I miss scrapbooking. I used to do it all the time, but since I spent the last year or so doing tons of crafty stuff for the wedding, I didn’t have much time to scrap. That’s where Cathy Zieleske comes to my rescue!

Cathy’s blog is my favorite. She’s hysterical, her family is lovely and normal, and the woman can scrap like nobody’s business. She’s teaching a class next month for Big Picture Scrapbooking called “Me: The Abridged Version,” and I’m in the class!

That’s right, I’m going to do a book of 28 layouts just about me and my story. It’s never been done (by me, anyway). The coolest part? I won a spot in her online class completely at random. I commented (along with more than 1,000 others), and her random number picking thingy chose me and one other person for a free spot in her class. Word.

Not only do I get to be pushed back into scrapping in a fun and creative way, I’m going to do a parallel book about Mark for Nicholas. I’ve wanted to do a book about Mark for Nicholas since Mark died, but for some reason haven’t really been able to do it. I’m going to use Cathy’s class as the template for it, and I hope I’m able to capture a small part of who Mark was so that Nicholas can know the part of himself that comes from his Daddy Mark. I think it will be good for Mark’s family too, to help me capture some of the stories about him before the stories are all gone.

Who knows, maybe I’ll get to know myself a little better in the process too.

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I was talking with a new friend last week, and during the conversation, she asked me how I tell Nicholas about his Daddy Mark. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, pretty much since the moment that Mark died.

Right after Mark died, I was a little manic about memory. I was so afraid I was going to forget everything. Everything about Mark, about our lives together, about his childhood stories, about the few months that he got to have with Nicholas. These thoughts calmed down after a while, but they were really intense in the first several months after Mark’s death.

To answer her question, I told her that I’m scrapbooking about Mark for Nicholas; but mostly, I’m telling him stories about his Daddy Mark.

I don’t want these talks with Nicholas about Mark to be artificial. I want them to be natural and meaningful, I don’t want to sit down to dinner every night and have “story time” about Mark. Instead, I tell him stories about Mark when one of Mark’s favorite songs come on the radio. When Mark’s favorite television show comes on. My favorite stories are when Nicholas makes a face or a gesture that looks like his Daddy Mark. I jump on those moments to tell Nicholas about his Daddy Mark.

I know too, that Nicholas is getting a lot of stories about Mark through his grandpa and his aunt and uncle.

So, how do you keep memories alive? How do you tell your kids or your spouses about friends, family, loved ones who have passed on (or even just have passed out of your life)? What do you do to try to help them know those people?