As I've mentioned a few times, I've been working my way through Cooper's baby book over the past month. This was another thing where I had found several ideas on Pinterest as I started saving ideas for the nursery, so I saved them on a Pinterest board to come back to. After looking at several options, I decided I would probably just want to make my own photobook with all of the details I wanted to capture.
So I took from several ideas I found and wrote up some prompts and put them in a Google Document that I've added to over the last year. It had a whole lot of things about pregnancy, his birth story, and our first weeks at home. Then I had pages for each month where I put the info I put in our Cooper's Cubbyhole posts along with important things I wanted to remember from each month.
As far as organizing pictures, I keep them organized in folders on the computer. It's not a revolutionary system, but it helped make the process of compiling his book fairly easy so I thought I'd share. I do our family photobooks each year on our anniversary so I have our pictures organized by those years. So in my "pictures" folder I have folders for Year 1, Year 2, Year 3, Year 4, and now Year 5. Then within those I have lots of folders for different seasons/themes/holidays. So I started a "baby" folder in Year 4 when I was pregnant and it grew from there. I then added a folder for each month. Within the monthly folders I have a folder for favorites from that month that has less than 10 pictures of the highlights. I also have folders in there for any special events, holidays, or trips within those months. Then I numbed all of the pictures starting at 001. This took some time, but it made it so easy to refer to the pictures and to add references in my google doc of what pictures I wanted to include. This was also very useful as I started creating the different themes that I posted about where I have pictures throughout the year to go with different spreads-- Lily, cousins, friends, etc. In my Google doc I have each one listed and then I just put the month and the number pictures that go with it. So easy to find everything! In fact now that Cooper's first year is over, it's a little weird to not be organizing all of his pictures by month--since I won't do another baby book I just have his pictures mixed in with ours in the different seasons and events.
Okay, now on to the actual book. I started working on it around the beginning of March. The first thing I had to do was decide where to create it. Due to some drama, our last yearly photobook that I created ended up being a huge mess and I had to create it twice. So I decided to stick with a company that I knew and trusted for Cooper's book and went with Shutterfly. I know there are lots of companies out there and ones that might be better, but I've always had a good experience with Shutterfly and find their program easy to use and customize. One of the baby book ideas that I had really liked came from the blog Who Arted. The book was fairly simple, but I liked a lot of the ideas she included and she even has a link to her entire photobook that she made that you can browse through. So I basically copied her :) And this is some of how it turned out:
So I took from several ideas I found and wrote up some prompts and put them in a Google Document that I've added to over the last year. It had a whole lot of things about pregnancy, his birth story, and our first weeks at home. Then I had pages for each month where I put the info I put in our Cooper's Cubbyhole posts along with important things I wanted to remember from each month.
As far as organizing pictures, I keep them organized in folders on the computer. It's not a revolutionary system, but it helped make the process of compiling his book fairly easy so I thought I'd share. I do our family photobooks each year on our anniversary so I have our pictures organized by those years. So in my "pictures" folder I have folders for Year 1, Year 2, Year 3, Year 4, and now Year 5. Then within those I have lots of folders for different seasons/themes/holidays. So I started a "baby" folder in Year 4 when I was pregnant and it grew from there. I then added a folder for each month. Within the monthly folders I have a folder for favorites from that month that has less than 10 pictures of the highlights. I also have folders in there for any special events, holidays, or trips within those months. Then I numbed all of the pictures starting at 001. This took some time, but it made it so easy to refer to the pictures and to add references in my google doc of what pictures I wanted to include. This was also very useful as I started creating the different themes that I posted about where I have pictures throughout the year to go with different spreads-- Lily, cousins, friends, etc. In my Google doc I have each one listed and then I just put the month and the number pictures that go with it. So easy to find everything! In fact now that Cooper's first year is over, it's a little weird to not be organizing all of his pictures by month--since I won't do another baby book I just have his pictures mixed in with ours in the different seasons and events.
Okay, now on to the actual book. I started working on it around the beginning of March. The first thing I had to do was decide where to create it. Due to some drama, our last yearly photobook that I created ended up being a huge mess and I had to create it twice. So I decided to stick with a company that I knew and trusted for Cooper's book and went with Shutterfly. I know there are lots of companies out there and ones that might be better, but I've always had a good experience with Shutterfly and find their program easy to use and customize. One of the baby book ideas that I had really liked came from the blog Who Arted. The book was fairly simple, but I liked a lot of the ideas she included and she even has a link to her entire photobook that she made that you can browse through. So I basically copied her :) And this is some of how it turned out:
This is the cover and page one. After that I had a page about finding out we were pregnant and how we announced it, a page with the monthly bump updates that I kept on our computer. I included a page about our gender reveal and Christmas card announcement and a spread about our baby shower. There was a page of pictures of the nursery and a page with a family tree that I made.
There was a spread for the day he was born including all his stats, first pictures, mom and dad's first thoughts when we saw him, and some notes about important news and what things cost the day he was born.
One of the many things I liked in the example book above was the calendar for each month. It notes things such as doctor appointments, holidays, milestones, playdates, swim lessons, vacations, etc. So I did a calendar for each month. I kept a paper copy of these calendars on our desk in our office and added to them throughout the year, then I made a computerized copy of each month for the book. So in the book there is a spread like this for each month-- a calendar looking at the month, stats for his month birthday, then his monthly pictures with the notes of things he liked, didn't like and his developmental milestones.
Also for each month, I had one page that had some of our favorite pictures from the month along with a note I wrote him each month (usually they are posted in my blog along with the Cooper's Cubbyhole posts). That's pictured on the right above. On the left was usually a special event for that month-- this example was his first time swimming in August. Other examples included First Mother's Day, First Father's Day, First Road Trip, First Rangers Game, First OU Baylor Game, Sitting up, Fall festivities, Family pictures, First Halloween, First Thanksgiving, First Christmas, First Valentine's Day, and Spring at the Arboreturm. The only month that didn't have a special event was January, so I just did a 2 page spread of pictures from the month.
For the last monthly update I didn't have a calendar (since March was included in the 11 month post), so I did his 12 month pictures with things he likes, doesn't and milestones. Then David and I each wrote him a note for his birthday and I put those on the opposite page with some pictures we took for his birthday.
Following that was a collage of all of his monthly pictures along with a list of all of his firsts. Again, this was a page I had in the google doc where I recorded all of the dates. These milestones are mostly recorded on the calendars throughout the year but it's nice to have it all in one place.
After that were all of the special spreads-- Sleepsacks, Breakfast Tacos, Neighborhood Walks, Lily, Friends, and Cousins. Then I did a spread of his 1 year old pictures and a spread about his actual first birthday. Lastly were some pages about his birthday party.
Another one the ideas I loved from the example book is that she scanned in all of the cards they got at showers, when the baby was born, and first birthday and included them in the book. I loved that idea, so I did it as well, and I even have started doing it with all of the cards, invitations and announcements we get throughout the year and I include them in our family photobook. It's always so hard to know what to do with cards, so I love having them all collected this way. I did a spread of all the cards we got at my shower and when Cooper was born toward the beginning of the book. And the above spread is all of his first birthday cards on the left and all of the "My favorite memory of your first year" cards from his birthday party on the right. It's so fun having these in the book and seeing our friends and family's handwriting there.
We ended with a collage page of 9 of our favorite pictures from the year-- none too special, just fun smiles we wanted to remember. All in all, the book ended up being 94 pages! I proofread it several times and then I ordered it last night and can't wait to get it. Hopefully it will be a fun way to remember Cooper's first year.
Sorry for another long post, just wanted to share and remember the details of how I made this book!
1 comment:
What a fun memory to have! I got photos for an entire year in a book...and that’s about it haha. But it will be fun to incorporate them into our yearly family books moving forward. Much easier and cheaper than old school scrapbooking!
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