Every year I create a family album with a selection of our favourite photos from each month.  The photos are of special occasions, everyday moments, kids artwork, and sometimes random photos of our life together.  I am starting to get quite a collection of these albums and we love looking through them to see how much the kids have changed and to remember certain milestones or moments.

My process for creating albums is the same each year.  I work on a page spread each month in Photoshop using photos from our camera and phones and add designs from digital scrapbooking kits to help tell the story.  (Sometimes I get behind and have to work on 2 or 3 months at a time to catch up!)  I also add extra page spreads for the kids’ birthdays, vacations, and Christmas.  Once the year is finished, the pages are all exported to Adoramapix where the book is put together using their software and then printed.

I print our annual family photo books as a 10″ x 10″ hardcover book with a standard matte lustre finish.  The quality of these books never disappoints! (I don’t get paid to say great things about Adoramapix, I just really love their books!!)

Here are a few pages from the 2018 album:

In the past I have designed my own digital scrapbook kits to use in the photo books, but this year I just didn’t have the time so I used one of my favourite kits Retrospective from One Little Bird Designs.

What I love most about these books is the lay flat pages!

And I always try to add some photos of the kids school artwork.  I love this self portrait of Casey in the above layout.

For December I usually make 3 page spreads: one for the month, one for Christmas Day, and one to highlight our elf’s adventures! I also make sure to include the kids’ letters to Santa because they are fun to read years later.

And finally, the back cover is never forgotten and usually adorned with another cute photo of the kids! The front and back cover photos were taken by an amazing Edmonton kids photographer and our friend, Roberta, from Baby Bee Photography.

So that is a wrap on another year for our family.  Time to get working on the 2019 album!

Leah