A Thailand Reunion

Yeah, yeah.  It's barely been a month since we got home from Thailand, but if you've been following along with this blog for the last few weeks, you may have gotten the impression that that trip was pretty life-changing for Ellie and I.  

And I honestly just can't stop thinking about it.   

 Not only was what we did pretty epic (the sight-seeing, the long days on the worksite, and the time we spent with locals), but  we also went with some pretty incredible people.   Those 21 young people were exactly the jolt I needed to wake up, shake me out of my comfort zone,  and give me hope for  the future of this world! They are a generation on the cusp of adulthood who gave up a huge chunk of their summer to be a part of something bigger than themselves.    The experience cracked open my heart and I feel like I have 20 new honorary sons and daughters (-1 from the total number, because one of those 21 actually is my daughter) that I want to keep in touch with! 

Since I've been home, I've had a deep desire to...

1) continue to foster friendships among the kids
2)  be a loving, supportive presence in their lives
3)  help them keep alive the spiritual nudgings they felt on the trip
4) continue fostering the feeling of relevancy I gained on the trip (#midlifeproblems)

I've floundered a bit in knowing how to pursue those desires and to redefine my role since coming home, but I'm here to share that I've successfully done two things so far: 

We hosted a Thailand reunion at our house (hopefully helping with desire #1)!  

We had a great turn-out--especially considering that 9 of those 21 people were from out-of state and 2 of them actually flew in for the occasion.

Hosting things at our house is often stressful for me (though not near as stressful as it was in Virginia), but I honestly loved every second of it.   I loved the chance to see their faces again...

And welcome them into our home...even if they all ended up gathering in Ellie's room, which she had not only not cleaned for the occasion, but she had not even made sure the corners of the fitted sheets were in place on her bed!

Haha.  Bare mattress aside,  I love these great kids.  Though they're more like young adults than kids.   Ten of them are high school graduates, two already have mission calls, another one started his papers right after the trip, and all of them were good-hearted and seeking to share their light.    

I love that they even Facetimed Jacob (our Thai friend and worksite interpreter) during the reunion.   It was great to see his face and remember what brought us all together in the first place. 

Right before  the reunion, I found out about an amazing Shutterfly coupon and decided to attempt to make a photo book for everyone before it expired.   Paul (the trip Dad) had offered to chip in half if I made a photo book and though creating photo books kind of stress me out, I went for it.   I knocked myself out for  a few days straight and created this....a hundred pages of memories! 

Design-wise it ended up being a bit of a disappointment, but it's done and that is an accomplishment itself for me, since I usually second-guess myself too much on these types of projects and never finish them.   Unfortunately they were delivered right AFTER the reunion, which meant I had to mail them to the people who live far away and hand-deliver them to anyone within about 20 miles of me.  

All but one of the books have now been delivered and I'm hoping, in some small way, that they're helping to accomplish desires #2,3, & 4 that I mentioned above.   I haven't heard much from anyone since receiving them, but, if nothing else, it was  a meaningful project for me. 💗

What's next to keep those desires alive?   I've got a few ideas, but we shall see.  

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Easy Blog Books

Six years ago I started blogging as a fun way to keep in touch with my family.  I could post pictures and tell stories without inundating their inboxes with emails they'd only ever read once.    It was not long after those first few tentative posts that I realized that blogging was a good fit for me.  It allowed me the opportunity to record our lives like I'd been doing off and on in scrapbooks and journals for years and it provided an easy way to share it with others.  I found that I liked the challenge of writing in an interesting and comprehensible way and I loved having a place outside of a shoebox for my photos.

After a year or so of blogging regularly, Glen started commenting about how we needed to print up our blog and keep copies of it for our posterity.  I spent a few years researching and discovering labor intensive blog books (like Blurb) that would NOT work for us.  I like to spend my time blogging and not hours and hours designing a book.    That is how we discovered Blog2Print.

With Blog2Print, the average blog book takes me about 20-30 minutes to upload, design, and order.  There were a few minor gripes I had with the design (mainly the small size of photos), but it's right up my alley and attention span and I've been ordering them every year.  I kept thinking that one of these times I'd try to design a book with larger photos again, but somehow I've never gotten past the first few pages.

Then a few weeks ago, I saw an announcement that Blog2Print has upgraded their design options and you can now choose the size of photos you want.  It was just the motivation I needed to order my most recent book and become their #1 biggest fan.

Here's a glimpse at our latest blog book:

It's worth the splurge to get the highest quality binding.  It is heavy duty, the pages are thick and glossy, and  is completely worthy of family heirloom status.

I put my pictures in the x-large size on my blog and wanted them x-large in my book as well.  It ends up being more pages, but is so much more fun to read and enjoy! 

If you're like me and use photos to tell your story, then you'll want to make sure you pick the option to have the photos stay in place inside each post.  You can choose a space saving option to cram the photos all together, but in our books it would have lost some of the effect.  

I liked how when I put the pictures side-by-side in the post, that they printed side-by-side in the book as well.  

My only gripe at all is that vertical photos tend to leave a lot of unused space on a page.  I'm so enamored with the rest of the options though, that it doesn't bother me a bit.  

One more glimpse of the awesomeness!!!!

I wonder how many years it will take to fill the bookshelf...



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Pics of the Week

In case you haven't noticed by now, I rather like my camera.  Much to the chagrin of a couple of my kids, I keep it slung over my shoulder (or tucked surreptitiously into my purse) almost everywhere I go.   And for those of you who have seen my camera know that it's not of a size to be easily "tuckable" or "slingable". 

So what do I do with all these pictures?

I used to print them all and try to scrapbook them, but I would invariably get overwhelmed with the mess scrapbooking always created and it always seemed like I was a year or two behind the times trying to keep up with the pictures.  Then in 2007 I started blogging, which I instantly loved because it was mess- and cost-free and was so easily shared with family and friends.  Shortly after beginning to blog I not only stopped scrapbooking, but also stopped printing up pictures altogether.  Now once or twice a year I'll print all of my posts into a hardcover blog book, which have become our new scrapbooks for our family.  I'll often walk into a room and find one of my kids curled up with a blog book and laughing about some funny story (this classic called, "Princesses Don't Toot" is their very favorite). 

The only problem with this method is that there are often great pictures that don't fit perfectly into a blogpost, which means that these great pictures often get lost in the archives of my iPhoto never to be seen again.  I'm going to try to remedy this problem by occasionally (possibly weekly) posting a blogpost just dedicated to my favorite pics.  They may or may not have a cool story to go with them, but mostly I just want them to be remembered. 

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I love how you can see the water droplets zipping onto Ellie in this picture as she hunkers down while a sibling sprays her with the hose.... 

I wish I could take credit for this amazing photo of a butterfly and bumblebee resting on our neighbor's flowers, but it was actually my sister, Heather, who took the photo.  Adam and Emma were the ones that had noticed the butterfly in the first place and demanded that I go get my camera immediately. 

My sister, Kristina, and I made some hairbows this week which required burning the edges of polyester circles with a candle.  By the time we were done, the candle looked like this and I couldn't help but take a picture of it.  My family thought I was certifiably weird when I pulled out my camera, but I was just so enamored with how charming and old-fashioned it looked that I couldn't help myself.

Don't know the story behind this photo, but I found it downloaded onto my computer and couldn't stop laughing.  Apparently it was taken by Cami very late one night. 

Here is a picture of Senator Mike Lee (from Utah) eating one of Cami's cupcakes. We have a friend who works in his office who had ordered Cami's cupcakes for a co-worker's birthday.  Cami called me super excited after receiving this picture. 

Cami really, really missed her big brother while he was in the hospital all those months and I LOVE seeing Spence and Cami hanging out together again. This is them at Chinatown (in DC) today. 

Blog Books: Up Close and Personal

Ever since I started this blog in April 2007, people have been asking me when I'm going to print my blog posts into a book.   I knew that eventually I'd like to do it, especially since it took me approximately 3 days of blogging before it completely replaced my time spent scrapbooking.  Unfortunately, by the time I started researching the prospect seriously I had over 600 posts. 

The main company I kept hearing about was Blurb.  So sometime last year I downloaded their software and got to work creating my books.  It didn't take long before I realized I had a very big problem.  When uploading my pictures to the internet I always significantly reduced the size to make them easier to load.  Although they looked fine online, not a single one of them was good enough quality to print.  Suddenly I was faced with the overwhelmingly monumental task of hand replacing every single one of my photos with the higher quality version from my computer.  In other words, I was going to get it done in about 57 years.  

I dabbled with it here and there and tried to make headway on it, but  it wasn't going anywhere fast.  Now fast forward to 2010 and  I have over 1000 posts and still no book.  Then I heard from my friend Andrea about Blog2Print.  At first I thought it would be another big waste of time, but when she mentioned it only took her about 20 minutes to complete her book I was completely intrigued.  20 minute projects are just about perfect for my attention span! 

I got off to a rocky start getting my blog downloaded and had to call the company (where a real person answered the first time), but after a 5-minute phone call my blog was downloaded and I was ready to make my books.   

The hardest part about the whole process was making a few decisions (outlined below), but shockingly it really did only take about 20 minutes.  

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 Here's a glimpse of our first two books along with some of the choices you'll have when you order:

There were several unique cover styles to choose from, so I just picked a different one for each book.   

Soft covers were slightly cheaper, but we viewed these as a family history type of investment so we chose the hard covers.   The binding and page quality are both excellent. 
 

 The pictures are a little on the small side, but I was so thrilled not to have to replace them all with higher quality pictures that I couldn't care less!  

 Because of the way I blog using pictures, I wanted the entries to be laid out as they were on the blog.  My friend Andrea chose the scrapbook style layout which grouped the pictures and words in a more space saving manner, but I did not feel that that style would have worked well with most of my posts. 

Although they added numerous pages onto the length of our books, we really wanted the comments to be a part of the books.  We felt that they added a lot of personality to each post and that it wouldn't have captured the essence of our blog as well without them. 

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In summary, we are thrilled with our new family yearbooks and would highly recommend them to anyone! 

In case you're shopping around, here's what I deem to be the pros and cons of working with Blog2Print over working with Blurb (although I have to disclose I never actually ordered a Blurb book, since I could never get past the planning stages). 

Pros of Blog2Print

• Super quick and easy to put together (totally finished a book with a whole year of posts in 20-30 minutes)

• Good quality books

• Didn't have to switch all my photos out for higher quality versions

• Choice to include comments or not

• Choice to leave out individual posts

• The choice to make your posts as short as possible (scrapbook style) or to keep them as they're written (in relation to the placement of the photos)

• Excellent customer service (via phone or live chat)

Cons of Blog2Print vs Blurb

•  No ability to tweak individual posts (like changing out the picture or correcting a typo)

• The layout on every page is the same (however you've determined you want it)

• Cost (I actually don't really know how this compares to Blurb, since I never ordered from them, but I did feel like my books were a little pricey ~400 pages for ~$110 or so and I couldn't find an online coupon anywhere.  Really, though, it was WELL worth the price just for the time I saved!)

• Photos rather small

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