I'm a C-O-P-Y, so sue me.

Buying baby gifts is agonizing.  I love all the cute stuff at the store, but I have no idea what babies (or their parents) really need.  The registry helps, but usually by the time I get to it, everything's been purchased except the $129 stroller or the sold-out-everywhere-but-Alaska 3-piece "Fishinaquarimaginatiouflage" car-seat-with-2-bases set.  So I usually end up buying a weird hodge-podge of something like washcloths, rectal thermometers, and binkies.  Do people even use rectal thermometers anymore?  Who knows.

I've decided that until I have a kid and know what people actually need I'm going the home-made route with gifts.  My boss is expecting a baby boy in October, and since she's always mentioning that she doesn't have the time nor skill to make scrapbooks and she regrets not having her first kid's life documented as of yet, she's going to be my first victim.  Congratulations Christine - you're the guinea pig!  Ha!

I saw the project I copied tonight on a blog a few months ago.  The bloggers were expecting a baby and they pre-assembled a scrapbook that would help document the baby's first few years.  It has basic things like favorites, milestones, slots for pictures, etc.  They put the file they used up on their site for download, and I snatched it up!


I went to Michael's today to pick up an 8x8 album with top-loading pages, along with an 8x8 baby boy paperstack.  I think I got ripped off on the paper - 8x11 individual sheets are like $.29 each, and I paid $9.99 for 36 reversible sheets in the pack.  But I saved the time of having to stand there and pick out enough matching baby boy papers.  How much is my time worth?  Yeah, I'm ok with paying a little extra...

Anyways, when I opened the document tonight to get to work on the book, I realized that the pages were formatted for 8x11 paper, so I had to do a whole lot of editing to make each page smaller to fit my paper (5 1/2 x 8 1/2 blank invitation paper).  An hour of formatting and shuffling and copying and pasting later, my document was ready to go.

Once I printed all the pages, I trimmed each one down to a 5 1/2 square, which would fit in the middle of each 8x8 patterned paper.

With everything trimmed and ready to be assembled, I centered and attached each 5 1/2 square milestone page onto a patterned page and put them all in the book. 

Done!