CREATING MEMORIES WITH PHOTO STORY BOOKS

Creating memories through photo books has to be one of my most important projects i enjoy so much doing for the children. I might ponder where the motivation comes from and how it changes
and you might too.

Sometimes I think I took so many pictures of my first born that I make sure everyone else has enough pictures too and it serves its purpose.

Sometimes I just feel how nice it would be to have more pictures to share with my children from my childhood.

Heres what I do:

Whenever our family has a break that is more than a week, Spring Break, Summer Break and Winter Break I create photo/story books.

Living in New York City we are prone to travel during these breaks to expose our children to different lifestyles, surroundings and experiences.

Where ever we go I travel with a small picture printer from Best Buy, nothing fancy, inexpensive, and it takes up about as much room in the suitcare as a hairdryer would. I also travel with small paper books, like those they sell at Target in the $1.00 section when you enter the store and they have less than 20 pages in them. Each book has the name of one of my six children written on it.

Every day on the vacation I have a picture in my camera of either one of the children alone, with a sibling or a group picture.

I print the pictures at the end of the day, I just print six, if its a group picture I print one picture six times, or I will designate six different picture to print
from the photo card which you take out of your camera and put into the printer.

Some printers allow you to hook up a wire from your camera directlty to your
printer and you select the picture you want to print that way.

Then with double stick tape I tape the picture into the coordianting book and write
two or three lines about the moment.

Start off simple, dont try to write a story. I just picked up the lastest books I did from last summer while writing this blog.

Here are some of the pages that have coordinating pictures for my eight year old.

PICTURE "This is you with your brothers roasting mashmellows"
PICTURE "I love fishing on the dock with you"
PICTURE "You were so excited when you caught that fish"
PICTURE "Plantation Dinner with Dad"
PICTURE "Remember when you were so nervous to Kayak"


These books go into the childrens TREASURE BOXES and are a great special time activity to have them go through their treasure boxes and read these books.

It is amazing how much more connected everyone feels to each picture.
If you continue to download all the pictures from the trip into the FAMILY TRIP
BOOK that you create when you return home, fabulous memories will be created
both for your children to remember in their Photo Story Books that they will see again
in your FAMILY TRIP BOOK.

I have to give you the most important tip of all. You have to forget about the past, forget about the hundreds of pictures on your camera card. Just download them into one Shutterfly or such album and call them assorted with the dates. Forget about all the pictures in boxes. Let them stay there. It is so difficult to begin and recall information from past pictures.

You have to start fresh and start small !

You might take this to another level like I have. Now I have found through searching the internet companies who have printed me photo story books with my childrens names imprinted on them. Each child has their own color book. The page of the left is blank for the picture, the page on the right has six lines triple spaced on it and they measure 6 X 8 for a 4 X 6 picture.

Good Luck with your photobooks and its almost SPRING BREAK !!! Great time to test this out!. Let me know how it goes for you!