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Sometimes we are so busy scrapbooking our children and family that we forget to include ourselves in our pages. Are you lacking in photos and pages of yourself?

With a little planning, you can capture more of yourself in your scrapbooks. While it's important to document our memories, we want our future generations also to know as much as possible about the person who took the time to create our scrapbook albums.

Plan to take more photographs of yourself. You don't have to have individual photos, but include yourself more in the group photos of activities and holidays. Teach another family member to operate your camera and pass it to them at least a few times at every photo opportunity.

Allowing others to take photos with your camera also gives your album some variety. Everyone has a different photography style. Having pictures taken by others gives you a chance to be in more photos. You might just be mentoring the family photographer for next generation. It's particularly fun to see photos taken by children. They tend to view the world from a very different perspective, and it shows in the photographs they take.

If you don't have many photos of yourself, ask your parents or other family members for pictures of you at their parties and events. You might come up with several great shots that you can include on your pages. Many people either other double prints or have digital photographs that they can easily print.

Try using photographs of yourself at different stages of your life. When you do page layout of your daughter, create a double-page layout with a picture of you at the very same age on the adjacent page. You might journal about how your life was at that age compared to your daughter's now.

Scrapbooking isn't just about photographs. Express yourself in other ways on pages. Write letters to yourself that explore your feelings, dreams and hopes. You also can write letters to your children or your parents telling them about how they have touched your life. These letters give others a picture of your personality that even a photograph can't express.

So often we want perfection in our scrapbooks, and we use computers to type out our journaling. This does give us nice, neat text with fancy fonts, but it doesn't

have the personal feel of our own handwriting. Use handwriting in your scrapbooks more often. This personal touch will mean a lot to your children and grandchildren.

If you can't come up with photographs of yourself, create scrapbook page layouts about yourself in other ways. Take photos of your favorite things and favorite places. "About Me" books give some great ideas for telling others about you without photographs. For example, save the tags from your favorite clothes and create a page that expresses your sense of fashion. Print the covers of your favorite books from the internet and journal about how these books affected you. Maybe you have a favorite brand of cookies or special holiday recipes, include the logo from the packaging or write out a recipe to include in your pages.

Look around you for other ideas to include more of yourself in your scrapbook pages. Even your Starbuck's Chai Tea Latte habit can be a scrapbooking page!