family photo cred: my darling Hannah Black Photography
i love photos. i love filling our home with happy memories. i love prioritizing these things in our home, in our budget, and in our schedule. and we finally figured out the simple way to organize and display our photos and memories that works for us.
as always, there are many, many ways to do this. this is just what works for us. take what you love, leave the rest, make it your own. you do whatever works best for you!
we fill our phones with candid photos. (duh haley, we all do.) i make sure to also snap photos of moments in our day-to-day lives. little mundane moments I want to remember. easy peasy. bear with me here.
then four times a year, i upload those photos on my phone from the past season to Google Photos. i purge and delete any photos I don’t want to save. my yearly tasks + expenses list reminds me when it’s the time of year to do this: March, June, September, December.
within our Google Photos, we have an album titled “google home,” I add favorite photos from the past season this album, and these photos from this album display on our TV and on our Google Nest Hub.
I then take our favorite photos from the past season, and I make a photobook. that way, we have four photobooks a year - for example, this year we will have Winter 2021, Spring 2021, Summer 2021, and Fall 2021.
again, my yearly tasks + expenses list reminds me when it’s the time of year to do this: March, June, September, December. and in these months, I make the past season’s book. like, in March I create the Winter book, in June I create the Spring book, and so on.
for me this works because I have one photobook to dump any and all special memories in - the small daily moments to the big life moments. bringing home a baby, going on vacation, small KK on her mat, Brett holding KK in the chair, what we ate for dinner, me and dogs taking a nap, etc etc etc: it all goes in this past season’s book.
like, here’s a peek into our Summer 2020 book - the season we brought home KK - and I already love seeing not only how small she was, but how sweet Winston was with her, how we watched Schitt’s Creek for the first time, how much godforsaken basketball we watched, how we started our Grill and Chill tradition, and how we ate on paper plates. such sweet memories
and we keep the photobooks in our den (see the photo here), and guests mention alllll the time how they love not only seeing our photos displayed, but also flipping through these books.
i use chatbooks, I make 6x6 softcovers, and I make lots of collages within the pages of each book so that I can minimize my page number count, but maximize the number of photos. here’s my referral link to chatbooks so that I can get $10 off my next book :)
i’ll print photos we love and i’ll hang them on our gallery wall, our big chalkboard, or our laundry room bulletin boards. one time a photographer recommend mpix to me for printing, so i’ve just always used that.
around our home we also have framed sentimental pieces - maps of precious cities/countries/hiking trails/national parks, magazine clippings of, say, the Southern Living Austin Taco Tour Brett and I started (and are one place short of finishing!) alllll those years ago when we were Dating Babies, art prints we picked up while traveling, beautiful cards we picked up also while traveling. i love having these happy sentimental pieces doubling as decor. for the same reason I love our laundry room bulletin boards. display alllll the memories so that we can enjoy them daily.
lots of places in our home give a nod to Santa Fe - the city where we got married and where we try to return to annually.
we have jars with the years labeled on them and these are our travel jars or our memory jars. like, the jar labeled “2016” has allllll the ticket stubs, maps, and general travel momentos from the trips we took in 2016.
we do not have a 2020 jar. we did not go anywhere in 2020. lololololol.
speaking of travel, when at all possible, we grab a travel book, an ornament, and/or a puzzle for every place we go. makes for the loveliest collections. and, on the topic of travel traditions, we try to go to both santa fe and a texas beach every year, assuming no morning sickness or pandemic affects those plans.
i would love to continue to take annual family photos, especially as our family grows. and i would love love love to send out annual christmas cards. both of these make me so happy.
(hate posed photos? hate christmas cards? no worries! don’t do them! you do what makes you happy!)
bonus: i have a google sheets document where I store all our loved ones’ addresses. perfect for christmas cards, perfect for surprise deliveries.
we have a few custom made board books (I use the “baby board book” section of this website - this link should give you a discount) of various important people (or important topics) in our lives. like, we have several on aunts and uncles, one on mama, one on daddy, one on kk’s favorite puppy, one on grill and chill, and on on our some of our favorite family traditions and rituals.
we have a “photos” line in our budget so that we can prioritize the above things. because i believe your home, your schedule, and your budget should reflect your priorities. and, as you can see, photos are a huge priority of mine.
bonus points if you can create a routine to help prioritize what’s important to you - like making photo books four times a year, or making a note to schedule family photos in november.
and finally, for each kid, we plan to make a childhood memory box. (i tried doing a baby book. i really did. it wasn’t for me.) armed with lots of pinterest inspiration, i took this box and these file folders, and created the below photo for KK. the idea is eventually each file folder will be assigned a grade/age to drop in important papers/awards/memories from that year, from “birth” to “twelfth grade,” plus a separate folder for “cards.” like, you bet your bottom in kk’s “birth” folder I dropped several those “I passed my covid screening!” papers from doctor’s appointments, as well as some special things from the hospital. :) anyway, this is something I can totally do as our family grows and - you know me - this fulfills my need for both a place for everything and a simple system.
side note: this was really nice to have set up before we brought KK home from the hospital, because my Angel of a sister unpacked my bags for me, and I was able to tell her to put several things “in KK’s memory box.” bless those simple systems. see other postpartum favorites here.
