in 2009 with my girlfriends.  Deciding it was time these pictures got put away, I bought a small 8×8 album, printed a few more pictures to fill the pages, and dug out my scrapbooking supplies.  While Lily napped last week, I scrapbooked.

Keeping Sunshine busy was another story this time.  One afternoon, she was happily watching Piglet’s Big Movie when I started working.  On the other days, she wanted to see what I was doing and to participate.  I gave her a few scraps of paper and let her turn them into smaller scraps of paper with my scissors and paper cutter.  I showed her how to use the glue stick to stick bits of paper to another piece of paper.  And I tried to keep my paper and pictures out of reach.

Once, however, she got her hands on a small pictures that I had just cut into an oval to add to my album.  Because I had the scissors, she had the paper cutter, and the picture was soon under the blade.  When I rescued it, there was a gash across the middle of the picture.  I told her that she couldn’t cut pictures and pasted the photo into my album (the scratch isn’t too noticeable).  For a while after that, she cut up pieces of paper, repeating, “We don’t cut pictures.”

I’d never made an 8×8 album before, but I found that I really liked the size.  It was easy to put a few pages together quickly and to stop when Lily woke up.  Twenty 8×8 pages was just the right size for one weekend’s worth of pictures as well.  And I had enough room to work on that album while sharing my desk with a two-year-old who also wanted to “scrapbook.”

As I flip through the finished album, I feel a sense of accomplishment.  I like the artistic and creative elements of scrapbooking.  Putting the pictures in order, with a few notes or details about each, is like putting a story together.  While I didn’t get any writing done last week because I was scrapbooking, it was a good break.  I was still being creative.  And even if Sunshine at times drove me nuts by asking for help or cutting up things that I didn’t want cut up, it was time that we could spend together working on something.