Day 34: Operation Baby Books. Get on the ball!

Those of you that reviewed my list of things closely (anyone? anyone?) will notice that this task was not one of the original -40- things.

It's one I came up with along the way, mid way into the challenge.

I was recently going thru some family photographs and I was once again reminded how few baby pics there are of me. Now, I am the youngest of 5 so I GET IT. The novelty had likely worn off.  But it's kind of sad to rummage through your infancy/toddler/youth photos that were haphazardly thrown into a dusty, old cowboy boot box.

And, it suddenly dawned on me I have not even STARTED a baby book for Syd. I have some baby mementos thrown in a pretty box stored in her closet, but that's it. I framed her birth announcement but she took it off her wall, at some point, and I honestly don't have a clue where it is. Wow, I am not doing much better than my own parents, am I?

Needless to say, it seemed entirely logical to scrap the "Spontaneous Road Trip" task and add in "Operation Baby Book(s)"... Fun day trip vs. Horrible Mother Award??? Hmmmm. That's a no brainer, isn't it?

I had a brief fling with scrapbooking after Holly was born, so I've got some scrap/photo books going for Holly. By no means are they a finished product. Let's just say that fling with scrapbooking was short lived. It's just not my thing.

After the panic attack of "I'm a horrble Mother. What if I die tomorrow and there are no baby pictures for Sydney to show her own kids someday", passed and I calmed the heck down, I started organizing photos. Then the panic set in again when Jeff remarked that the hard drive on my Mac is dying and "had I thought about backing up the photos somewhere else?"

 Crap! Crap! Crap! No, I have not backed anything up. This could be a bad scenario. (If anyone has a good system in place how/where they store their digital prints, please let me know...)

4,000 deep breaths later, I realized I had to start somewhere. I decided creating a physical photo book for her would be best.  I'll deal with the potential "hard drive crashing/ all photos from the past 4 years going bye bye" scenario after this challenge is over.

Off I went to make some organizational sense of all the photos.....

Ugh, that was the most annoying part. Digital Photos everywhere - on my Mac, on the home PC, on CD's. It was like searching for a needle in a haystack to find her birth photos from Overlake Hospital.

But I found 'em. And weeded through hundreds, if not thousands, of images and narrowed it down to 255 prints to order. Boom, log onto Costco.com, order those babies up and I am on the way to "not being the worst Mother ever". Thank God.

I've only completed a bare bones book for Miss Sydney Elizabeth from birth to 15 months. But that is a good start. I've got prints through 2 years old ready to go, too. I just need another photo album to put them in.

Progress, folks, it's a beautiful thing!

The best part? Sydney LOVES this book. She's looked at it everyday, several times a day, since I put it together. She likes looking at her old crib, photos of her with no hair or with her Binky in her mouth, photos of her with her beloved stuffed elephant that she's had since she came home from the hospital. It's sooooo cute to see her looking at the photos and smiling and saying "Remember this, Mom?"

"I sure do, honey",  I say. And now she can always remember it, too...