PhotoBooking: Family Year Book + Adoption Book

As part of my August 2016 Goals, I wanted to start working on my 2016 Family Year Book and work on completing my son's adoption book. I'm happy to say that I've actually made progress on this! 

Using My Mac Photos

I haven't really been organizing my photos on my Mac. I started working on this a little bit and getting Photos in a good order.

2016 Family Year Book 

I'm tasked with actual completing a Family Year Book! I've always wanted to make one and am so very excited that I have the opportunity to make one this year... a year where we have been a Forever Family :) Creating a photo book, yet alone a whole years worth of memories, is no easy task. I'm already years and years behind on moving these digital memories into a cohesive photo book. Small steps... and small tasks... will get me there (hopefully). For August, my task was to pick 10 photos ONLY for two months: July and August 2016. Luckily July and August weren't difficult to pick pictures from! So far, so good!

I'm back and forth on whether I should actually drop the photos in a photo book NOW... and keep adding as I go. Or do it all in one sitting (which might take a very long time!). But I guess I'm still contemplating what a full 2016 formatted Family Year Book should look like. It's all in the details, right? :) That'll have to be pushed to a different month as a goal, as it's a lot to try to accomplish this month.

Adoption Book - Story Boarding

It's taking me so long to finish my son's adoption book. There are so many ways to organize it and I couldn't really make a firm decision on it. Once I decided one way, I leaned a different way. Part of the reason I'm so indecisive is that I want to make an Adoption Book about our family and how we became a family vs. a lifebook. A lifebook is a book that goes into more things than just the adoption. I love making lifebooks for my foster kids and my son has 2 completed books. But I've been conflicted on how to approach our adoption book.

Plus, I want it to be just the most perfectest adoption book ever! I just had to really let go of all that and think about how I want to tell my son his story. I finally sat down with myself to really think about OUR family and OUR story. What I really want to accomplish by making an Adoption Book:

• I want it to be the story I tell my son. 
• I want my son to feel special about his adoption book. 
• Hopefully it'll be a story he wants to read over and over again because he loves the way it makes him feel. 
• Each adoption day (and hopefully days in-between) I want to be able to sit and read this book with my son. 
• I want him to feel loved from the book. 
• I want him to feel good about adoption from the book. 
• I want him to get a little about his "story" from the book - in an age-appropriate way. 
• I want him to know that I love him. 
• I want him to know he's loved by his birth parents. 

Lots of HIGH expectations from a little bitty book! No pressure or anything! :) 

When I think of our adoption story... I think about how our lives intersected in the most unexpected and random way. Like it was meant to be! I also think of my son's story as beginning in his birth mother's tummy. This is VERY important... because I think that's where part of the story really "begins," right? 

So, we have ME (aka Mama) who became a foster parent. 

Then we have Little Guy growing in his birth mother's tummy. 

With that said, that's where OUR story will begin!

I'm so excited about completing the adoption book, that I had to slow myself down. I made an outline and I've dropped it into a photo book on Shutterfly. I'm still playing with parts of the story, so I'll post the "completed" storyline once I go to print in Oct/Nov.

I have to say... I can't wait until it's done and I get to sit down with my son and share it with him. I think it's going to turn out really well.