Did I mention the family yearbooks? Google says no. While we were in Singapore I started making books to document our time there. I shared the first two here and did make and complete the third one. Those three books covered all of our travels in Asia from 2009 to 2012. Hamish makes an appearance in the last book. 

I love them. A lot. I worked hard and I'm so proud of them and they are pretty and wonderful. Yay. 

But the books were organized by trip, and so they didn't include home time or regular life time. No Singapore. And obviously nothing from before 2009 or after 2012. 

New plan! 

We celebrate our "family's birthday" in August--our anniversary. We were already making anniversary videos. So I hit upon building family yearbooks from September 1 to August 31 of each year. (We married on August 26, so close enough). But if I'm going to do this annually, it needs to be streamlined. Easy. This can't be quite the undertaking that the 3 travel books were. 

I did start the same way: I built page layouts in Photoshop. The travel books are magazine style, with 19 page templates incorporating text and photos. These books needed to be even more simple. The goal was to just be able to drop in blog posts between September and August on text-only pages and drop the photos we pulled for the anniversary video onto photo pages. Keep the pages chronological and call it a day. I made 8 templates: 7 for photo pages and one for text. The design is even more simple than the travel books, photos are a bit bigger, and we chose to print them in a smaller format. 

Once I got the details set (size, templates, etc). I knocked out three for years 8, 7 and 6 of our marriage. I ordered them at the same time, and they look great. Year 5 is in the works, though I kind of got stalled. I need to get back at it. Because I order from Blurb when I find a good coupon, it would be in my best interest to order several at a time. I'd love to finish 4, 5, and 9 this fall and get those ordered together. The earliest years of our marriage were before the blog and before we took massive amounts of digital pictures, so years 1-3 might be grouped into one book. 

ANWAY... the point of all of this is that for this master plan to work, I need blogs. The blogs are what I cut and paste into the books that document our lives. We can have straight photo albums, of course. But if I want further documentation, I need to blog it in real time so I can include it later in the book. I know better than to think I'm going to go back and scrapbook or journal or whatever in hindsight. 

And right now, year #9 is pretty slim indeed. So I'm putting this out there for internet accountability. Maybe that will help me be better?