OUR FAMILY CHRISTMAS BOOK

We're getting nearer and nearer Christmas! I've spent the past week knocked out by the flu, so feel like I already have a lot of Christmas activities to catch up on. Good thing I finished buying all my Christmas presents in November! While I'm getting my Christmas crafts organized, I thought I'd share this little memory book I started a couple years ago.

In 2014 and 2015 I made whole albums dedicated to the month of December, inspired by the December Daily concept. In 2016 however, I started making albums for the whole year (here's 2016 and here's 2017--2018 is almost done!), so making a 2016 December album felt a bit redundant. I love the idea of documenting Christmas traditions though, so I decided to make a separate Christmas album inspired by this post that I came across years ago.

Finding an album I actually liked proved to be more difficult than I'd thought. There didn't seem to be a whole lot of options out there, and the ones I could find were a bit dated and just not quite what I had in mind. So I thought about DIYing it. I thought about just having a project life-style album and adding to that each year. I even thought about getting a book printed with pages ready to fill in. Eventually I settled on getting an album with blank pages and pockets. The blank pages are obviously for journaling, and in the pockets I'll keep Christmas cards. I love that this gives me a lot of freedom for doing whatever I want. I'm sure my tastes will change over the years, and I'll have years where I'm feeling super creative and years where I just want to make a couple of notes, and either way it'll be so special to look back on. If I want to write a ginormous essay detailing everything one year, I can do that. If I just want to fill the pages with photos one year, I can do that too. The book I ended up with is one of these personalized books from here.

I decided to backtrack and start in in 2015. This was the year we got married, so it seemed like a bit of a natural starting point. I insist on taking a Christmas family protrait every year, and I love seeing how our family is growing! This is already such a special album to bring out each year, and I'm already so excited to be adding on the 2018 pages. To be continued!

OSCAR'S TRAVEL ALBUM

One of the gifts we received when Oscar was born was this memory book. It's essentially a spiral notebook filled with blank pages and a personalized cover, and I think a lot of people use these as a type of baby book. But as you may already know, Oscar already has one of those. So I spent some time thinking about how to use this book. I could have just scrapped the baby book and used this one, but I'd kinda already started the baby book and I enjoy its cheesiness haha. I could have just filled this with photos. I could have let him fill it himself, even just with random drawings. After lots of overthinking, I decided to just go with my first impression of the book and turn it into Oscar's very first travel journal.

Seeing as I kinda feel like I have enough journals and photo album projects and whatnot, I decided to keep this one as simple as possible, with mainly just photos and text. I usually use about a page or two per trip, or a page or two per stop if it's part of a longer road trip. Everything from small weekend trips to the cabin to our big coast-to-coast American road trip earlier this year gets journalled. This is also where I stick down any postcards he gets in the post.

I drew a map on the first page, which I plan on marking every time he visits a new country. I might add more to it later, but for now I'm keeping it pretty minimal. So far, counting the country he lives in, he's already been to six countries! Not a bad start for our young explorer.

The further I get on, I seem to be focusing more on the photos and less on the text, which I'm pretty happy with as I often struggle to figure out what to write and feel it ends up a bit awkward. It's not until the latest trip, our coast-to-coast American roadtrip, where I've started using alpha stickers and the like. Not sure I'll keep doing it, as I want to keep it as simple and minimal as possible with the main emphasis on the photos, but somehow I feel it works for that trip. I also try to use as many random phone photos as I can, as these photos are likely to not end up in any other photo books. It's a work in progress obviously, but I'm happy to report that I'm well over halfway through the pages! And at this rate, the book might end up being so thick I might need to take out some pages.

I really do hope Oscar grows into one of those people who appreciate these sort of things as an adult haha. But, if nothing else, at least I have a really good time making them. :)

DUBLIN PHOTO BOOK

I'm loving my ever-growing collection of photo albums, and this is my latest addition. I have a long to do list of photo books I plan on making, and I finally sat down last yaer and finished up this one from when Graeme and I went on a trip to Dublin back in 2012 (which feels like a lifetime ago!).

Photo books are probably my favorite way of preserving memories, and I love how flipping through this takes me right back to that little trip. All these little memories come flooding back; like struggling to find vegetarian food for Graeme (he was still a vegitarian back then!); getting caught out by snow and seeking shelter by going to watch the Hunger Games at the movies; sitting in a pub in Temple Bar where some girl was singing Sinaed O'Connor covers and thinking, yup, we are definitely in Ireland. :)

Like the Athens album, this one was also printed in a softcover (I ordered them both at the same time), and I'm still not really sure if I like that or not. This is also a relatively short album, and I feel the softcover just kinda makes it feel even less substantial? I dunno. I'll probably order a hardback next time. And I'm probably also totally overthinking this haha. One day, when I have a whole library full of these, I doubt I'll actually care.

Looking through these albums always get me so excited about travel (even though we just came back from a trip haha). Anyone off to anywhere exciting any time soon? We have a few loose plans that I think we need to finalize pronto!

ATHENS PHOTO BOOK

I was just about to start this post about this photo book I made from our trip to Athens "last year", until I realized we actually went in 2016 which is not last year at all, it's almost two years ago already. How did that happen?

This was actually Oscar's first holiday abroad, and his first time on a plane! He was just three months at the time and the flight went swimmingly, he just fed and slept for the whole time. It's a whole other story now when he actually has to be entertained for the whole flight (looking forward to that trans-Atlantic flight we're venturing on in a couple of weeks...!) And oh my, the Greeks certainly love babies. He was doted on wherever we went, with strangers of all ages coming up to coo over him and kiss his feet. He was like a tiny celebrity.

We had an awesome trip. As it was our first time travelling with our kiddo, we were a little unsure of how everything would go. We actually ended up spending a bit more on the hotel than we normally do when we travel, just in case everything went to hell and we'd be stranded at our hotel the whole time. Thankfully that didn't end up being the case! We visited the Acropolis and Parthenon, Temple of Olympian Zeus, Ancient Agora, the Panathenaic Stadium—there is just so much to see in Athens, so many historic sites so many beautiful neighborhoods to walk through, and not to mention so much delicious food. I mean, just look at me casually feeding Oscar on some old beautiful street in Plaka in the photo above. If only every breastfeeding session was that idyllic! Ha!

We also celebrated our first wedding anniversary while in Athens, and went out for a meal in Kolonaki, which is what Oscar is all dressed up for below (I also tried to snap a family photo for the occasion before we went out, which ended in hilarity as Oscar decided to spit up mid-photo haha! Ah, parenthood is so glamorous.). Our plan was to celebrate with a nice steak dinner, but what the waiter brought us was definitely not steak. "Umm, sorry, we ordered the steak?" I asked. "Yes," said the waiter. "This is steak. Baby steak." Ah! Haha. Not quite what we had in mind, but tasty all the same.

For this album, I used Blurb's option of a softcover rather than a hardcover. Most of the photo books I have made so far, I have had printed in a plain hardcover with a dust jacket, and then I've just removed the dust jacket and kept them with plain covers. The 2017 album was actually the first album where I used the hardcover imagewrap option, and I was really happy with the result and definitely plan on using it again. I'm not actually as impressed with the softcover option though, and I find it a bit annoying that you can't get anything printed on the spine if you go for a softcover. My plain hardcover albums don't have anything printed on their spines either, so if anyone knows a good DIY for this that still looks neat, let me know! Or should I just get everything reprinted as hardcovers with imagewraps? (Kidding! I think. Haha)

2017 PHOTO ALBUM

In 2016, I made a giant (actually, it was really quite small) album for the whole year. It can be pretty time consuming to make these albums, but breaking it up and basically updating it each month helped a lot. I also chose to only use photos from Instagram, which made the process a lot quicker too, as the sorting out the photos, organizing and editing is already done. But for my 2017 album, I decided to simplify it even further and made a photo book based. I used Blurb as a) they're my go to for photo albums, b) they were one of the few companies that could print up to 440 page books and c) they have a program that connects directly with Instagram. There's a couple of limitations as to what you can do format wise using this tool, like how you can't edit the layouts or do two-page photo spreads, but for my simple plan of having one photo per page it was pretty perfect. I updated the album monthly and it probably took me about five minutes each time. 

And whoa, I love this album. I love the fact all our favorite photos are in physical print and that you can just sit and look through them. I've probably already spent way longer than I should have flipping through it, and there's just so many pages that instantly make me smile. It contains our whole year, and everything from everday photos around the house to photos from our travels. And I absolutely love comparing the photos at the start of the year with the end of the year and seeing how much Oscar has grown. He's gone from being a baby to a kid, and it's so awesome. I mean, when I was taking photos for this post, I ended up ear-marking 48 favorite pages that I just had to include. I manage to narrow it down a bit further than that, but sorry, this is still a pretty photo-heavy post haha (which meant that Blogger crashed about a million times when I was trying to post this haha).

However, first a bit of a disclaimer: the album you see here is actually my second attempt at a 2017 album, as I just wasn't happy with the first album that got printed. The photos came out blurry and grainy and I just wasn't happy with the quality of it at all. Such a bummer. I ended up contacting Blurb customer services to complain, and I was really just hoping for a refund (as obviously an album of this size cost a few bob!). Mainly though, I was just so sad that I'd been looking forward to flipping through the album for a year, and expectations just did not meet reality. I know, this is an album based on photos from Instagram which automatically reduces the quality, but I guess I was just expecting that a program specifically made for making albums from Instagram photos would either somehow magically take that into account, or at least produce some sort of warning as you're making the book that the quality isn't good enough (as that's normally what happens with their other software). Anyway, I did not get a refund. I was told they'd give me a free reprint, but that I'd have to go through and probably use the original photos for the quality I was looking for, and I'd have to reorder within a month. AKA, sort through thousands of photos (probably not even an exaggeration haha) and organize and edit them--exactly the part of the process I was hoping to avoid. I don't even think I have all the originals anymore, nor did I have any idea how I'd find the time to do this. Eventually I decided to go through the album and just change the layout of each page, hoping that might help. Instead of full-page photos I opted for one large photo on each page. I figured that as they were covering the cost of a second album, I might as well give it a shot. And I'm so glad I did, as the second album is exactly what I had in mind the first time around. Lesson learnt.

The finish album is my biggest photo book yet, 360 pages total. It's divided into twelve chapters for each month, and at the end I did a quick written summary of the year at a glance so that the album will still make sense to me 20 years from now. The photos are not necessarily in chronological order beyond being in the right month--chronology is not a priority for me. I used photos from both mine and Graeme's Instagram account, and kept the whole book super simple and uniform. As a change from my previous photo books, I chose a printed hardcover this time, and I'll probably do that again for future albums too.

And, yes, duh, of course--I have already started the 2018 album. And I'm already very, very excited.