Parenting Sites 411

If you’ve been cruising around the mommy blog community this week, chances are you’ve heard about this.  Apparently, there are people who have been going onto flickr and taking pictures belonging to other people of their children and using them in profiles on Orkut.   And that’s not all, as people’s photos of their children have been popping up in marketing, on websites, etc.  All without permission, of course.

This is a huge deal to the parenting blog community.  We talk about our children nearly daily and we like to share the pictures we take of our children.  Unfortunately, the general public obviously cannot be trusted with this level of sharing.  So all across flickr there are mothers privatizing the pictures of their children.   It involves setting the permissions of all of the pictures of your children to be viewable by those you have marked as “Friends” or “Family” on your contact list.  I’m one of the many who have joined this crusade.  It’s a shame to have to “lock down” these adorable photos I’ve taken and enjoyed sharing with my readers, but I need to make sure my children’s likenesses are safe from the outside world. Short of taking down the pictures altogether, this is the best solution I can think of.

If you’d like to read more about this particular issue, check out the blog sites below (mine is included):

Babes in Blogland

Miss Zoot

Hilarities Ensue

Joy, Unexpected

Rockstar Mommy

Rancid Raves

Sweet Juniper

Slackermama

If you’d like to privatize the photos of your children but are unsure how, check out these blogs or leave me a comment here and we’ll get you all set up.  As parents, this is the LAST thing we need to worry about, don’t you agree?

I love taking pictures. It is very odd to see me at some function or event without my camera. As I have mentioned before, we take lots of pictures of our son, so he is pretty used to having the camera aimed at him.

What has been interesting lately is that he is interested in being behind the camera as well. We have an old digital camera that still works, so we charged up the battery and stuck in the memory card. We showed Fuller where the button was and he went to town. He went to town taking pictures of his fingers. They were all over the lens. And it cracks us up.

But, he is only two and a half. What are we going to do?

If you don’t want to hand over the camera to your little ones, why not the pictures?

I am not one who enjoys scrapbooking that much. I did it once for a trip to Ireland in college, but beyond that, I just never really got into it. And with our family spread out all over the world, I feel as if the mission as been accomplished once I upload the pictures to my flickr account. At least then the pictures are visible to others.

But I have been recently thinking about those pictures and ways to display them somewhere off my computer. And what ways are there to get Fuller involved?

This article at Family Tree Magazine gives several scrapbooking ideas for children, but my favorite is the Picturing a Pedigree:

Kids may have a tough time keeping all the branches of their family tree straight, especially when your pedigree stretches back centuries. Illustrate the relationships by creating a pictorial family tree together. Start with a simple paper-pieced tree like the one shown here—kids will love cutting out leaves and crumpling brown paper to make the bark texture. Collect photos of parents, grandparents and great-grandparents. Color copy them so you won’t damage the originals, then crop the copies into apple shapes and mat them on red paper. “Hang” the apples on the tree and write the names on the leaves. Add a tire swing just for fun.

What a fun way to help your littles ones remember who all their relatives are and where they are in the family line. This would be great for my husband’s side of the family, since they are many in number and get together every major holiday.

In the early days of summer, it might be fun to pull out pictures from over the school year and have your kids put together pages commemorating their accomplishments and events. Scrapjazz has a great list of ideas of types of pages to create:

Favorite subject at school. Why?
Favorite teacher. What does your child like about this teacher?
Describe a typical day at school.
Describe the items in your child’s backpack. Take a photo of those items.
What does your child like about his or her school?
Where does he or she usually hang out?
List of fun things your child does with his or her classmates.
What extracurricular activities or clubs do you child join? Since this is a personal choice, why did he or she choose it?
Who does your child usually sit with at lunch?
Who are your child’s favorite classmates? What does your child like about them?
What are the memorable field trips?

A trip to the craft store can inspire children to create and remember the days gone by. They will have something that they created and will last a lifetime. I guess it is time to start printing pictures!

scrapbooking, scrapbooking for children

Our son is a driving force for a lot of what I do. When he was a baby I wanted to share his life with our family, but they are so spread out that I knew the internet would become an accomplice in our quest to keep everyone up to date.

I started the Daily Fuller Fix in order to let people, especially the grandparents, see Fuller everyday. Now, I will be the first to admit that I don’t always do the best at updating everyday, but I try. And we backdate liberally.

It seems pretty simple, one picture a day of my son. In response to that I have to say, “Thank goodness for digital.”
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