Summertime, with its picnics, weddings, vacations, reunions, and other outdoor fun, offers itself as a season of photo and scrapbooking opportunities.  Here are a few suggestions of how to make this summer's memories special:

• Keep something from the place or event that you capture with photos to be preserved and scrapbooked along with those photos.  A few blades of grass from the park where your son or daughter played baseball or softball, a leaf from a favorite picnic grounds, a ribbon from a wedding, a few grains of sand from the beach or a pebble from a lake where your family vacationed preserved in a small memorabilia pocket will be a unique addition to your summer scrapbook album. 
• Expand this summer's memories beyond photos and your own experience by having other people at the event or activity contribute to the journal entries or captions that you can scrapbook along with your photos.  You can do this simply and easily by asking the simple question: What will you remember most about this day?  You may be surprised with some of the answers.  And when everyone finds out you'll be adding their comments to your summertime scrapbook, they'll want to join in with funny, witty and poignant remarks. 
• Take offbeat as well as traditional photos to capture the flavor of an activity or event.  For example, at a recent wedding, one of the guests took photos of each course of the meal served.  Scrapbooked along with more traditional wedding photos, these offbeat photos add another dimension to the memories of that particular wedding. 
• Capture, with a memory button, a giggle, a sigh, a clap of thunder, the vocalized "cheese" at the snap of the camera and include those memory button sounds in your scrapbook albums alongside the appropriate photos. 
• If you're taking a summer vacation of more than a few days, take an empty scrapbook album and a few scrapbooking supplies along with you and have the photos developed during the vacation and scrapbook them right there so you can go home with a complete scrapbook of vacation memories.
• If you're too busy planning events and taking photos to scrapbook right now, be sure to label the envelopes of photos with event and date or label a container (Summer - 2005) to hold all of your summertime photos and memorabilia.  Later, when you have more time, the summer will be waiting for you in clearly identified envelopes or container. 

However you decide to preserve your memories, we hope you have a summertime full of fun!