Kids=PICTURES

In this era of digital cameras, it is so easy to take thousands of pictures of your little one in the first year alone. We are talking ONE kid. So what if you have 4 or 5? or 10? Of course, your time behind the camera will be limited with more kids so you will take a few less with subsequent children, but the point here is that many pictures will be taken. And what exactly are you planning to do with them? REALLY?

If you are like me, then you took thousands of pictures of your first child, and within the first 3 months had already made copies of about 200 of them. I set them aside saying I'd do something with them later. 5 or 6 months later when I looked back at those pictures, I wondered WHY did I make all these copies? She has almost the same facial expression in all of them. The biggest differences from picture to picture are the outfits.

From then on, I vowed to let myself take as many pictures as I wanted, but THEN I had to go back and delete pictures that were blurry, or basically doubles. The NEXT step was choosing only about 5-6 pictures from each month to make copies of. Some months would have a few more, and some would have a few less. I had to tell myself to choose my very favorites. The others would still be on the computer anytime I wanted to look at them. Well, actually we move them to the external drive every few months so our computer doesn't run slow. But you get the point.

The FINAL step for me was picking a way to actually organize the pictures that I'd made copies of. I love scrapbooking, so I chose that route. Now, mind you, I used to be a more detailed scrapbooker with ALL the fun stickers, papers, scissors, etc, but if I am actually going to get scrapbooks done for my children, I knew I'd have to simplify my methods. For Kayla's first year scrapbook, I used markers, normal scissors, and a few fun background papers to change it up. See an example below of several pages.

We are expecting #2 in about another month or so, and I have come up with a plan that I think hope will work in the future. Each child will end up with a full and complete scrapbook by the time they are ready to leave the nest. The first year will be more detailed (about 10-12 pages worth). Each year after that will get a page of the highlights from that year, possibly two pages if I'm feeling really artsy. I figure if we have several children, I can spread some of the favorites out between scrapbooks and that way if you look at them ALL you get a more complete look of the family. And I will not have all these photographs lying around my house with no place to go and no one to look at them.

Below is a page of Kayla's firsts that I included in the first year section of the scrapbook. I did some of the normal "firsts" and put in a few that were more original to our family/life.

Another fun idea. On one page, I let Kayla color with the markers (she was about a year and a half then). I put pictures on top, so I have a record with the pictures, and some of her art work at the same time.

I also included a page of "Favorites" from her first year of life. I know I will forget all these things as she gets older and we have more kids to keep track of, so this page was a fun way for me to save these memories. I didn't have pictures of every single favorite, but just wrote some of them in, so I'd at least have the written memory.