Baby Book Re-cap

Once Upon A Time, long, long ago (ok, like a year or so ago), I had a relatively precise vision for M's baby book.  I assumed it would be like B's and have a two page spread per month as well as some pages about 1st (birthday, Halloween, Christmas, etc...).  But taking it one step further, I had visions of all the pages using the same (or complementary) paper and the same template design.  I even mocked up a version as a gift to my sister that she could easily fill in for baby Zane. (See sample pages she completed here).

Somewhere along the way though, I realized a few things.  First, it just wasn't happening.  She was more than a year old and I had not one iota of interest in mocking up monthly pages.  Secondly, through Me: The Abridged Version and A Week in the Life - I have learned that while I love the projects and the memories I am keeping I do not love repetitive work -- we knew this already, but now I know it is as true for scrapbooking as for my day job.  As in my Stacy Julian inspired world there is no behind and no need for chronology in my work (plus all the journaling is already on my blog) I just let it the book idea go for the moment.

Recently, I was sorting completed layouts out into albums and noticed that I have a layout about M from nearly every month.  I even have several "1sts" pages.  All but one of her professional portraits have at least a page too.  I even found some of my favorite type of "family member" pages which talk about my kids and members of the immediate family.  It seems, that I have created a baby book largely by accident by scrapping the way I do now rather than the way I did when B was a baby.  I looked at the pages and was delighted to see the amalgamation of little things that had made it in when there was no pressure to focus on all the "big" things or getting a photo set from each month.

It all made perfect sense as both the storyteller and the subject have changed along with my style of storytelling.  When B was a baby, I was about chronology in scrapbooking, I focused on big events and months mattered.  Now, I am more about telling stories as I'm inspired to do so.  I am delighted still that nearly every month has a story (February has many for some reason) and as I decide to tell more from a given month I'll add them.  I need to find a way to put the monthly blog posts in some how, but think I can do that a variety of ways that fit with my style now.

I wanted to share the discovered baby book with you so the slide show has most of the layouts I'll include. Note, they are not in any order here as the software was fighting me a bit.  For those of you paying close attention, some of the products/color schemes from my original post are indeed there, but so are many others and I am quite alright with that.

Note - this is not all the layouts of Lady M's first year so far.  Many of them are with other people or about group activities and those are largely elsewhere in our family books.  I do have several sibling layouts and one of those, at least, will make it in her book too.