Life Story Work: Holiday Memories

As a social worker I’ve learnt a lot about child development, attachment and how love and family can shape a child’s views on the world throughout their adult life.

I work mainly with children in foster care or moving onto adoption, so I’ve seen how having a negative attachment figure (parent) or not having anyone to attach to at all, can affect a child, and in turn affect how they relate to others when they are older.

One of the things we encourage our foster carers and adopters to do is to create life story work. This is something we also ask the biological parents to help with, especially if the child is moving onto adoption. This is vital as the child can look back on their childhood when they are adults, and know exactly where they came from and who was involved in their life. It literally fits all the puzzle pieces together and shows them how many people loved them.

I have noticed how well life story work has been used to help children, and want my own son to have access to all of his childhood memories. As we get older we tend to forget a lot of the precious memories; I struggle to remember a lot of things unless my mum reminds me, or I see the odd photo from the attic. I would have loved to have had a life story book to look back on now!

I’ve started compiling things from the day he was born, but not much of it is in order as I rarely have time! I have bought memory boxes, and I put anything in there that I can write about- tickets to places we have been, photos of extended family, letters his father wrote to me when we were together, maternity notes, his first curl etc.
 
I even write a private blog to him when I get time, where I tell him what things we have got up to and new things he has learnt to do.

We are about to go on another holiday, so I had the idea to create a holiday memory book, which would be something I would put in one of the boxes.

DoCraft Kit

I was sent a gorgeous Oyster Blush craft set from DoCrafts to make our holiday scrapbook and I think the set is beautiful!

We have been on three holidays so far during his 2 years on this planet, and they have all been UK ones including going on a boat and visiting sandy beaches, so this theme really fits the topic of our memory book to a tee!

I am planning to put a mixture of photos, beach shells Chunk picked at each beach, tickets to places we visited, holiday park info etc in the scrapbook, as well as write blurbs about what we got up to on each holiday.

Oyster Blush DoCraft Set

When I finally get around to doing it (it’s a mammoth task trying to go through all my photos which have not yet been put into photo albums for two years!) I will be writing about it on here and showing bits off!

So for now, you will have to make do with seeing all the gorgeous crafts I get to use on this scrapbook.

The book itself is lovely, because it has plastic inserts to protect anything I will be sticking and writing, so it should hopefully last a good few years without getting worn.
 

Gorgeous Scrapbook

 

The neutral, sandy colours of the craft materials are going to look gorgeous against the beach family photos I will be adding in, and I can stick some real shells on to carry on the theme.

I was given the Oyster Blush craft kit from DoCrafts for the purpose of completing this review. No payment was received for this post and all opinions are honest and my own.

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