When my first child was born I had a baby book, first-year calendar and a journal where I wrote down her milestones and first words. With my second it was the book and calendar. My fourth was lucky to get the calendar! Offline solutions for recording precious moments and memories as my child grows don’t seem to be working and that’s why I’m intrigued by Keepaboo.

Keepaboo is not an online scrapbook, which is appealing to someone like me who’s never had an interest in scrapbooking and doesn’t want to think about page layouts and design. But it also isn't as DIY as starting up a blog, pulling elements together, and ending up with a basic way to post photos, videos and pictures in a chronological stream. Think of Keepaboo as more of an online suite replacing the standard baby book and even scrapbook. You can collect, record and even share moments and milestones from your baby’s first year. You can keep a parent diary, create picture galleries, track your baby’s growth and “write down” the memorable things your baby is sure to say.

Everything you record is put into your baby’s LifeBook, an online 3D book you can browse like a real baby book. Plus you can create custom books with themes such as Baby’s First Birthday or Grandma’s Brag Book. Keepaboo plans to offer the ability to print hardcover versions of your keepsake books, which is clearly their money-making strategy - great for us, because it means the site itself is completely free to use.

Keepaboo is a wonderful way for parents to capture those first-year (and second-, third- and fourth-year) memories in one place and share them with family and friends. It’s the perfect solution for a mom who’s online as often as I am and tired of dusting off her daughter’s current baby book! - Emily H.

When my twins were born, my goal was to make each of them a scrapbook chronicling their first year. Well, they are turning three in less than a month, and those books are still not finished. Now that I have a third child, I figured it would take me until he got married to finish his first year book!

Then I heard about How Fast They Grow, an online scrapbooking company that claims that you can create a scrapbook page in seven minutes using your digital pictures and their free online Digi-Scrapbook software.

Seven minutes? It seemed too good to be true, but I had to check it out.

I joined the site (free), uploaded some pictures, and got to work. Sure enough, I was able to crank out some pages that I am really proud of in five to ten minutes per page, depending on how long I spent thinking about what to write.

The sample page I have below is just one of six I created in under an hour.


How simple is the process?

1. Upload pictures to Digi-Scrapbook (the most time-consuming part of the whole process).


2. Choose a layout from over 480 page designs.


3. Drag your pictures into the page - it is easy to zoom in or out and move around as necessary.


4. Type text on the page and add your own title.

That's it! Once your page is finished, you can publish it to share online with family and friends or print. Printing costs just dropped as of December 1, and now pages cost just $5.50 each. When I think of the time saved and the money not spent on more scrapbook supplies, it is definitely worth it for a busy scrapbook lover, especially for such a great finished product. The 12”x12” pages are printed with Kodak printers on 110-lb. cardstock, and they should last for generations if well-stored.

If How Fast They Grow sounds like something you or someone you know might be interested in, check out their website for a ton of great example pages and to view all of their templates. The company is currently running a special with free ground shipping on gift card packages using the code GIFT4U. Each package comes with the gift card as well as a sample 12”x12” page to see the quality of their product.

Maybe there is hope yet for my little one's baby book! - Sara I.

Baby’s first Christmas is often filled with such love and wonder. It is the perfect occasion to being building traditions to last a lifetime.

A great way to mark the first Christmas milestone is to begin a tradition of giving the child an ornament each Christmas. The ornaments can be holiday-themed or be given to remind the family of something special about the year.

(My two boys will be getting ornaments from the movie Cars, which was the first movie they ever watched. We saw it on a family vacation and they were obsessed with it for the rest of the year.) When the child grows up and moves out, she will have a set of ornaments from each year of her childhood.

There are a lot of very unique ornaments that can mark the holiday. Here are a couple of my favorites.

Baby Girl Stocking Ornament: This glass ornament is hand painted and then decorated with glitter and ribbons. Bright and festive, it is a great way to celebrate a little one’s first holiday season. Available for baby boy as well. | $24

Holiday Ornaments by Beehive Kitchenware Company: Handmade of lead free pewter, this partridge, tree, and pear would all make beautiful additions to any tree and should stand up well over time. | $16.50 - Sara I.

This adorable little pillow can make the fun of losing a tooth even more exciting. Sweetly stitched in felt and whimsy, this pillow is especially dear to me because of the subject matter! But Posie & Me has many styles of tooth fairy pillows to choose from.

There's a secure pocket on the front for making sure the tooth doesn't get lost. That same pocket holds whatever the Tooth Fairy brings as a surprise for your lucky child. In our house, she leaves a shiny golden dollar coin, but there's room for paper money, a note, or even a very small toy.

Posie & Me has thought of everything, but I'm afraid there's nothing I can do to help the Tooth Fairy remember to do their job before going to bed! - Erika

There is so much going on during the first year with your first baby, it is hard to think about building traditions with your growing family. I don’t think I woke enough to even think about things like that until my twins were almost two!

Luckily, there is a book out there to help even the most bleary-eyed parents come up with ideas of how to begin traditions in their families that will be treasured for a lifetime. The Book of New Family Traditions: How to Create Great Rituals for Holidays and Everyday by Meg Cox has been a great resource for our family. Ms. Cox outlines ideas to develop traditions in your family, and not just for the major holidays and celebrations. She also writes about rituals involving daily routines, like dinner and bedtime, and on celebrating milestones from transitioning from bottles to cups all the way through graduations.

Ms. Cox interviewed diverse families from across the country for more than three years in her quest to find rituals and traditions on which to build her own family. This means that all of the ideas in her book have been put into practice by real families, which has given me a little more confidence to try some with ours. One of my favorites? I love the birthday balloon countdown when children pop one balloon on a chain each day until their birthday arrives.

Do you have special traditions already established that your family holds dear? In the continuing quest for more ideas to involve ritual in my children’s lives, I would love to hear what ideas you embrace in your home, too! - Sara I.