Round 2 of Creating With the Stars is up and open for voting! Go check it out – once again, the projects are fantastic! 

Um, before I get started let me be completely honest and say that I straight-up stole this idea from Young House Love.

I’m not ashamed.

If you’ve been reading a while you know I have quite a thing for photobooks, and Corey and I have a ton of them floating around our house. I love how they display photos in a much more concise (and pretty) way than traditional photo albums, and I’m big on having photo books around the house that I can look through whenever I want.

So, when I read about John and Sherry’s tradition of making a “yearbook” of photos each year, I knew it was something I had to do. I had really already been doing something similar to this for a very long time, because it’s been a long-standing tradition for me to make a photo album or scrapbook for Corey every year on his birthday (we’ve been together seven years, so we’ve got a lot of albums!), but this was a great push for me to shift it from his birthday to just the start of the new year, and now we’re able to include everything from the entire year prior in one nice little package.

I got ours a while ago, but I just realized I never told you about it and I think it’s worth sharing. I absolutely adore going back and looking at these photos, and it’s so fun to see what was important to us last year and see how much things have already changed.

Like, for example, Hadley. Can you believe she was EVER that small?

Making this yearbook was a good reminder to me that I need to be better about taking photos on a daily basis. I take a ton of photos of our house all the time for the blog, and I’m constantly snapping iPhone photos of our dogs, but when it comes to real-life, every day things involving actual humans, I’m not that awesome at remembering to pull out the camera. Here’s hoping I can change that this year.

I also wish I would have added in more text – I really prefer the look of photos only, but I think that in 10 years when we look back it might be hard to remember exactly what this crazy-looking date was. Well, scratch that. I don’t know if we’ll ever forget that date. But you get my point. Luckily this is just the first year of doing this, so hopefully I’ll get a little bit better at it each year! 

One of my favorite features of the book (this one was all my idea!) was that at the very end I included a bunch of photos of what our house looked like in 2012.

We’re constantly changing and updating things (as you probably very well know!) so I thought it would be fun to have a little section each year to update what the house looks like so we can look back and see the progress we’ve made. Hopefully over the next few years we’ll see a lot of changes! 

And that’s our little book! Fingers crossed that this year I can take more photos and maybe our 2013 yearbook will be quite a bit thicker!

How do you organize and display your family photos?

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