My Thinker

Little could I have known way back when these pictures were taken and I scrapbooked this layout just how prophetic they would be about my sweet son.  I was not present when the photos were taken, my husband took them while the two of them were up in the mountains hiking, but when I saw them I instantly fell in love with them.  I'm not quite sure I've ever seen pictures that summed up his personality so well!  He's been a deep thinker his whole life, and now that he's almost 20 years old, I realize how well all that thinking has served him.

I could possibly alternately title this page: "You just never know when those weird things you bought are gonna come in handy".   All the patterned paper on this page was bought at this little off-the-beaten-path scrapbook store.  They were selling these packs of paper that were nothing but strips--approximately 4 inches wide--there were about 100 strips per pack, and I momentarily thought "What will I do with 100 strips of the same patterned paper...and when will I need just four inches of it?"  But they were only about a dollar per pack, so I bought them anyway--lots of them in all different colors and patterns.  Then I tossed them in a drawer and they never made an appearance again until this page came along.  The piece under the title needed to be a little wider, so I just lined up a couple of strips and glued them on together.

The word "thinker" is another word I made using WordArt.  I flipped it and printed it on the back of one of the strips, then cut it out with my precision scissors and craft knife.  The other letters are metal tags that I bought in a plastic bag from the same store--no name brand on them or anything.

One of my all-time favorite elements to include on a layout is poetry.  Maybe it's the English major buried deep inside me, but I just think poetry expresses feelings that can't be expressed any other way.  Sometimes I write my own poems, but they are usually cutesy or funny and always rhyming.  I love this one to go with this page, and I'm not even sure how I found it...but it must have been some kind of miracle.

If you haven't ever created a page like this, I challenge you to do it, and I'm not talking about the layout--I'm talking about capturing a child's soul in photos and preserving it so succinctly that fifteen years down the road you can look back at it and remember that moment when you discovered exactly who they are.