Mandatory Scrapbooking

When I have time, I do enjoy scrap booking. Despite the fact that half of my craft room is devoted to embellishments and scrap booking paper and tools, it is hard to find the time to update my boys' scrapbooks.

Fortunately, each year, my kids' pre-school requests parents to make a scrapbook page for each child. I'm down to only 2 kids in pre-school now. One year, I had to make a page for each kid all in one weekend which was crazy because I didn't have any pictures ready and sifting through hundreds of images took time.

This year was a little different. I was prepared! Every time I uploaded images to my computer from my camera, I made an additional copy of my favorite images into a favorites folder. So, when I needed images this year for each child, I went straight to that folder and voila, the best pictures where already sorted for me.

With online photo-printing, I didn't even have to leave my home to order prints. That made this years school mandatory scrap booking a lot easier. As much as I dislike having to make the pages in such a short amount of time, I realize that forcing me to make a scrapbook page each year, forces me to be somewhat up-to-date and allows not only me, but my kiddos to stroll down memory lane with a flip of a page...and that I love.

Photo Cards or Tags

Each year, I like to make photo tags to attach to my kids' teachers gifts they hand out for Christmas. It adds a personal touch that everyone loves to see. I've been doing these tags for four years now and teachers love them. Here is E.'s Christmas tag to his teachers this year.

A. was so tiny a few years ago when I created this tag in 2008.

Now for the instructions: It all starts out with a fabulous kid-bribed photo shoot. This year it was as simple as pie or M&M's I should say. For my kids, if you get one kid to do something, you will get the rest to do the same because they always want to follow suit.

E. was the first to get in front of the camera. No bribery necessary. Just a hug from Mom was all he needed to cooperate.

Ryan wanted to copy E. so also no bribery was needed for his smiles behind the lens.

A. didn't need to be bribed for the first 5 shots, but after that, I had to fork up an M&M for each additional shot. That is, if I wanted a smile, that was the payment that was needed.

Good thing we only needed sibling shots.

Total price tag for my portraits, 5 M&M's for each kid. Despite the fact that E. and R. didn't ask for any, I felt compelled to compensate them for their time.

When the little ones were done, J. got behind the lens. At 13, this took a matter of minutes to get a great shot.

Voila! Total time when everyone is cooperating, 25 minutes, about 5 minutes per kid and another 5 minutes for the group shot.

After rummaging through the hundreds of shots, you need a template. I go here for my templates. These are photo greeting card templates that I have used as Christmas tags. Basically, you download the template, import your image, type in your text, and then you have yourself a wonderful card or tag you can hand out. For the tags that I have used, you need to download the additional templates they provide here. Download them to your computer, then once you open up the software, import the file you downloaded.

Go to your local photo place to get them developed and attach them to your gift and you are done.

I love the personal touch it adds to the gift. Can't wait to watch my kids hand them out!