Scrapbooking is a wonderful, relaxing hobby and a way to preserve all the memories of your kid's theme parties as well as an activity that can be shared with your children, especially after a birthday celebration.
In this era of digital cameras where you can take one photo after another, it is such a pity that most party photos either stay on the hard drive of your computer after everybody had a look at it, never to be seen again by anybody except if grandparents or family from across the country visit for a day or two and want to have a look at it.
If you are like me, you take one photo after another and never look at them in a critical way by deleting the blurry or bad ones (and let's face it, there are bad photos in every batch of photos taken at a kid's birthday party or for that matter, at any other event).
Choose the best photos or the ones that you find funny or cute and delete the rest.
Yes, I know it is difficult, but you have to be ruthless when it comes to photos on your hard drive.
This is especially important if you do not print the photos yourself but take it to a photo lab to be printed.
You can waste a lot of money in this way and end up with photos that will eventually find their way into the waste bin.
Turn the choosing of the photos into a family affair and let the birthday boy or girl choose a certain number of favourite photos and give the same option to other members of the family.
If you have your own computer, you can turn these photos into digital movies by using a program like Windows Movie Maker.
Add captions, voice inserts and music.
Burn the movies onto DVD disks to be viewed on DVD players so that the whole family can enjoy the movie.
This is also a great gift for grandparents and other family members.
Photos of the birthday party can also be turned into scrapbooks - pieces of wrapping paper, ribbons and gift tags that were attached to gifts and items that were used for decorations can all be used for the scrapbook, add notations as to what foods were served, games played and the names of all the guests that attended the party.
Digital scrapbooking (designing your scrapbook pages on a computer) has become very popular and if you have a scanner, you can scan and add many of the items mentioned above to your digital scrapbook pages.
If you have a graphics program like Adobe Photoshop, for instance, you can design your own papers and embellishments using brushes, custom shapes and styles that are part of this software.
There are also many specific digital scrapbooking software that you can download to create your digital scrapbook pages.
If you do a search for digital scrapbooking freebies you will find many tutorials and free "kits" that are shared by thousands of very talented digital scrapbookers.
Each one of them has their own terms of use, so if you want to share your digital pages online, you have to credit the person or persons whose work you have used in your digital scrapbooking pages.
Your digital scrapbook pages can also be turned into DVD's for your birthday child to enjoy watching together with his friends or even his own children in later years.
No matter how you preserve the memories of your child's theme parties, the important thing is to do it!