DadJack.com Blog

This one requires a little solo Dad work, but the results are great!  Taking photos is a must if you have kids ( I may go a little overboard, but digital photography has made it cheap and easy to capture almost every moment!)  The downside to this digital photo revolution is that many of us don’t print the pictures, they sit on a card or hard drive, un-viewed and unappreciated, or on your Facebook page, where friends can see them, but the kids don’t really have access.

So What I do, is every 4 to 6 months, I make a photo book of our “Adventures” (We’re on volume 4 right now.)  You may be asking yourself, what the heck is a photo book?  Think old school, yellowing pages, plastic sheet pulled over your pics, photo album… Only way, way cooler.  You get to place the photos, design the pages and the best part, write the captions. (I’ll explain why this is the best part soon).  Sites like Shutterfly, Snapfish and Photoworks are great places to start… And if you get on their mailing list they’ll sent you promotions (which often include huge discounts on photo books.)   A side benefit is that when you upload your photos to these sites they store them for you… Just another way to back-up your precious memories.

If your kids are older you can have them help with the whole creation process… But if they’re small like mine, it’s more fun to surprise them!  The end result looks just like a real book you would buy at the book store, so the kids are amazed their pictures are in there.  This is where the captioning comes in, I try to write the captions at the reading level of the kids, it’s a great way to promote reading, nothing is more fun than reading about themselves and the places they have been… And I throw in a wacky few that Bing will latch onto.  When we go through the books, Bing will remember certain captions and yell them out.  We read ours as a bedtime story or when we’re sitting on the couch in the evening.

And knowing that you are not all single losers like me… They make a great gift for the spouse too!  I had a dear friend surprise me with one filled with photos that they had taken while our kids were hanging together and I love it.

So get that camera out and start shooting!