Hard Copy Memories

Part of the reason I try to be so diligent with this blog, other than to satisfy the craving of my massive following of nearly a dozen readers, is to keep a record of our family's major (and not so major) events and milestones. But, what happens in ten years when Blogger is defunct, and we're all communicating through tiny microchips in our brains? How will I get to such fine memories like A Walk to Remember or Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay? Enter Blog2Print. With a few key strokes, I customized a printed book of all my blog posts through 2015. I love it! They lay out the entire thing for you based on your choices. My one gripe is the photo captions don't stay with the pictures. They either just end up at the bottom of the post or sometimes randomly end up in between paragraphs. But, it's a small glitch that I'm happy to accept to have a printed and bound book of everything.

Another keepsake success is a completed photo book of our 2015 photos! At Thanksgiving, I started a project of curating of all our electronic images. After years of just doing a massive upload every so often, we are left with THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of images, most of which aren't good (like when we hold the button down and take 50 snaps, hoping we get ONE half-way decent shot with both kids looking, and maybe even smiling, at the camera). I've made my way through 2015 and 2014 and am being disciplined about uploading and cleaning up photos from both Mark's and  my camera each month this year. Pretty proud of that progress, but the next step of getting them into some sort of album was proving too much.

Shutterfly's Make My Book to the rescue! You can upload up to 800 images, and a design consultant will lay out a book for you for a $9.99 service fee. Hubbawhaa??? Um, YES, please and thank you. You can choose to use all your photos or have the consultant curate them for you and pick the best of similar shots.  You get to proof  the book before you buy and can add and rearrange pictures. I just got the book today and I love it! (HINT: Shutterfly is always running crazy  promos, so if you think you want to try this, keep an eye out. I got this book for 50% off). I can't wait to order my 2014 book!

I'm so excited to have these hard copy treasures in the house! There's just something about holding a book and turning pages that speaks to me and make the trips down memory lane a little richer. Happy lady right here!