Anyway, they are finished, and they are here. I don't think anyone else understands what a labor of love this has been. Except for possibly Gus, but even he only got to witness me cursing at the (uncooperative) computer at the tail end of the project. In fact, this is something that is over two years in the making. See, I made a blog book when Nikos turned one. It covered my pregnancy and his first year, and was a great thing to have. I fully intended to do the same thing for Maya, but kept overthinking the project: Do I make one book for Nikos' second year and one for Maya's incubation and first year, or make one combined book? And if I make a combined book, where do I start and stop??? You have no idea how much I agonized over these seemingly insignificant details!
In the end, I knew I had to start the book with the day I found out I was pregnant with Maya (August 2008), even though it would overlap slightly with the first blog book. And, well, time just got away from me. Every few months, I would attempt to catch up with converting all the posts to one giant Word document, but I never seemed to cross the finish line. A few weeks ago, I set a goal for myself: to finish the blog book before 2010 ended. And, I made my goal! With about ten minutes to spare!
The end result is this 464-page labor of love. I ordered two copies, one for each kiddo, which I plan to give to them when they are old enough to appreciate what they really are. It's their entire lives over the past two-plus years, in words and pictures. AND... in video! What I didn't mention is that I also set a goal for myself to burn ALL the video clips onto a DVD (2007-2010), and mount the envelope for said DVD inside the back cover of the book. So each of them will also have a video record of all the cute things they did and said as toddlers.
Really, I am pretty proud of myself. I love these kids more than life itself. And I hope that, one day, they will read these books and truly understand that. ♥
3 comments:
You are such a great mom, Briar! I would LOVE to have something like this. Definitely a worthwhile labor of love. :)
Wow, it looks AMAZING!! What program did you use for the actual book production? I'm sure they will treasure this when they are older. We have our blog printed into three different books so far and the kids already love to look through them, which we are fine with as long as their hands are clean :)
Good work!
Thanks you guys!! And Alayna-- I ended up doing it through Lulu.com (like I did last time.) I laid everything out using Word, converted the whole thing to a massive font-embedded PDF file, and uploaded that. And I was too tired, so I just used one of their cover templates, haha! I am SO HAPPY with how they turned out. They are seriously exactly how I wanted them to be! :)
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