Our photobook has arrived

I'm always excited yet really nervous to order a photobook.  Excited to have it done and see it in print, but also really nervous that I'll find lots of things to change as soon as I see the hard copy.  So I anxiously await it's arrival, start to look through it, and then realize it looks exactly like what I've seen on my computer screen countless times.  I try not to look too close to read too much of what I wrote because I know I'll find something (I found 3 things my first look through of this one, despite many edit run through it).  But I'll get over those little things and as time passes it's becomes more exciting to look at the actual book.  My stack of photobooks has grown to three and it's nice to know so many pictures (over 1000 between them) and memories are stored and ready to be shared.

Besides the typical documenting our adventures, there are some other things I like to include in the book (some of these carryovers from my scrapbooking days).

1) Projects completed

I don't have room for them all but do put in various crafting, decorating, organizing, and baking things I've done as well as woodworking or other home projects Matt's done (the bathroom got multiple pages this year).  In my scrapbooks I did this monthly but to save pages I did it quarterly in the photobooks.  It's nice to look back and see what we accomplished and how those things have changed since then.

2) House Tour

This is one I wished I had been doing from the start but did put in my 2014 and 2015 books.  Around the anniversary of the date we closed on our house, I went around and took pictures of all of our rooms (many of them are in this house tour from last year).  I am amazed at how much changed in just one year.  I love looking back to how our house looked in the background of various pictures over the year.  We've definitely gotten rid of a lot of stuff and I think my decorating skills have improved (feel free to disagree but just don't tell me).

3) Instagram pictures

I didn't do this in scrapbooking because there was no feasible way to do so.  In my photobook I did and fit 165 Instagram pictures on one page.  I think I'm going to do a separate post on how I did this because it'll take some explaining (I did not add 165 pictures to My Publisher and then to the book, there is no way that would have worked).  I only included Instagrams that were taken in 2014, not necessarily the ones I posted in 2014 (I hate that I know what #tbt is but I kinda do it).  It's a nice way to finish the book with a quick snapshot of our year.

4) A Day in the Life
I didn't do this in our 2014 book but I'm going to include it in Luke's 2nd year one.  If only for my own sake, I think it would be interesting to have his daily schedule documented and see how that changes.  I would like to read that for myself as a kid.  I do that here on the blog (1, 2, 3) but it hasn't made a book yet.  It will.


5) Social Media things

I haven't done this in our book because there has been nothing significant to include but at the end of Luke's first year I added all the Facebook comments and wall posts congratulating us on getting him as well as comments on my blog post.   I also added the entire text of that post.  Man, I lived it all but still get teary reading it. 

Who knows how long Facebook and such will be a thing.  Maybe when Luke's bigger he'll find the whole thing ridiculous.  But it is how a lot of people found out about Luke and where we got many congratulations.  It felt right to include it in his book.  He'll be able to see how many people were waiting for him with us. 

Side note:

Here is the advantage to the lay flat pages upgrade I've done on 2 of our 3 books.  

Top is Luke's first year book (the first one I ordered).  That's regular pages.  Bottom is our 2014 book with the upgrade.  Huge difference!  Definitely worth the upgrade fee for us. 

It's nice having the photobooks (and scrapbooks) to document and show our lives.  It's always fun to look back and see our adventures or just how life was different in past years.  I hope Luke enjoys looking through them some day as much as us (not for a few years at least...right now he only gets very closely supervised looks!).