photo documenting: two inspiring ideas

when it comes to documenting memories with photos, i have not typically been the best at this. although i have definitely gotten better at it since i began blogging a couple of years ago, when it comes to printing out pictures and putting them in albums, i am simply no good at this.

with the the birth of our first child quickly approaching, i knew i wanted to be better at this but wasn't sure exactly how... until i stumbled upon these two wonderful ideas that is.

one comes from my friend lyndsey whose post about documenting her growing/changing family from year to year inspired me. she bought a simple christmas scrapbook and every year, she is going to make one page that includes the christmas card they sent out that year, along with a family picture and a picture of the tree. genius huh? this project is do-able for me because it only requires that i scrapbook one page per year. easy right?

the other idea comes from the o-so-popular younghouselove, one of my all time favorite blogs. when they welcomed baby clara a little over a year ago, they came up with the idea of taking a picture of clara every single week, for 52 weeks straight, and then putting these pictures into an album, almost like a flipbook, where they could document how much she grew and changed over the course of the year. they put her in a white onsie so that it would be easy to tell how she changed, and they photoshopped the week number on her cute little belly. they also bought a cool piece of fabric each week to go underneath her, although i'm not sure we will do this part. at the end of the year, they ordered shutterfly albums for each set of grandparents as a gift. super cute huh? although the thought of doing this at first seemed daunting to me, i figured if i found the perfect picture album, it would be as easy as printing the pictures out, perhaps once a month, and putting them into their place in the photo album.

while shopping at tuesday morning yesterday, i found two great bargains...

a christmas scrapbook for the first project ($2.50 on clearance for Christmas)...

and a monogrammed c.r. gibson brag book for the second ($6.99)...

aren't they super cute? and you can't beat the $10 joint price tag. i looked them up online to find these photos and they retail for more than $20 a piece --- gotta love tuesday morning savings. i'll be good on the christmas album for the next ten years because the album included ten christmas pages, and the monogrammed photo album holds 60 4x6 photographs, perfect for slipping baird's weekly photos right in. 

hopefully these two little projects will be a great way to watch our family grow throughout the years and a great way to watch little baird grow during his first year. 

thanks lyndsey and younghouselove for the wonderful inspiration! 

love, 

maggie