[bucksaunt]

hi - am very new at this, so not exactly sure how it works, but here goes...we are getting ready for our homestudy. i just recieved a letter stating that we need to complete a 6-15 page lifebook about us, in a paper folder (standard size) so that it can be stapled to our file. i have no idea what to put in one, or even where to begin. they want this in 3 weeks. i really need some suggestions on how to put one together. thanks

[Stormy]

Hi,
I happen to teach scrapbooking at our local craft store and have done a seminar on lifebooks and will be doing it again this fall. I have done several lifebooks for my family, for foster children, and one of the most important ones was for our agency to show our son's bio mom. For that life book we wanted to show the bio mom what our family was like. we had an opening page with pictures of dh, myself and our 3 yo son. (we couldn't decide on one pic.) We had a page of our home and yard, dh and i courting, our wedding, our honeymoon, two pages of our family, places of interest in our area, some vacations, some holiday's and the last page was our favorite pic's of us with our 3 year old. We had captions telling the who, what, when, where and whys of each. Each page had a heading. We went to the craft store and got some decorative scrapbooking paper and a caligraphy pen. I cropped the pictures so that they only showed the important parts. In the end the album was great. (we had only a weekend to put it together). We then went and got color copies of the album. That way we could give it to our son's bio mom to keep and we didn't run the risk of loosing all that work. We also are able to keep the origonal as the first part of our sons lifebook. I think they usually don't want you to include any information that would identify you other than your first names and maybe the town you live in...if that. And just give them a good idea of what you are like.

And good luck,
A

[bucksaunt]

stormy - thanks for the info - i'm getting a pretty good idea now.
did you include very much text, ie, paragraphs of info, or just headings under the photos? i'm trying to get an idea of how much or how little we should write.

[Stormy]

We gave each page a title and then we wrote a sentence or two under each photo or if we had a group of photos for the same event we wrote about what was going on in the grouping. It could be as much as 2 words to 2 sentences. But just to give a feel for why that photo was important.

Hope that helps.

A