School of Life - The Early Years

Back sometime around 1999, I took a class from Stacy Julian at a scrapbook store near Seattle. At the time, she was getting ready to publish her book "Simple Scrapbooks". When it came out, I fell in love with her "School of Life" concept and started a book for Colin. When Dutton came along, I wanted to do something similar for him but I knew it would be many years before he was school aged. I modified the idea slightly and called it "School of Life - The Early Years". Basically, I follow the same 6 page system that Stacy used for each "chapter". For the first year of their life, since they are changing so fast and there are lots of great things to remember, I created multiple "chapters". After that, each year is from one birthday to the next. I plan to do pages for the little guys this way until they are in Preschool and then start a School of Life - The Primary Years book for them.

Page 1 contains an enlargement of a portrait from that time period.
Page 2 contains a group of pictures from an important event (for the first year) or their birthday party (for age 1 and up)
Pages 3 and 4 contain a simple multi-photo layout of the major year events
Page 5 is a pocket page and contains the visit summaries from the doctor visits and any other important papers for that period of time
Page 6 contains calendar highlights for the period - dates for milestones (sitting up, first solid food, teeth coming in, etc.)

Since getting more organized for Library of Memories I have been able to very quickly pound through a bunch of pages for Emerson's book. I sat down and created some templates of some of the different page layouts I have used previously for Colin's and Dutton's books, and created Emerson's pages entirely digitally. So far, I have the page 1 and 2 created for Emerson's first three chapters - his NICU time, 4-6 months, and 7-9 months. His 10-12 month page one and two is almost complete as well but I need to search out some extra photos from his baptism from family members since I was a bit busy to take many.

Here are the completed layouts. It feels good to be checking things off my list!