Scrap Challenge Day 4: Document one Day in Your Life

Of all of the photo albums I've seen over the years, the one most precious to me was done by my mother when she was 16 and hospitalized after a car accident. Some relative gave her a scrapbook to help ease the tedium of 33 days in the hospital, and she recently gave it to me to act as caretaker to the now-disintegrating book.  When I opened the front cover, I was transported back to 1966.

Recovering from two surgeries, the teen version of my Mom used her scrapbook to chronicle her experience. She taped up remembrances of the good days, like when a boy from school brought a flower when he visited her in the hospital. And she taped up the bad, like Christmas cards from relatives she wouldn't see that holiday, because she wasn't yet released. In between the good and the bad are remembrances of her life--hall passes from school, her hospital wrist band, the front cover of the TV guide (featuring her teen crush, Ben Gazzara).
Paging through my mom's scrapbook from those harrowing weeks, you see the optimistic, vivacious, sometimes introspective teen--the girl she was before. Before children, before marriage, before she began the 'work-make dinner-work-drive kids-work' cycle that would define the next four decades of her life. I never knew that 'before' girl...but in paging through that scrapbook, I feel like I do.

That's my challenge for you: Document your day--the good, the bad, the ugly. Years from now, your kids will page through and laugh, or grimace, or just think, "How in the hell did she do all that?"

(Or maybe they'll say, "Oh, no wonder she was such a crabby-*ss *itch all the time.")

Either way, it'll be your moment in time, in all it's multi-faceted glory.


It's easy. Here's what you need to do:

• Take pictures of your day. From when you get up to when you go to bed, document the high and low-lights of a typical day in the life of YOU. We'll be scrapping many of them, so take enough pictures that you can pick and choose what you want to represent. Try to include at least one of yourself! This page is about YOU, after all!
• Grab the ephemera of this one day--receipts, labels, the tiny flower your daughter picked for you--the flotsam of your everyday that might normally be trashed. We will scrap these, as well.
• Finally, document your day. What time did you wake up? What did you make for dinner, or did you order out? What's something funny your kids or husband said when you told them what you were doing today? Songs on the radio? What book are you reading? You get the drift.

At the end of the day, gather it all into a pile. Print your pictures, or send them out for next-day printing. We're going to use it all when we begin our next 2-page layout.

Thanks for joining me as I scrap...

Happily My Ever After,
Dylan