Hellobee

I knew I wanted to make a baby book for each of my kids right from the get go. I wanted to capture all of those sweet memories and precious firsts and most of all – the wonderful photos. I have the baby book my mom made me and I still like to get it out every now and then and flip through the pages. I think I like to imagine the time she spent putting it together just for me, almost as much as I like to read about myself as a little baby.

I’m kind of a control freak so when it came time to make a baby book for my own baby, I didn’t want to buy something with specific pages to fill out; I wanted to decide what would go in it. A photo book was the natural solution. Something full of beautiful photos of my squishy little baby along with notes about the best parts of that first year.

With this in mind, I kept notes every month about what new things were happening, what milestones were reached. And I took lots and lots of photos. And when Lil Washi reached his first birthday, I was ready to put it all together. Except I was busy and I never quite seemed to get around to it. Well, you know how that goes – before long my little baby had turned two. And then I was pregnant with baby no. 2. Which meant I was about to get far busier and memories were about to get far more muddled.

So I set myself a deadline of completing Lil Washi’s baby book before Washi baby was born. And as much as I hate deadlines, they really do work – my completed book arrived on our doorstep the very day I was in the hospital giving birth.

I already had all the notes and all the photos.  So I decided the best thing to do was keep it simple. Our very best photos. A few notes.  And that is it. Nothing fancy – just my beautiful little boy front and center. I won’t show you every page — I realize nobody wants to see every single picture of someone else’s baby. But I will share enough that you can get a good idea of the layout and style and maybe a bit of inspiration for your own baby book.

The book is in chronological order.  At the start of every month, there is a full page photo and a summary of the happenings of the month.

Before I had kids, I thought that I would keep track of all of Lil Washi’s firsts – first time he rolled over, sat up, etc. – by recording the exact date these things happened. But I soon discovered that sometimes it isn’t as black and white as that – sometimes it is hard to narrow down whether the day he say unassisted for three seconds counts as sitting up or if it wasn’t until he did it for ten. Plus, life got busy and sometimes I really just didn’t remember the exact date. Keeping track of what was happening and all of his milestones by the month rather than the specific day just made it all so much easier.

Between each monthly spread are a page or two of the very best photos from that month. I found that narrowing down the dozens of photos I took each month to only a handful of the very best was key. When you include a ton of little photos on a page, none of them seem special.  When you look at the page, you think ‘wow, look at all those photos’ when what you want to think is ‘wow, look at those pinchable cheeks.’

The very best are the pages with only one large photo because they really grab your attention. But I also mixed in pages with three or four photos each because I wanted to be able to show a fuller picture of what was happening each month. Also, your photos need to be really crisp to look good enlarged to a full page and some of my favorites just weren’t good enough for that, but they look great slightly smaller. (When you make your photo book, most sites will let you know if your photo resolution is too low for the size you want it.)

Near the end of the book, there is a little recap of his first birthday and the major milestones that happened beyond twelve months.

And the book ends with a two page spread of his  monthly photos.  I thought about using these throughout the book to start off each month, but they are much more fun when they are all together so you can really see the changes each month.  Plus, because of a lack of good lighting in the location I chose (whoops!), the quality really wasn’t good enough to enlarge them to the size of a whole page.

I love how his baby book turned out and I was able to use this to make a great present for the grandparents as well. It is really easy to pull out just the very best pages to create a smaller book perfect for gifting.

And when I had my book printed, a copy of the template was saved online, so I can easily make a very similar book for Washi baby after he turns one by just swapping out the photos and summaries. (Hopefully I will get his finished in a more timely manner!)

Did anyone else create a photo book for your babies?  What did you include in yours?