How to Create a Digital Children’s Book
It’s almost as cliché as every new parent’s plan to “sleep when the baby is asleep” —you buy a sweet children’s book with all the places for mementos, photographs, and handwritten memories. You are going to document the baby’s first tooth, the first haircut, the first word, everything first. You put it away on a bookshelf for safe storage, you have a baby, and you immediately forget that the thing even exists (and you are awake when the baby sleeps).
A small percentage of parents do manage to keep a handwritten journal of all these early moments and memories (albeit only for the first child), but many others simply print out a few photos once or twice during the first year and are going to write something down at some point. If you suspect that you fall into the latter group, there are several ways you can use all the technology at your disposal to create something like a digital children’s book.
Automate this
The surest way to get out of your child’s early childhood with some sort of book of memories is to take responsibility for truly capturing those memories on your jaded shoulders. Basically, most of the work should be done for you. This is where apps like Chatbooks or Qeepsake can come in handy.
Chatbooks will automatically print and send you photobooks starting at $ 10 from your Instagram, Facebook, or camera rolls . (If you’d like to get more involved, you can select the images you want, add additional pages, or create a photobook for special occasions.)
If you need more time (but still an automated process), the Qeepsake app will send you regular text messages about your pregnancy or baby to respond to. You can add more photos or memories as they appear through the app (or by text message to Qeepsake) and then order the book every year or as often as you like. There is a free “lightweight” plan and two other paid tiered monthly plans that offer more options.
If email is your favorite, My Own Little Story is an Internet children’s book site that will email you reminders of milestones or memories. It is free to use for the first two years, and a hard copy can be ordered at any time.
Of course, there are many other options for ordering photo books online, including Shutterfly , Mpix , Printique, and Blurb . Most of these sites have predefined layout options, so you can just add your photos and let the site arrange them for you, but that still requires you to really think about how to do this and accomplish this.
Involve a large family
You may not want to share every last memory, milestone, or innermost thought with everyone who follows you on social media. But you can share all of this with your child’s grandparents, aunts and uncles. In that case, you can create a family account at Tinybeans , a free app where you can upload individual photos (or complete albums) and memories by date with little notes. You can invite family and friends to follow you; they will receive email updates whenever you post something new, and they can like and comment on what you posted.
The real advantage here is that if you haven’t published anything for a while, someone – most likely one of the grandparents – will definitely ask why everything was so quiet, thus reminding you that you forgot to add new memories. And if you want to ultimately create a printed book out of those memories, you can link your Tinybeans account to chatbooks.
Or just send your child emails
We’ve written about this idea before and stick with it. The easiest way to capture moments you will never want to forget is to take out your phone and email them about it before it gets lost in the abyss your brain has become:
The first time they smile at you, email them to tell them what stupid thing you did to piss them off. When they take their first steps, email them how they refused to even try until they knew they could walk through the room without stumbling. Send them an email when they reach out to you to ask you to raise them, saying, “Am I hugging you?” and its attractiveness almost kills you on the spot.
Email them to tell them how brave they were on their first day of kindergarten. Submit a photo of their fourth grade BFFs and a video of this awesome soccer goal or their first solo choir performance. Send them an email every year on their birthday to tell them how they are growing, changing, and making you proud.
When they turn 18, give them the password and they can relive bits of their childhood through your documented memories.