What I'd Scrapbook
The scrapbooking phenomenon keeps growing and growing, as mega-marketers like Martha Stewart urge the nation’s parents to move away from their mother’s cellophane-and-sticky-cardboard photo albums and closer to their great-grandmother’s lace-bordered family heirlooms.
As a work-at-home dad, I’ve taken on any number of traditional maternal roles, from choosing the kids’ daily clothes, to tending boo-boos, to fussing over balanced dinners. But still, I’m not scrapbooking. I am keeping all of my photos of the kids, in a giant Rubbermaid tub purchased from Home Depot and kept in the corner of the bedroom.
Not exactly what Martha had in mind. And yet, in a way, our entire apartment has become a scrapbook of the kids and their signature moments. Were it physically possible to fit everything between handmade paper covers, the book might look something like this:
1st page:
The first letter block my son, Fellow, put in his mouth so often that its entire coat of paint wore off. (Actually, I’ll have to remember to put this in the scrapbook when it comes back from the lead testing lab.)
2nd page:
A classic large cardboard stacking brick. My son made his first towers with the bricks when he was about nine months old—on Sept. 11, 2001. So he’ll know where he was.
3rd page:
The sheep and pig from the Fisher-Price farm play set. When my son was 2, I came up with a game in which he’d sit on my shoulders, and I’d put the pig and sheep on top of a picture frame. He’d then knock the animals off while I sang, “Oh, the sheep and pig and Fellow should be friends,” over and over again. When I’m old and barely mobile, I’ll want him to remember that I was actually once able to perform repetitive motions.
4th page:
The seashell-and-tinfoil bordered handmade picture frame my daughter made for me in preschool, with an adorable picture of her in a princess outfit inside. She later covered her photo with Disney Princess stickers, but I still remember how sweet she looked when she brought it home.
5th page:
The original cast album of “My Fair Lady.” My son once spent nine full months singing and dancing to “With a Little Bit of Luck,” each and every night of the week. Then he stopped, cold turkey. I’ll need to keep this on hand for when he brings his fiancée home to me.
6th page:
The 21 identical farm mazes my son completed in first grade, each copy taken from his classroom’s free time/enrichment box. It never bothered him that he’d completed the maze a dozen times before. He just kept doing it. When he starts rebelling in his teen years, I’ll be able to point to this maze as the object that made his self-confidence begin to grow out of control.
7th page:
A note my son once slipped to us under his bedroom door in the middle of a particularly grim timeout during kindergarten. It said, “I WT 2 CM OUT!” My response: My son can write! I still kept him in time out five minutes longer.
8th page:
The Scholastic Rhyming Dictionary. As part of his first-grade word study assignment each week, my son had to come up with a set of words rhyming with each of his words of the week. When he realized that he could just look up the words in the reference book, it was like he’d discovered penicillin. His first cheat sheet.
9th page:
My daughter’s bluebird ring. This tiny, slightly-too-large piece of jewelry has already been lost and found a dozen times. I just want to put it in the scrapbook so I’ll know where to find it.
10th page:
The trio of cardboard punch-out animals my daughter painted and decorated for her three pre-K teachers, and which I forgot to bring to class during the last week of school. She’s insisted on keeping them out on display ever since, a silent reproach to a forgetful daddy. To remind her one day that, unfortunately, she can never be too attentive a parent.
Gary Drevitch is a former assigning editor at Teen People, Parade Publications, and Scholastic. He’s also a dad with three young kids. A veteran producer of educational content for McGraw-Hill, Scholastic Inc., and Time Inc., he’s written several non-fiction books for children.
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Posted by carol gillette on Oct 30, 2007 3:39 pm