I’m a little bit (oooorrrr, a lot) behind on questions I’ve gotten about fostering. Life has been crazy, and has no signs of slowing down, but I will try to answer what I can!
I got a question about lifebooks recently:
I’m not sure I’m the person to ask as far as keeping lifebooks ‘up to date’ as little in my life stays that way! BUT, yes we are required to make lifebooks, and I think they are vital for kids who spend time in foster care.
Our very first placement called me on the phone and went through her lifebook page by page with me for at least a year after they left. It meant so much to her to be able to go back and confirm those memories with me.
With that said, we do lifebooks a little bit differently than most people do. If I scrapbooked our lifebooks, they would never happen. I don’t get much time to sit down and do anything – and if there are craft supplies involved my kids quickly make sure it becomes pure chaos.
So, I actually choose to make our lifebooks on shutterfly.com. That way I can upload pictures and quickly make pages for different events, save it, and come back to it later. It’s easy for me to upload the pictures, and putting it together happens pretty quickly. Then, when kids leave, I just order a copy – if they leave quickly, I have it shipped to wherever they are going. It also makes it easy for me to order a second copy for our family so that we have the memories also. It’s possible that it’s a little more expensive that putting it together other ways, but I think they will last well, and it’s worth the ease and actually getting them done.
For anything that I want to stick in the lifebook that can’t be photographed or scanned in, I just get one of those big plastic envelopes that they sell with scrapbooking supplies and put it in the back of the book to stick it all in.
So….that’s how I do lifebooks! Anyone else have any tips?
I wish we had gotten lifebooks with our now adopted children. There is so much of their lives that is a mystery to us and to them. Somewhere in their eleven placements, one or more lifebooks got lost in the shuffle. I really like your way of doing them. The paper scrapbooking is always tough to get done at my house, despite my best intentions.
ReplyDeleteJust want to echo the importance of life books! We had a little girl in our home when she was 3 months old...just last year she called us at the age of 10 and in 4th grade. She was looking through her life book and saw we had our contact information in there (with this particular case, my parents felt comfortable providing that). What a fun surprise to hear from her after TEN years and to know she was still looking at the life book.
ReplyDeleteAlso, my two little sisters look at the books that came with them all the time. I am so grateful for the people that took the time to put together life books so that they can have pictures from their first few years of life. Such a blessing!
Thanks for sharing, Maggie. (That was actually my question.) I am trying to work out how I'm going to accomplish this in the future, given that my 5-year-old's baby book is still mostly empty... I think I might have to go digital, too.
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