I started blogging back in 2007, right before the birth of my first son. I had no clue what a blog even was until I saw a link in a friends’ Facebook status to her blog. I remember reading through her posts and clicking on to the blogs of other women, reading all about people I didn’t even know! Sometime during my late night blog stalking I got hooked. I loved being able to “peek” into their lives, people who were going through the same things I was or was about to be! I remember thinking “Hey, I want to do this”! With a newborn on the way and all our parents living out-of-town or out-of-state, I knew this would be a great way for me to keep the grandparents in the loop when our baby arrived!
And so my dive into the blogging world began. For the past five and a half years I have documented every new milestone, every birthday, every trip, every soccer game, and everything else in between! My boys whole life is written out, and I love it. I love being able to go back and compare their pictures at different ages, see when my oldest accomplished something, or even see what they got for Christmas each year!
About four years ago, it dawned on me that this blog will *hopefully* always be here and therefore will have captured everything about our life in it. I kept saying I wish there was a way I could have all of my posts in a book of some form, ensuring I’d always have all of these memories! I am not a scrap-booking person at all, and printing out each post would be just crazy, so I began doing some research.
What I found were some actual online sites that will print your blog for you! I was so excited and knew that this was what I wanted to do. After doing some reading on my options, I chose to use blurb.com. It basically uploads all your posts and pictures, puts them onto pages for you, and you have your book! The fun part, at least for me, is that you can edit every single thing about it – selecting fonts, colors, layouts, picture sizes, type of cover – pretty much anything. In the end you have a beautiful (in my case hardcover) bound book!
I now have five beautiful books that hold many, many memories! It’s my version of scrap-booking!
What’s great is that there are a couple of ways you can go about turning your blogs into books. You can choose a site that will let you fully customize your book or you can choose a site where you literally push a couple of buttons and it will do it for you. I love to be creative design stuff, so I choose to fully customize mine. It can be overwhelming to start, so here are my two top tips if you plan to give it a try….
1. Make Each Year A Book – I did not do this for my first two books, and it was sort of a mess. So now I do it yearly. Each books starts January 1st and ends of December 31st.
2. Work Month By Month – Editing a whole year at the end of the year could take forever! Again, guilty. My first yearly book didn’t get finished until April! So to make it more manageable, at the end of each month I sit down and upload all the posts from that month and work of those pages. That way a the end of December you only have a handful of posts to edit, and then you can publish.
These books are my version of “baby books” and I am so glad I will be able to give them to my boys one day!
What are some different ways you document your family’s memories?
I started blogging just before I got pregnant with our first and was great at keeping it up for him but since the second arrived…whomp whomp. However, you inspire me to at least get those first years printed. I am such a perfectionist it is hard for me to pull the trigger on things, but I just need to let go and do it!
Oooo. I’m pinning this one!
Emily, you’ll be so glad you did it!!!! Let me know if you need help!!