Baby’s first year is an exciting time, filled with memories you’ll want to cherish for a lifetime. In response to this, the market overflows with baby albums, many containing space to record weight, height, and other important information, such as first word, favorite toy, and so on.
Commercial baby albums have serious limitations. For one thing, their question and answer format feels more like you’re filling out forms than documenting baby’s first year. Commercial albums also lack the personal touches that really make a photo album special. We’ve collected a set of baby photo album ideas to help your make a customized and deeply personal memento.
Take a Scrapbooking Course
Preparing for baby keeps you busy for a while, but once the nursery is painted, the crib bought, and the childbirth classes completed, time seems to drag out as you wait for the big day.
Why not fill your time with a scrapbooking course? You’ll discover all manner of tricks and techniques you can use once baby’s arrived and you’re ready to start creating her album. Online scrapbooking sites also offer baby album ideas for experienced and novice scrappers alike.
Express Your Feelings
By all means record baby’s weight, height, and important milestones, but don’t stop there. Record the silly moments, the quiet snuggles, and those times your heart feels so full of love it could burst.
Combine your baby album with a journal of your thoughts and feelings. One of the best baby photo album ideas we ever heard came from a mom who wrote regular letters to her child and included them in the album for the child to discover when she was older.
Cards and Photos
A new baby sees a flood of congratulatory cards you can add to your album. You can pose baby with the special cards and use the picture in combination with the actual card for a beautiful page. This gets more fun by baby’s first birthday, when he’s old enough to hold the actual cards.
Baby Names as Decorations
Scrapbooking supplies offer thousands of different letter stickers to spell out baby’s name, or you can order personalized stickers to use as decorations in your album. You can also include baby’s name and age directly in your photos. Buy some wooden letter blocks, spell out baby’s name, and take his picture beside them. Large children’s fridge magnet letters also work, if you keep them out of baby’s reach (some have small magnets infants can swallow),
Growing Up Photo Shots
One of the great joys of a baby album is charting the little one’s growth. Pictures of baby alone don’t really provide a sense of how she’s changing, though. Taking monthly pictures with the same stuffed animal (or a willing older sibling) provides a wonderful sense of scale. You can also buy an outfit meant for a one-year-old and dress her in it for the weight photos. She’ll be swimming in it at the start, and slowly grow into it over the course of the photo series (be sure to put her into a better-fitting outfit as soon as you finished taking photos).
Online Baby Photo Album Ideas
While a physical scrapbook is still the first choice for a keepsake, we can’t deny online albums have their place. They’re easier to transport and share with long-distance grandparents, for instance, so why not keep both physical and virtual albums? You can play with Instagram’s simple-to-use filters and effects with baby pictures, then upload them all to an online album for easy access by friends and family.
