Farewell 2010...time to archive the year's adventures!

The year is coming to an end...in less than two hours to be exact! 

This past week my husband asked me, "how can we keep our boys this age forever?"  I said, "through photos and movies!  It's the only way!" Sammy has begged me to "read" him his "baby Sammy book" (his baby photo album) about 6 times in the past couple days.  I love looking back through the years and I am happy that Sammy already does too!

Once Christmas and Sammy's birthdays are over, I kick my family memory archiving production into overdrive.  Now that the year is officially over (almost), it's time to wrap up my photo albums and family movies for the year.  For the past few years I've been doing our family albums digitally via iPhoto and having them printed by Apple.  I try to work on it throughout the year, creating new pages after each new family adventure.  I still prefer to create my own layouts in Photoshop and upload each page as one large image, rather than use iPhoto's layouts.  But, I really love how they are turning out and love to do them this way for several reasons...

1) They have a much slimmer profile than a scrapbook, and take up much less shelf space
2) Since I have everything backed up digitally, if anything happens to the books, I can always have a new one printed,
3) It's a big chunk of change at the end of the year, usually $70-$90 in the past depending on # of pages, but when compared to the price of all the supplies to do scrapbooking, or even to print pages digitally myself, it's actually cheaper.

I'm caught up through September now...a little bit behind but I hope to have it done and ordered soon!  I also do the same with movies...I keep running movie projects in iMovie and have been adding to them throughout the year.  One for each of my boys, and a third is all about our family activities together.  Working on them bit by bit throughout the year makes it much less daunting.  Can't wait to finish them, burn them, and watch them on our big screen!

I did just recently update my system on my Mac so that it could handle the new iLife '11, and have been pretty happy with the new iMovie so far.  I have been having some fun with the movie trailer capabilities it has, and put together one starting each of my boys, just as practice. But, I thought I'd share them because, well, I'm a mom and that's what moms do...they force everyone to look at cute pictures and movies of their kids.

Here's to a happy new year full of exciting blockbuster hits!!