Just thought I’d share a baby book idea that I’m working on. When I was pregnant one thing of the million things I thought about was what my baby would look like. Would he look more like me or my husband? Would he get my eyes and daddy’s mouth? In fact, two of my best friends, G and R planned a baby shower game around these fun musings that many expectant parents have. I think they found this game online or in a shower planning book somewhere. There was a list of features like eyes, nose, mouth, hair and also a list of qualities like intelligence, athleticism, personality, sense of humor and the parents are supposed to mark whether they want baby to have that attribute come from mama or papa. The expectant parents go through the list and mark their preferences and then the guests have to guess what was picked. It was funny to go through the list – our guests thought it was hilarious. (b/t/w Photo Book Baby got daddy’s mouth and his hair for sure!)
In a related idea, for fun I asked my husband to find his old baby photos. I figured we would have fun looking at them and seeing if we could find any similarities between ourselves and our little guy. We’re not quite sure who he looks most like and he’s changing every day it seems, but no matter – we think he’s cute regardless! This got me to thinking about also putting our baby photos in our baby’s photo book as a fun side-by-side. That in turn made me recall a website link my husband sent me not too long ago about a photographer who takes her inspiration from an old photo and then has the person recreate that photo present day as faithfully as possible. It’s wild! I Googled to locate it and found photographer Irina Werning. She calls this her Back to the Future project. You know those old funny childhood photos (some of which you wish were lost)? Well, imagine yourself dressed up in the same exact clothes (but bigger of course), doing the same exact thing but say 30 years later. Along those lines, I thought it could be fun to find a couple shots of our childhood photos to see if we could capture our little one in the same pose. It’s a bit ambitious since it’s not easy to get cooperation from a baby, but it could be fun to try!
So I know I tend to ramble, so here’s a recap of how to incorporate the concepts above into your baby’s photo book:
1) If you’re expecting, play this shower game or something similar at your baby shower. Here’s a list of some additional attributes in the game we played, but you can add your own too: eyes, nose, teeth, smile, lips, hair, legs, hands, feet, eyesight, laugh, personality, intelligence, height, artistic ability, sense of humor… etc. Then scan your sheet where you marked your preferences and/or recreate the list for baby’s book. It’s also fun to see how accurate your predictions were!
2) Scan in a few old baby photos of mommy and daddy and then put them alongside baby’s. What may be good to use is the first photograph in the hospital along with perhaps the small card that they put in the baby’s bassinet (My hospital didn’t really mark the bassinet tag with name and weight etc. like my husband and I have – maybe cause they have those high tech baby lojacks now), but there was a similar looking tag I kept…
3) Do a twist on photographer Irina Werning’s concept by recreating one of your old baby photos with your baby;
For some of the more traditional items to include check out my earlier post on what to put in your baby book.
For those of you who are doing baby books, how are your projects coming along? 🙂
great post! i cant wait to get pregnant! 😀