All new parents and grandparents enjoy capturing the precious new-baby cuteness by taking lots of photos. But if you're like most families, you have more photos than you know what to do with. If you spend a little time organizing and editing the photos, you'll be able to enjoy showing them off more easily.
You can arrange your photos and have a lot of fun at the same time by making a scrapbook for the new baby.
Even if you're not much into crafts, you can still enjoy scrapbooking which is a lot of fun and very easy. The scrapbook can be just a simple photo album or an elaborate work of art. Everything you need to know to make an enjoyable scrapbook, you learned in kindergarten.
You only need to get started arranging the photos in a meaning sequence so that people can enjoy them. The goal is to create the story of the child's life. You can add or insert other pages as things come up and you have time.
You will need some supplies to get started: a scrapbook, various types of pages, good scissors, glue, etc. Be careful about the pages. You need acid-free, archival pages for any precious or heirloom photographs. You can buy everything you need online or at your local crafts' store.
Don't get sidetracked looking at all the items in the beginning. There are lots of cute adornments and stuff for baby scrapbooks. Don't worry, you'll find lots of fun embellishments and things when you know what you really need.
I start a scrapbook by organizing the photos by date and event. Now is a good time to throw out all the duplicate, fuzzy, and really bad photos. Take the photos from the first pile and spread them out so you can see all of them. Chose the best photos and put them together to tell the story of what happened. You'll want to add a title and whatever information you like about the occasion. Having these details will make the page more interesting to look at later when you might have forgotten a lot of it.
You can add many other items besides photos. For a new baby, shower invitations, a copy of the birth certificate, birth announcement, thumb and foot prints are fun. Later, add school reports, newspaper clippings, school athletic letters, ribbons and awards, clubs, interests, anything meaningful.
As long as you make the scrapbook for your new baby with love, it'll be a perfect keepsake that he'll treasure his whole life.
My mother started my scrapbook when I was born, and I have been hooked on scrapbooking every since. For more tips and ideas, visit my scrapbooking blog.