Andrew's First Year Book

first page

I made Andrew a "first year book" through Costco's photo center!  I have been struggling with keeping up with the photo album (frankly, I haven't put anything in their consistently since last August), the idea of scrap booking is appealing until I consider that I have a one year old, and while my blog is an online photo album of sorts, it isn't the same as having the pictures in front of you to flip through.  I looked into the ads that promise to turn your blog into a book (which seemed like the best idea in the world), but because I compress all the pictures I put online, the photos would all have to be re-uploaded into the book software.  Shutterfly and Snapfish were too expensive, so Costco had me.

Their 30 page books start at $29.99 and I knew that I wanted the entire year to be in one book. His book ended up being 34 pages. As part of sharing photos with my mom and mother-in-law, I have been uploading 50-60 of my favorites each month to Costco. When it came to building the book, I used the photos I had already uploaded which saved a bunch of time. I forced myself to pick my favorites from those (about 6-10 per month) and only did one double page for each month. I also did a separate page for each big holiday and two for both birth and birthday.

I take thousands of pictures, so choosing was hard, but I wanted to represent his year without being repeating (sort of like we would have done in the old days with film).  I built the book in spurts and could save it and come back.   The only downside of Costco (vs the other, more expensive, companies) was that I could not change the layouts or add a lot of text (the text boxes were already part of the layouts).

 our first moments together

 month six

 pumpkin patch with Brenda's beautiful pictures

 month 7 was a "photo light" month because between school busy-ness and Andrew's new sense of movement, there weren't many good ones!

 Let's eat cake!

I've already started his next book, but I've decided that I do not need a full year to fit into one book. 

I am going to do as many double-page spreads as I want :)