The decorations are packed away, the wrapping paper has gone to the trash and the tree lies on its side by the road. The holidays are over and all surprises have been revealed. It’s now safe to talk about The Big Project.

This past fall I decided to do something I’d been thinking of doing for some time – create a photo book for each of The Boys of images from their childhoods up to the present. I called the books “Life So Far”. It was a huge task but I gave myself the Christmas present deadline and bunkered down (ha) in The Bunkie for the month of November and got it done.

I use the Aperture program from Apple for my photo cataloguing and post-production, which has a built-in book making capability (as does iPhoto)  so I used that to create the books, but there are a number of programs available.  Photobookgirl.com reviews the different software as well as gives tips and advice about how to go about it. It’s not difficult but it does take time and effort to figure out.

But before you can start playing with the layout you need content and therein lay the bulk of the effort – digitizing the contents of those huge piles of old albums, envelopes and shoeboxes. I spent days and weeks scanning everything, scanning my entire life, which was a trip.

Not exactly a gentle frolic down memory lane at times when face to face with long ago images from way back when, but I found that my fear of looking at the past had been blocking all memories, including the good ones. For example, both my parents are long gone, which is still painful in itself, and before that divorced when my brother and I were young. Looking at all those black and whites from my mother’s collection of that young couple with a young family at a time before love faded turned out to be very good for me. Releasing that fear of memories has left me calmer and happier, a very welcome, unintended consequence.

When it came to The Boys, looking through all those images as I scanned them was a blast – lots of laugh out loud moments. The image I chose for the beginning of this post, of Baby Steve standing in his crib, is from the moment I walked into his room one morning in Jamaica to find that for the first time, he’d figured out how to pull himself up to a standing position. Who knows how many tries it took, but the look on his face tells it all, joy and accomplishment, “Look Mom, I did it! Look at me!”

Once I had everything scanned, then came the fun part – the sorting and curating, the story telling. The finished products are about 55 pages long, around 170 images, hardcover, and look terrific. I’m pretty sure there are more photo books of one kind or another in my future – I have over 15,000 images in Aperture, and now that I know how to do it…

Thank goodness I had a deadline. But I did get it done, pressed “send” and a week later the UPS guy knocked at the door with the finished project.

I gift wrapped the photo books and mailed them to The Boys (with strict orders not to open before Christmas). I also wrapped our copies and put them under the tree as a present for Dad as well. Wishing I could be a fly on the wall when the gifts were opened, I settled for the next best thing. The Boys were spending Christmas Eve together at Steve and Kate’s house in Ottawa, so they were together when they opened them and then gave us a call on Skype video. This year’s Christmas present appears to have been a big hit – a gift for all four of us, and an even bigger gift of what it did for me in the process of its creation.