Family Yearbook

January and February are the most boring months of the year for us. It's cold, gray, and rainy here in Seattle. With two very small kids, we just don't get out much. The weather's pretty much the same in November and December, but having Christmas on the horizon makes it all so much better. 

Working on our annual photo book over the last several weeks has been such a mood-lifter. Looking through all our photos from the past year made me remember how beautiful the Pacific Northwest is during the summer and how we have so much to look forward to this year. We keep telling each other that we just have to make it through February and it will all be downhill from there!

I made our family yearbook using Blurb. I keep our photos organized by month in Flickr and you can connect your Flickr account to the Blurb software, so the whole process is really easy. For the cover, I went with my favorite family photo. 

And then just a pretty landscape photo for the back that sort of tied into the color scheme. 

Just for simplicity's sake, I like to limit text to just the title page and a list of the year's memorable moments.

Then it's just lots and lots of pictures! From Claire's first birthday...

To our summer vacations...

And Maggie's debut...

Of course, I had to devote several pages to our family photo session...

Before wrapping it up with our first Christmas at home. 

All my Instagram shots made it in too. 

And the very last page was devoted to Maggie's birth announcement and our Christmas card.

I've always been happy with Blurb's quality and I also like that they have a ridiculously high page limit. This book ended up being over 120 pages. I just can't narrow down pictures of my babies! But the grand total was about $45, which isn't too bad when you factor in the cost of printing all those pictures and storing them in traditional albums!

 P.S. If you are also photo book obsessed, here's another post about the rest of ours.

Fun Apps

Completely unrelated picture, but doesn't Claire look so grown-up here? What happened to my baby? Good thing there's another one on the way! 

Although I know I have a ways to improve on disconnecting myself from it, I love having a smartphone. I love that I no longer have to copy down directions, recipes, or addresses ahead of time. I love that we can find the nearest anywhere-but-McDonald's on road trips and that we can occupy Claire with an episode of Curious George for just a few minutes of quiet on long flights. It really has fulfilled all of my wildest dreams.

But, really, my absolute favorite thing about owning a smartphone is how much easier it is to get pictures and videos of Claire into the hands of her adoring fans. Aka her grandparents and great-grandparents. 

When Claire unexpectedly arrived, in our poor college student days, I threw our camera in my purse as we headed to the hospital, just in case. Adam went home to grab our bags and laptop later, but of course, the wireless on the laptop had to break at that exact moment. So, we had to ask a hospital visitor to bring a wireless adapter with them. Finally, more than twenty-four hours later, we were able to send our families a picture of Claire. Let me tell you, twenty-four hours is pretty long in grandparent years. If we had smartphones back then, it would have been more like ten minutes! 

Without further ado, my favorite apps for giving the grandparents what they want:

- Postagram.  Claire's great-grandparents are all over the place when it comes to technology {from also owning an iPhone to not owning a computer at all} but they all like to get mail. In my pre-smartphone days, I tried to send them pictures of Claire every other month. I had to choose the pictures, have prints made, buy the albums, put the photos in the albums, and mail them at the post office {always a fun place to take young children}. I would estimate it cost about $40 each time. For that very same price, I can send them each a Postagram every single week. It's a postcard with a little message and a pop-out photo from your Instagram feed that costs $1.00 to mail in the US and $2.00 to Canada. The app saves your addresses and payment info, so it only takes a few minutes to spread some snail-mail cheer. All from the comfort of your couch! 

- YouTube Capture. As you can probably guess from the above paragraph, I am pretty lazy. Before discovering this app, I would take lots of videos of Claire before finally getting around to connecting my phone to the computer to upload them to YouTube. Because that's obviously too much work, right? But, thanks to this app, when I catch Claire doing something new/funny/cute, I can upload the video to YouTube right away, straight from my phone. And then email Adam or my parents to check it out when they have a chance. 

I really think if they made a sixth love language it would be pictures, don't you?

Photo Books

Well, it's official. Our entire life, up until now, has been documented via photo book.

Here is Claire's baby book. I ordered two copies, one for us and one to put away for her later. 

It starts with her pregnancy announcement and ultrasound pictures.

Then the weekly photos we took during her pregnancy.

Continues on to her birth story and birth announcement.

The majority of the book is devoted to her monthly photos and corresponding blog posts. 

It ends with a few pages of favorite photos...

...some funny Instagrams and pictures from her first birthday party.

I also made our first "family yearbook" for 2012. 

It starts with a list of the year's memorable moments.



Like Claire's birth.



Adam's college graduation.



And our move from Pittsburgh to Seattle.



Of course there are way too many pictures of our cute baby.





Again, it ends with some Instagrams. The very last page is devoted to our Christmas card.



The final book I ordered recently is our wedding album. I actually made one quite a while ago, but then right around our two-year anniversary, we discovered that we had a DVD of all the images. You see, our photography package was supposed to include a DVD slideshow and we just didn't get around to watching it for two years. When we finally did, it turns out that our photographer had very, very generously included all the images instead. So, I made a new wedding album that pretty much sticks to the format of the original, just with a lot more pictures.



It starts with Adam's proposal and our engagement pictures.





Continues onto the ceremony.





The reception.







And, of course, the honeymoon.





I showed you our "college years" photo book a few months ago, but I'm not sure if you've seen these guys. I made them both quite a few years ago. We'll start with the one covering our semester abroad.



It starts with our home base, Aix en Provence and the surrounding region.







Then moves to our weekend excursions to Paris, Geneva, and Barcelona.









It continues onto our week-long trip to Italy.







And ends with our two-week trip to the British Isles.









That was the very first book I made and the only one I wrote captions for. I gave it to Adam for our last dating anniversary. It's funny how that event was such a big deal for five years, but now it's just like any other day! Speaking of dating, the final book I'll show you is titled "growing up."



It's basically the pictures from our childhood that we scanned to use for the slideshow at our rehearsal dinner.









But it also includes the story of how we met {Adam drew a comic book illustrating the events as an anniversary gift one year} and some pictures from our dating years in high school.





Whew, thanks for humoring me! I felt a little ridiculous taking all these photos of photo books last night. What can I say? I just love a good photo book.

Seriously, though. I know I've mentioned this before, but I've only used Blurb and been very happy with them. There's always a 15% coupon code out there. Most of my books range in price from $40-$60, but the largest is 150 pages and includes hundreds of photos spanning five years. Obviously the cheapest option for storing your photos is just to leave them on your computer, but if you feel like displaying them in some way, photo books are way cheaper than traditional albums. Plus, they're easier and take up so, so, so much less space!