Family Yearbook
Sometimes the banalities of life make the days feel long and the years feel short. Parenting young children can feel a lot like groundhog day. Roughly once a quarter my girlfriends and I begin the spiral of existential crisis because “what are we even doing here?!” A couple of years ago I discovered a family yearbook to be an antidote to this feeling, and I can’t recommend it enough.
My Process
The way that I manage all the work involved in creating our yearbook has changed over the years, and my current process feels about as efficient as it’s going to be without letting AI put it together (which I’m not willing to do right now). I have a phone reminder set for the first of every month, at which time I scroll through all Google photos from the past month (both Brad’s and mine since we share access) and move any that would be good for the yearbook to an album that I’ve created for the year. I try to over-add, knowing I probably won’t use them all, but not leaving any real good ones behind. In the new year (or in this case June, because of life), I upload the album that I’ve been collecting into Mixbook. This is the platform that I use because I had a coupon 5 years ago and it’s been working well for me. Once I have all the photos loaded, the work of organizing and creating pages begins. I typically start with the big events or trips from the year, and then fill in with more of the daily minutiae of life.
When it’s all put together it no longer feels like minutiae. It feels like a life that’s really been full of wonderful moments. Of course, it’s a highlight reel, and doesn’t display all of the tantrums and the saying 603 times to please put your shoes on it is time to go and the bargains made to leave the park in peace. But taking the time to look through the evidence inevitably reminds me that we’ve made a lot of happy memories and shared a lot of love in the past year.
Kate was sitting next to me as I submitted the order for our 2024 yearbook the other day, and it prompted us to get out our other yearbooks and take a look. I started this tradition in 2020 (what a time to be alive!) so our yearbook history goes back to Kate’s babyhood. As we flipped through the pages together she said “mom, are these all real things that happened?!” Indeed they are. It’s a beautiful life we have together.
