Baby Book Update

There are some things I did when Henry was a baby that I know I won't be able to maintain by the time we have a second child. However, there are a couple of things that are really important to me, such as creating a baby book that is just as robust as Henry's was. 

As a reminder, our plan for scrapbooking is as follows:

• Matt and I maintain an ongoing "Living, Growing Scrapbook" for our family
• We made a baby book for Henry to encapsulate the period leading up to his birth and his entire first year. After that, we only e-mail him photos and notes to a special e-mail account. We plan to pass down our family scrapbooks to our children, which is why I'm fine only making him a separate one for the first year of his life.

Sadly, we canceled our Spring Break vacation to Galveston. At first we were going to cancel it because the weather was not going to be so beach-friendly. At the last minute, we decided to go anyway to have an adventure as a family. The night before we left, Henry got sick and finalized our decision not to go. 

Instead, I used the time to catch up on a lot of projects, such as adding to our scrapbooks. Last year, I had to mail our family scrapbook to Voyageur Press (the publisher of A Priceless Wedding) for a photo shoot. I took out all of our post-wedding photos and temporarily stored them in Henry's baby book. 

When I finally got everything back and sorted in the right place, I realized that I had stopped adding to Henry's baby book around the 8th month and stopped adding to our family scrapbook around the 5th month! 

I spent an evening uploading photos to Snapfish. While I was at it, I wrote a letter to our second baby to tell him the story of how he came to be in our lives and what my pregnancy with him has been like. I've been writing him letters throughout the pregnancy, just like I did for Henry, but I also wanted to capture the complete story for him (like I did for Henry). This letter (plus accompanying photos of the pregnancy + the letters Matt and I have been writing all along) will form the start of the baby's book. While I was at it, I also uploaded photos for our family scrapbook. 

At the end of the process, I had uploaded 111 photos. I found a Snapfish coupon on retailmenot for 25% off plus free shipping. It brought the total down to a little over $8. Woo-hoo!

Just the other day, I read John and Sherry's recap of their yearly family yearbook. I love the idea of creating a slim, easily storable memento every year, and I started to regret our growing binder scrapbook. However, after flipping through our scrapbook again, I realized that I really like being able to add tangible items directly into our scrapbook, such as letters Matt and I write to each other for our anniversary, cards, invitations, etc., as well as being able to write next to certain pictures. Also, I think the process of uploading, printing, and taping photos into a scrapbook every couple months is more manageable for me than creating an entire book every year.

Going through the process also made me reflect on my process for storing photos in Picasa. The first year of Henry's life, I stored all of our photos by month. However, that process made it extremely difficult to locate specific photos unless I could remember exactly when they were taken. The next year, I lumped everything into a single folder for the year. Although it made it easy to upload photos for our scrapbook, it made it extremely difficult to scroll through and access individual photos during the year. This year, I'm going to go back to my old, old system of organizing folders by year and event. However, I'm going to keep them in order by adding a two-digit number right after the date. Here are some examples of folders we have already:

• 2013_01_Henry's Birthday
• 2013_02_Zoo Trip
• 2013_03_Food Truck

I think this system will make it easy to locate individual photos throughout the year and make it easy when it's time to upload for our scrapbook (since I can systematically go through each folder in order).

A couple other things I learned during the process:

• When we take photos, we need to get better about deleting the obviously bad ones before we even transfer them to the computer.
• When I upload photos from the camera to my computer, I need to delete the bad ones to reduce the time it takes to scroll through so many pictures.

I'm feeling good about being able to check things off my list of goals for the month! 

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