I’m not going to lie – I had to laugh at all the entries that have come through for the eye cream giveaway yesterday! Apparently I have a lot of tired mommies who read this blog – regardless of whether they are 3 weeks or 3 years, we all know how tiring it can be… and I swear, they NEVER sleep!!! 😉 Okay, maybe my views are jaded because we are going through the most horrible sleep regression known to man. I need to bathe in that eye cream! The giveaway is open through Friday everyone – go enter now!
Switching gears, back before I had the girls, I had planned on doing something to document their first year of life. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do a traditional baby book where I filled everything out by hand or do something digitally, but I knew I would want to keep track of things so that come their first birthday, I would be able to come up with something.
Once their first birthday hit, I knew I had to make a decision on what to do. I finally came to the conclusion that I should use Shutterfly to make a first year book. Many times Shutterfly has their photo books 40-50% off as well as free shipping with orders over $39. Shutterfly books also have the option to add pages, which I knew I was going to need many of!
My largest piece of advice is to document EVERYTHING to help you as you are starting your book. Although I waited until the girls were 1 year old to start these, I will probably work on our next child(ren)’s books every few months until their first birthdays so it’s not much of an undertaking. Looking back at my monthly updates for the girls on the good ole blog was one of the only reasons why I could put so much detail into their books. I used so much of that information to help me out with the details I added.
I also had to decide whether I was going to work on the books simultaneously or whether I was going to work on each book as an individual project. For me, I decided to work on them independent of one another. I felt that if I focused on them both at the same time, each one of the girls’ personalities would not shine through quite as much.
Before I even got started working on the books, I took the time to organize my photos on my computer by month. This REALLY helped me when I needed to place my pictures in the books. I also realized that we don’t take nearly as many family pictures as I would have liked in the girls’ first year, and we have gotten much better at that since then! I was also sad I didn’t really have many pictures of us at the hospital either – we don’t even have a “first family picture”! Horrible, I know. Lessons learned!
I started with Emerson’s book and worked on that to completion. This took me about 1.5 months working on it almost nightly in 1-2 hour increments. For Emerson’s book I chose the Classic Baby Girl theme on an 8×11’’ hardcover book. I loved how bright and girly it was – totally matched up with Emerson’s sweet personality! For Brooklyn’s book, I chose the Little Love theme on an 8×11” hardcover book. This theme is subtly girly with pops of yellows and purples. It totally spoke to me as a “Brooklyn Book”!
Once I finished Emerson’s book completely, I started on Brooklyn’s book. This was the best decision ever because I could use the number of pages and how the books were laid out (1 month, Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc….) so that the books would be “fair”. I’m all about fairness, especially when I know the girls will be looking at these books in 10 years and saying “Moooooooooom – why did she get more pages than me?!”. I had to plan ahead for that one. 😉
I used their monthly photos as a starting point and worked around those, adding in holidays and special times in between them.
I used a lot of the layouts that were available through Shutterfly on the left hand side of the computer screen as well as changed the different backgrounds and embellishments as I went along. One of my favorite features was the “Idea Pages” to give you some great ideas on different themed pages you could make. When I got stuck on some “special pages” to make, I looked there and got some different ideas.
I added in letters and updates to the girls for all of the even months of their books, and this was where the blog was super helpful. I took most of the pertinent information I shared in their monthly updates and made them into little letters to add to their books!
The ABSOLUTE best tool I found when working on their books was the “Storyboard”. If you click on the Storyboard at the bottom right hand side of your screen, it brings you to a page where you can click and drag the pictures you want to use on each page. I used this the entire time I made the girls’ books as it was such a helpful tool.
Once you apply the changes you have made, the Storyboard chooses a page layout for you. That is easily changed once you’re back to the page editor screen if it’s not one that you like, but I often found I really liked the page layouts they chose for me!
My absolute favorite pages I made for the girls were their 12 month pages. I had high hopes of creating those lovely chalkboard poster boards for their birthday party back in August (that I never ever got around to posting about – whoops!), but I never had time to do them with all of the other crafts I had to make. Instead, I wanted to create something similar in their books that would last forever. I LOVE how they turned out! These two pages were a labor of love, my friends – each one of their 12 month pages took at least 1.5-2 hours!
Going into making these books, I wasn’t sure on whether or not to make their books the same or different, and I am so glad I took the time to make them different. Just because they’re twins doesn’t always mean they have to be treated as a set! Hopefully one day they will appreciate the fact that I worked on individual books for them.
I tried to share pictures/layouts above that document the same things – and you can see how different they are! That’s what I love about Shutterfly photo books… you can make them into anything you want them to be. Shutterfly isn’t paying me to say that either – I paid for those books with my hard earned $$. 😉 Each book after the discount (I think I had a 40% discount on one and 50% on the other) were about $40-$50 each. That may have been a little bit more money than a regular baby book I could have hand filled out myself, but I am so much more pleased with these products!
Going forward, I will probably make more books for the girls – most likely not as intricate and detailed as the ones I made for their first year, but for years nonetheless. I am already envisioning books in a year or two detailing all of the “things my toddler said” quotes that will make us laugh for years to come!
If you have any other specific questions, let me know – I’d be more than willing to help!
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