Snug-A-Bug-Blog

This year for Christmas I was looking for a gift idea for my parents and Jay’s parents when I stumbled upon photo books. They are like scrapbooks—only they are done on your computer.

I have a macbook which comes with iPhoto. In iPhoto I can make a photo book right in the program. When you are finished creating your book—which includes style selections, image resizing and more—you upload your book to Apple and they send you out a finished book. The books come in a variety of sizes, colours and types, (soft and hard cover) and, in a wide range of prices.

I have played with different photo book software before from Picaboo and Shutterfly but I had never actually finished a book and ordered a printed copy. I was very happy I did at Christmas. The Photo Books were the favourite gift. The book was a collection of pictures from Georgia’s first year. Jay’s Dad takes it everywhere with him to show.

Since the success of the books I gave as gifts, I made a smaller softcover book of Christmas 2006. It is a nice way to showcase your photos—and in many ways is nicer than uploading your images to be printed—rather than putting them in a photo album.

I must admit almost all of my photos I have had printed in the last 10 years are sitting in photo boxes and are never looked at. I plan on scanning all of our wedding photos and making a wedding photo book as well as taking pictures of my grandparents and making a memory photo book for Birthday or Christmas presents next year.

The nice thing about the photo books is that if you are not that creatively inclined they have different themes to help you lay out your pictures. The other reason I really prefer it to scrapbooking is that it is digital. I have found that with digital scrapbooking you can easily change something you are not happy with.

While I liked the ease of using iPhoto to create the photo books, it is limited in the number of themes. Picaboo is a free program that you download to your computer and you can easily use your images to quickly make a book and you don’t need to be hooked up to the internet to create your book. The downside of Picaboo is that they don’t have a mac download.

Shutterfly also has a large number of themes and styles to choose from but you need to upload your images to their site which can be time consuming if you want to play around with more images than you plan to put in your photo book. However, since it is a web based system it doesn’t matter what OS you are using. They also carry a range of other photo gifts, prints, and free online photo sharing and photo storage.

I think the next photo book I make will be from Picaboo. They have a wider variety of page layouts and backgrounds. Unfortunately because they don’t have a Mac download I will have use my PC.

What has been your experience with making a photo books, and how did it turn out?

Picaboo – Create a Photo Book. Special Offer: buy 1 get 1 free!

Posted on Wednesday, February 7th, 2007 at 1:40 pm

New fabric is on it’s way and I hope to see it arrive anytime now.

I have a few new styles up at my etsy store as well as a few old favourites. Please keep checking back for the new styles!

Posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 12:17 am

One thing is certain with a new baby: you are going to be taking lots of baby pictures. Digital Cameras are great for capturing every moment. I love our digital camera, I bought it for Jay a couple of Christmas’ ago, but I seem to be the one who uses it the most.

The Hardware

We have a Canon A85—I highly recommend their cameras if you are thinking about buying one—the optics are great and the model we have has a tonne of options. I will admit, I prefer the “auto” setting—just point and click.There are lots of great buying guide websites around if you are looking for reviews of cameras like DP review.

The Canon A85 is 4 mega-pixels—most cameras available now have at least that many mega-pixels. One thing I would recommend looking for in a camera is an optical zoom vs digital zoom. Optical zoom is the zoom using the lens, a physical magnification of the object vs digital which is just a magnification of a portion of the picture. With a digital zoom you can end up with a pixelly image.

The other important factor with digital photography is the memory card. The bigger the memory card the more pictures it can hold. Speed is also important. The memory cards come in different speeds the faster the card, the faster the recycle time which means more pictures. I didn’t realize how important it was until I used my sister’s camera last month, she had a slow memory card and it seemed to take forever until I could take another picture.

To Print or Not to Print

When it comes to printing off the pictures a film camera does not compare. You can pick the images you want fix them with your photo software and print them at home or send them to your local photo store. When ink-jet printers first came out I loved the idea that you could print the pictures at home. The problem I have found with printing at home is that it often takes 2 or 3 tries before I get a decent quality print and with the cost of ink-jet ink and photo paper it is kind of expensive.

Now I send all my pictures to a photo-lab to be printed. There are so many choices and you can get the pictures for such a good price. I use Blacks Photography. They are more expensive but I think the pictures look great! We usually pick them up so they are printed in the store and I think that the store that we use, at Mic Mac Mall in Dartmouth, is far superior to other Black’s stores. In my opinion, if you find a spot that does excellent prints stick with them, because good quality prints are often because the staff in the photo lab are good at their job.

The Software

As well as printing pictures, I find that with a baby I am e-mailing a lot of pictures to people. I had been using Adobe Photoshop to prepare my images for e-mail. I would colour correct, I would use the dodge tool to fix red eye (a very common problem with babies) a very tedious way to fix it, then resize the images for mail. There is nothing worse than getting an email of a picture and all you can see is a giant eye.

I started using Picasa, Google’s photo software, which I downloaded for free. It has a very easy to use red eye fix and when you want to e-mail the picture you just click the e-mail button and it resizes it for you! Now Picasa also has a web album so you can resize your images and people can look at them online and download images suitable for printing—something that e-mailed photos not always great for. The free online album offers 250MB of space but you can buy more if you need too ($25 for 6GB).

If you are Mac user iphoto has similar software with an easy to fix red eye and the one click e-mail.

What tips do you have for digital photography?

Posted on Saturday, October 14th, 2006 at 11:33 am

A few years ago, I had a friend whose Granddaughter was learning sign language to help her communicate before she could speak.At the time I thought it was strange, but before I became pregnant I heard about more parents who were teaching their hearing children sign language. It made sense, babies and toddlers are unable to speak but understand language and often become frustrated at their inability to get what they want.

Many people who have tried teaching their babies to sign and say that it really helps with the terrible two’s. As toddlers they are less frustrated because they can communicate with their caregivers and get what they need and want.While I was pregnant I started to look into different programs and books to help you teach your baby signs. Joseph Garcia’s Sign with your Baby seemed to be the best. It comes with a book, DVD (you can get a VHS video if you still haven’t made the plunge to DVD but I have to ask why?), and a reference card. You can find used copies on eBay. I read the book when Georgia was about 4 months old, and I tried using a few signs with her like milk, eat, and more. I quickly got bored and slowly stopped doing the signs.

Last week Jay decided to throw the DVD in the player to watch. It was very cute all these babies doing signs and the parents seemed happy with the results. The nice thing about the DVD is that you could see how to actually do the signs. So we decided to try again. It suggests the signs “milk”, “more”, and “eat”. We also decided to try dog, drink and water.

After about 4 days, Georgia was in here high chair eating strawberries. She finished what she had been eating and it looked like she was signing “more”. So I gave her a few more, when she was done, she signaled more again. It was very exciting that she learned that quickly and she looked so proud of her new language.

You can get a variety of books and flashcards to help teach your baby how to sign:

SIGN with your BABY Complete Learning Kit: US DVD Version, Book, Training Video (DVD), Quick Reference Guide

Baby Signs: How to Talk with Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk, New Edition

Has anyone else tried signing with their baby?

Tags: baby, parenting, motherhood, signing with your baby, ASL, Joseph Garcia, communicating with your baby

Posted on Thursday, September 7th, 2006 at 10:00 am

One of the best books that I read while pregnant to prepare for labour was Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth.The book is divided into 2 sections, the first is full of positive birth stories, the second is tips and advice to make labour easier.

Ina May Gaskin is America’s foremost midwife and has compiled a lot of information tips and advice to help get you through labour without intervention.

While I was going through labour, the chapter “Let Your Monkey Do It” carried me through, I let my body do what it had to and followed its cues as to how to make the labour easier.

My labour was easy. It lasted only 6 hours and I had no medications or interventions. It was the labour and delivery I wanted. Both my husband’s support (and back massage), and the information from the book helped to get me through the labour the way I wanted. I highly recommend it for anyone wanting a natural medication free birth.

Tell me what books or tips helped you through labour?

Tags: labour, labor, pregnancy, childbirth, midwife, natural, parenting, motherhood, medical

Posted on Monday, September 4th, 2006 at 10:20 pm

I was happy to discover that Baby Center has started a Canadian version of their site. While I was pregnant I used their UK site.

The Baby Center lets you put in your due date or babies birthday and they send you weekly updates about the stage in the pregnancy or the developmental stage your baby is at. They also have advice and support for those trying to get pregnant.

As well they have a forum so you can “meet up” with other Mom’s and Mom’s to be.

Posted on Wednesday, August 30th, 2006 at 12:40 pm

Before Georgia was born, my husband Jay and I decided to use cloth diapers instead of disposables.

I didn’t like the idea of throwing all that plastic into a landfill and the chemicals used to make diapers white—not to mention having those chemicals up against my baby’s skin all day.

As I started to look into cloth diapers I could not believe the cost difference. Although cloth diapers are expensive in the beginning, I think we have spent about $600-700, that is much less than the costs of disposables. The cost I have read are about $2000/year!

While researching the different cloth diaper manufacturers, I was pleasantly surprised a lot of the companies are Canadian. The two spots we have bought diapers from are The Baby Marketplace and Mother-ease. I loved the way the MJ fitted diapers looked and they have worked very well. The air-flow covers by Mother-ease do not leak. We had used Bummis diaper covers at first and found that they leaked, I am not sure if it was us or the wraps themselves. Luckily I was able to sell them on eBay .

I must admit we have used some disposable diapers. It just seems like to much work to bring cloth diapers with us when we are away from home, not to mention carrying the dirty diapers around with us. There are some diapers that are chlorine free, Seventh Generation. They seem to work better than huggies and pampers with no leaks, although because of their taupe colour and lack of cartoon characters they do attract attention.

Overall I would have to say I am happy with our decision to use cloth diapers as our primary diapering. Laundering them isn’t much work, an extra load every other day. Cloth diapers today are not the same as years ago no folding or pins, they have been replaced by snaps and Velcro.

The one item I need to recommend for all cloth diaper users is the gamma seal lids for your diaper pail. The lid screws onto standard 5 gallon buckets (the kind used for paint or pickles) and no smell comes out, but when you open it watch out. You can get them at The Baby Marketplace and Lee Valley.

Tags: cloth diapers, diaper pails, diaper covers, gamma seal, mother-ease, the baby marketplace, bummis, seventh generation, lee valley, baby

Posted on Friday, August 25th, 2006 at 5:30 am