A Boy's Life

I've alluded to it twice before and now here it is - the thing that has become my second job all week long. The project I lay awake nights thinking of how to do something a little different. The project that has given me ah-ha! moments in the bathroom when I finally realized how to do the family tree in the nontraditional sense. The project that I rush home to spend 3 hours working on with my son, sending him to bed at 10 and then working on some more for about 2 hours. It takes about that long to do TWO pages, my friends. Mind you, I'm probably making it more work than it needs to be but my mother succeeded in turning me into a perfectionist. I may have had the latent tendency but she made sure to bring it out early and I haven't looked back since. It's both a blessing and a curse, as you perfectionists out there well know. It's work setting things up but once they are running, it's a beautiful thing and most people can appreciate it.

So this is some of the scrapbook. I just didn't want to spend a ton of money on embellishments so I may have taken the boring way out by printing lots of stuff off my computer. Good thing I bought color ink not too long ago. I must admit I am grateful to the crazy scrapbook industry (this kind of hobby still eludes me overall) for creating those wonderful 12x12 sheets AND plastic protectors. So neat. So simple. One word of caution - regular Ellmer's glue and paper with color images printed on them don't really mix. They make the color run a little and Son is heavy handed with the glue so that didn't help. I broke down and bought one more thing - a gluestick - to see if that would be better. It seems to have been an improvement.

So the theme is basically "Who Am I and What Am I Becoming?" I keep forgetting to take pictures of the mess we create each night but I did take pictures of what we've done so far. The cover isn't cut yet - that's Husband's job and he's been sleeping on the job, too. I think he's waiting until Saturday to throw some muscle into this but the book is due on Monday morning and I'm not trying to lose more sleep this weekend. I don't want a regular scrapbook cover so we'll cut out the cover and use yarn for the spine, much like he did in kindergarten. Thanks, Kindergarten Teacher!

I still have to cut out the letters to go on the cover and I've got some great Africentric-themed Christmas paper to do that job (trust me, it's pretty). I've also decided - thanks to the accidental wisdom of Daughter one morning who told me that she is a butterfly - that I will add a black butterfly to the cover and the back somewhere. Now if I can just find that song by The Sounds of Blackness called "Black Butterfly". The words are a fitting end to this tale of one young life:

Black Butterfly.
You can do most anything your heart desires.
Spread your wings and fly.

Makes me cry. I gave my tape away to a friend years ago. Wish I had it now!

Let's see, the "Yesterday" section still needs a title page and I've got to lay out daddy's family pages; there are lots of pages yet to do in the "Today" section, and the "Tomorrow" section needs a couple of photos to finish out three of the pages and 2 more of those pages have yet to be done. It sounds like a lot but we've made a lot of progress actually considering:

1. we've known about the project since June 20th before camp started,
2. I've been dreading it because scrapbooks make me cringe (I'm creative but I still don't know why I don't like these),
3. and we've only actually been working on it since Monday night because Husband's family reunion was this past weekend and it kept us hopping.

So, without further ado, here is the book thus far. I apologize for the glare. I was too lazy to take the sheets out of the sleeves. Hey man, I'm tired!

Still need to add the "Yesterday" title page before this.


We made sure no apples fell far from the tree.


Just my side for now. Daddy's got to get on the ball before I trim his branch!


OK. The paper is pinkish and he's a boy. But it matched the lettering! Besides, my baby's not afraid of color.


He actually had enough likes to fill two pages. Whew!


Children are the future right? Who else should be here other than my own stars.


We posed the question.


Here's a little closeup of him asking "the question". Required some acting. He pulled it off beautifully. Any excuse to be silly.


Yep, I've got some thoughts on what he will be.


Daughter does too. "He's going to be a doctor. I'm going to be a soccer ball," she stated bluntly. Daddy's thoughts are still blank, as you can see. Hmph. Typical. He's trying to make me sweat this out. I just know he is!

And that's all for now. Son says he will be a doctor so that's the stuff we have yet to illustrate.

It's been cool showing him picture of his great-great grandparents. One great is still alive (his "great" that is. My "grand".) and I hope he gets to keep the memory of that. He technically met my grandmother too when he was 5 months old. I wish I had a picture of them together. I wasn't thinking. I knew she was dying and all I wanted was to answer her prayer. You see, she had told me every summer when I stayed with her and my Grandpa when school was out that her main prayer was to live long enough to see me grown and with my own family and happy. She didn't expect to live to see my brother do the same. He is 9 years younger than I.

When I had Son, Husband (then Boyfriend) was going to California to see his nephew get married. He wanted to take Son but I said I had a mission to accomplish first because time felt short. Son was 5 months and Grandma was a shell of herself so she didn't speak, but I know she saw him. One month later she was gone.

I hope this book will be very special to Son later. It will make loss of sleep worth it.