Practice Makes Perfect!

Learning to write your name is a very big thing for a kid. I have my boys write their name everyday. When they are little, I give a slip of paper and then I let them color their paper. I tell them they are writing their name. I always keep the first one of every month. Oh and I always have a laminated copy of their name in front of them. As they grow I start to help them do more on their name. When I think they are ready to really start writing their name, I place the laminated version of their name under a tracing paper, and have them trace their name. After awhile I put it back in front of them and have them start writing it for real. After they write their name, I have them answer a question of the day. Are you happy? Did you eat breakfast today? etc. This is my 13 year old's name writings when she was little. I saved them and put them in her scrapbook. I love to save things like this, that show progress.

Not only am I glad I did this with my kids, I am also glad I saved it and scrapbooked it this way.

My Project for 2011

So I have a big project, that I need to do and I have only done about 5% so far. I decided to share what it is, because I do feel like it is an important project to do.

It all started one December morning when we woke up to this in our neighborhood. We actually took these pictures.

A house had burned to the ground, with the family losing everything they had. The good news, was that they were on vacation, so no one got hurt. Then I got thinking about a couple of months ago, when a forest fire made people have to evacuate fast from their homes. So I decided I didn't want to lose everything, and I didn't want struggle trying to find important things, when evacuating my home.

So I have started scanning copies of everything that is important to me and putting them on a portable hard drive. Stuff like: Adoption Decrees, Birth Certificates, Baptism Certificates, Blessing Certificates, Any document, that I want to keep.

Then I started started scanning all my scrapbook pages for our family. I started with my daughter Anika, but I need to go back and do my wedding book, and my childhood and my husband's childhood scrapbooks. I am a big scrapbooker, so this is a big project. The scrapbook page below is when I was pregnant with my daughter. Sorry I forgot to rotate the page.

I filed them on my computer like this:

Anika's Scrapbook
Scrapbook 1

Bk1Pages 1-30

anibk1pg1 (each file matched the page it was)

Then after I got her first book scanned I realized she was born Pre-Digital Camera, so then I took each scan and made pictures scans as well.
I figure this will be good for other reasons as well: Anytime I need young pictures of her, I will have them now and when she gets married, I won't have to do this for her video.

This is how I have filed them:

My Pictures
1997
Jul-Dec
July 1997
7-97-1 (7 for July, 97 for the year, 1 for the picture #)

I can't even imagine losing these cute little pictures.

Anyway that is what I am doing for the whole year of 2011. We first got a digital camera with our 3rd child and she is now 8. So I have to do the picture thing for two kids, plus the stuff I listed above. Then I need to scan in every one's scrapbooks.

I have only ran into one problem. I will need to buy a 12x12 scanner when I get to the time that I switched to bigger scrapbooks. But I figure that is a good thing to have anyway.

When I am done, I will put them in a Safety Deposit box at the bank, and of course keep copies here that I can use for my day to day use.

So that just gives you another idea of how to save your kids precious memories and pictures.

My Cricut

For those of you that have a cricut and buy cartridges all the time......
It is time to stop.

1. Go to sure cuts a lot on-line and buy their software. I didn't get the CD with mine, so it was a little cheaper. But it runs 75 dollars without CD and 90 with CD.
2. After that you can use your cricut with the software on your computer. You will need to get a USB cord that runs from the cricut to your computer though.
3. The program allows you to use ALL the fonts you have on your computer to use on your cricut.
4. It also lets you use any dingbat like thing.
5. In addition you can google free SVG files and pretty much get anything you are looking for.

Today I found a ship that looked like Colombus's for my daughter's poster she was doing on him. It is great and really easy. So if you have a cricut (which I don't know how a mom doesn't with all the parent homework that needs to be done) get sure cuts a lot!