Category: 52

12/52 + 23/40

It’s week 12 and posting a bit later than usual! I got the spring bug this week, and felt a bit lazy with regard to basically everything, but laying on the couch and playing games on my phone.

Olivia: She surely is a 2-year-old toddler in full swing! she has learnt how to push the right buttons to get what she wants, but when she is in a good mood she is just the best kid a parent could ask for! we have been enjoying playing with sticker’s books, singing out loud and reading stories (she does that by herself at bed time!). And started to ask, especially me, to remain alone in the room while playing, apparently I distract her too much!

Baby boy: It’s 23 weeks, weighting just over 1/2 kilo and measuring more than 28cm…apparently the size of a large mango! Not sure I follow babycenter’s fruits comparisons, but that is what it says.

11/52

It’s week 11 and we have been enjoying a glorious weather, lots of sunshine and longer days!

This is you carrying your wellies to the car in a bag bigger that you.
Olivia: Her appetite was coming and going all week, but she asked for raw carrots every single day! And thankfully her red raincoat still sort of fits; it will be very difficult to replace…she’s is totally in love with it. 
Linking up with Jody from Practising Simplicity.

9/52 + 10/52

It’s playing catch up again this week! but this time I have a very good excuse…we have been to Italy for 10 days and despite my intentions of carry on with my daily/weekly routine, I hardly checked my emails, Instgram feed, let alone publishing a blog post. So here we are, the best of the past two weeks.
In Rome, eating a slice of pizza at every corner
Olivia – week 9: She got very excited when we told her we were going to Rome. And screamed with joy when she saw her trolley ready to be packed in our living room! 
In Pisa, wearing zia Marty’s handbag after her graduation
Olivia – week 10: She loved spending time in Italy and seeing family (lots of it!) and friends. She has been a joy to be around and made our stay there very enjoyable and relaxing.

Linking up with Jody from Practising Simplicity.

8/52

“A portrait of my children, once a week, every week in 2014”
Olivia: We came to realise this week that she has very much outgrown her baby stage. She doesn’t want to sleep in her cot anymore, but in the big bed. She doesn’t want to seat in her high chair at the dinner table, but in papa’s chair (with no booster seat, we tried and she firmly refused!). She doesn’t want to seat in her pushchair for long, but prefers walking. It’s a joy and a pain to see her grow so fast.
Baby-to-be: And again this week, I’ll get a new picture in a separate post!
Linking up with Jody from Practising Simplicity.

Project 52 into a photo book

Last year’s project “A portrait of my child, once a week, every week in 2013” has been a success! Although I started at week 3 I managed to carry on for the entire year and ended up with more than 52 pictures of Olivia. Between my inexperience and an ever more active toddler, not all of the pictures were great, but some were good enough to make it onto 30x20cm canvases.
But I really wanted a photo book to capture the changes into my daughter’s life throughout a year. Also, each week, together with the picture, I had made a note of some facts about Olivia’s life, her achievements and some funny stories. And I wanted to keep a record of that too.

I decided to go through Photobox, a trusted site I used many time before. The quality of their product is awesome, and if for any reason you are not satisfied, they’ll do whatever they can to meet your expectations.
I chose two different sizes for the books, a square spiral softcover one and a small soft cover one. The first one was for the grandparents, big photos and no text. Because the notes were written in English and they don’t speak English, I thought it was too much effort to translate everything in Italian. But they ended up with about 60 full pages (20x20cm) picturing their beloved granddaughter, and so far they have not complained a bit!

The smaller book was for us to keep. I liked it because it was rectangular (approx. 18x14cm) and perfect for fitting both pictures and text side by side. I used the same layout throughout, except where there was too much text to fit in and in that case I used a double page spread for just one week. Probably a bigger size would have been better, but surely not cheap.

The site was fairly easy to use, I uploaded all the pictures at once, chose the type of book and the layout for the cover and for the inner pages, and the book was automatically created. Of course you can make changes and move things around, change the colour of the background and so on.

To add the text I copied it first from my blog onto a word document, and then manually copied it onto the site in the text box available on each page. A bit tedious but well worth it.
Olivia loves looking at her pictures, and I’m sure she will appreciate reading through my notes once she’ll be old enough to do so.

Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored post. I’m just sharing my experience with Photobox because I love their products and used them many time before.