Yearbooks

One of those things that new parents are brainwashed into is the idea of doing baby books for their child. Apparently, as soon as your kid exits your birth canal, you are supposed to have the urge to go to the craft store, stock up on hundreds of dollars of scrapbooking materials and immediately start making pages for every kiddo accomplishment the moment that it occurs.

And if you’re too busy actually caring for your newborn to paste a piece of the umbilical cord into their baby book… well, you’ve obviously already ruined your kid.

I actually received a couple different blank baby books to use when Jack was born, so you think it would have been easy to throw in hair from his first haircut or write down his first words… but it wasn’t. When he was around 8 months old I realized I was never really going to get around to it. It wasn’t that I didn’t think it was important to do – I loved the idea of him reading about himself when he was bigger – I just never was able to carve out the time to do it.

Which brings us to my Jack Yearbooks.

When I was pregnant with Jack I received a coupon for a free photo book, so I decided to make one tracking my pregnancy. Instead of having a bunch of ultrasound pictures sitting around, I just scanned them in and included them in the book before tossing them in the trash. It was a nice place to dump all those pictures that I never got around to printing out – like my positive pregnancy tests picture and pictures from my baby shower. It was also super easy, because I already had all the pictures sitting on my computer (and in my phone).

Pregnancy book 1

Pregnancy book 2

When Jack was approaching his first birthday, I got another free book coupon… so I figured I’d grab up all my favorite pictures over the past year and throw them in. I went back through emails to my best friend and Facebook posts so I could add in when Jack said his first words and stood up for the first time. Just sitting down for 15 minutes and collecting all the information at once was SO MUCH easier for me than keeping up with it throughout the year.

Yearbook 1 a

Yearbook 1 b

Yearbook 1 c

After the first Yearbook, I was hooked. I made a note in my phone to collect pictures right before Jack’s next birthday and added them all into his second Yearbook at one time. After doing it once, it was super easy to keep everything in month order as I cleared pictures off my camera throughout the year. Also, I received free book promo codes at least twice a year, so I just held onto one until I wanted to use it!

Yearbook 2 a

Yearbook 2 b

Yearbook 2 c

Jack’s third birthday was a couple months ago and I just got his Yearbook in the mail. Each time I get a new book, I grab up all of them and page through slowly. It’s amazing how quickly the last three years have gone and I love that I have these memories in my version of a scrapbook to page through.

Yearbook 3 a

Yearbook 3 b

Yearbook 3 c

So, even though I’m not really a scrapbooking kind of girl… I guess I’ve sort of ended up with some baby books after all.

 

Did your parents do a baby book for you when you were a kid? Do you scrapbook your kid’s accomplishments?

Like what you see? Share me with your friends!

6 thoughts on “Yearbooks”

  1. No baby book for me but because I was born at the end of December it worked out that my mom made note of my first year on a calendar and kept that. So somewhere she still has a 1984 calendar flying around with little scribbles on it.

  2. I want to see these books in person! <3 🙂
    My mom made baby books for Becky and I. It's so fun to look at now that I'm older and I appreciate that she did them. I am awful at printing pictures out or making books online or any of that. I always mean to, but it just doesn't happen. Maybe that will be something I'll work on.

    1. I never get around to printing my photos, so it’s nice to be able to just dump them into the books once a year. I’ll definitely have to show them to you next time you’re over!

  3. We have a handful of baby books with one or two pages filled in, then a whole bunch of empty pages. As you said, we were busy raising the kids, instead of writing about it.

    I started doing something like these books about 15 years ago with my step kids. I started out doing books for the first few years, then moved on to putting together photo slideshows of them after the printing costs became prohibitive (these became our traditional Christmas presents to hand out to family & friends). It’s incredibly fun to go back and look at the old books or watch the old DVDs each year, and remember how much our lives have changed over the years.

Leave a Reply to Joules Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *