Baby’s First Year in 52 Photos – A Great Idea for New Moms!

June 26, 2012

As my due date looms closer and closer, I’ve been spending most of my extra time decorating the nursery, pulling out onesies and burp cloths from storage, reading lots of “new baby” books to my toddler and reminiscing on my first year of motherhood. How life has changed since we brought our son, Elliot, home from the hospital on that bright September day almost three years ago! Thankfully, I’ve had my share of “mom paparazzi” moments and have many, many photos to help me remember all those special times….BUT, since the advent of digital photography, do you ever feel like all your photos are buried in the black hole that is your computer hard drive? Aren’t photos meant to be looked at? I admit, I’m not a scrapbooker and if I’m not mailing photos to my grandma or filling a picture frame, I rarely actually print-out photos, which is a shame!

Thus, one of my favorite baby shower gifts I received when I was pregnant with my son was….a photo album. My mom made me this adorable album with the specific purpose of cataloging a photo of my baby every week for the first year of his life…what a wonderful gift and such a great idea! It’s amazing to remember how much a baby grows over those first 52 weeks, and this album highlights those small but dramatic changes as the weeks pass. AND, it forced me to be intentional about taking photos and actually printing out a physical copy of each photo for anyone browsing through the album to enjoy….no computers needed!

This is a thoughtful and special gift for any new mom and can be easily created with a small scrapbook album, decorative paper and other embellishments as desired. If you want one for yourself but don’t have time to get fancy, a simple photo album will suffice as long as it holds at least 52 photos and has space for writing the date next to each photo.

Here’s the album my mom created for Elliot.

The first page is for “Day One”…. the day your baby was born!

The following pages are labeled by weeks. My mom also bought Elliot this teddy bear to be photographed with him each week in order to provide a reference point for his growth. (another great idea!) I didn’t always remember to get the bear into each weekly photo but it’s included often enough to notice a difference. As you can see, she found a bear stamp to match the teddy bear…so cute!

If you are giving this as a gift or making it ahead for yourself, just cut a square or rectangular piece of cardstock and attach it to each page for a quick and easy border as each photo is mounted. I carefully removed the photos from these pages to show you an example.

Here are some of my favorite “bear” photos from Elliot’s first year…now that I have a digital SLR camera I can’t wait to start snapping pics of my next baby!

Week 4 – Elliot and his Teddy are about the same size.