I used a sight called Lulu. Every other blog-to-print website I found had lame formats that wasted a lot of space and made pictures too small for my preference. With Lulu, I chose my book size, paper quality, etc., downloaded a Word template and cut and paste each date, title, text paragraph and picture from the blog to the word document. That is where the hours were spent, cutting and pasting, but the end result looks just like the blog with large, colorful photos.
While the picture quality is compromised a little bit, it is good enough. While the binding is not the highest quality out there, it works. And each 500+ page volume only cost roughly $100.
I had made one of our year in France a few years ago. These four volumes are such a treasure!!!
The family history began when Tennie was born in 2000, while Geoff was in grad school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. To keep family living on the West coast up to date I started a weekly email called, Hello from Boston. Each person in the family got a paragraph about what they were up to that week. The paragraphs included milestones, quotes, behaviors, stories and events.
We moved to Seattle in 2001 and the emails were changed to Hello from Seattle. I had lost several years worth, but bless my mom! She had saved those emails and compiled them for me for Christmas one year. Last month I found the first two years that were missing on old floppy disks, bought a floppy disk reader and am working on those. There were no pictures attached to those Hello emails, so a big project on my list is to add pictures and create books like the blog books. And then I have six years of living in Utah to turn into books. Heavens, this is an enormous project and labor of love! And it is still going!
As I've read through amazing detail of years and years of family life, I realized the significance of my role as historian. I envisioned exactly what I'm creating now, the history of our family, but I had no idea the value of the information. The personality characteristics of our girls was remarkably evident from toddlerhood, if not infancy; the medical information; the growth and struggle; the evidence, in hindsight, of God's miraculous and merciful hand in our lives; the humor of my account; the priceless memories and quotes; and the picture of the amazing life Geoff and I worked to create for our children. It is all there, in detail. I marvel that I found the time, that I made the time, when there were often very difficult obstacles in my life. Somehow I stuck with it and made it a priority.
I must admit that the time on the tail end has made me want to simplify what I record now and how often. I also realized several traditions that haven't been captured, small things that are part of our daily lives. And there are many significant lessons I've learned that I want as part of this history. I want my children to know what truths strengthened me through life's journey. So moving forward, I am hoping to capture some of those things amidst the general happenings around here.
Lastly, these books capture all that was good. My private journals go into detail about my hardships and struggles. I'm glad they are separate. I remember struggling with depression during different seasons I read about while creating the books, the change Geoff's illness had on our family, or the angst about a particular child that accompanied long years of otherwise happy hubbub. Our lives are real. We all have our deep waters to pass through. But as I read over almost two decades of family life, I realized that all works out in the end. God is with us. Life is good.
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