How Would You Document...
 

For the first year of my son's life I committed to taking a photo a day. I'm terrible with consistency, so it was a huge commitment for me. I think I only missed like 4 days the whole year, on days that I forgot I would cheat the next day and change his outfit so I could fill in the gaps :D

Anyway, I have all these photos, but no documentation and I'm not sure exactly what to do with it. I've already printed some of the photos into plain photo books for grandmas, but I would like to do something a little more special for myself and to give Monkey when he's grown.

I'd like to do something chronological, so I'm thinking pocket style seems apropos. But, I'm curious how other people would approach it.

Would you do spreads without journaling? Would you include the dates? Weekly pages or monthly pages? Elements or elements-light?

Have you done a backlogged project like this before? How did it turn out?!

Could you maybe just journal what you remember from the general time period? Maybe hopes and fears you were having, memories from that time but not necessarily about the photos? You could also use info from the year in general--what was happening in the news, what the weather was like, what was popular, etc. I have gone back and tackled big projects like this before. It's hard but worth it. I usually write from my current perspective about what I remember from that time. You also don't need journaling on every page. If you have a spectacular photo, make it big and scrap one-photo pages to intersperse with your pocket pages.

You could add the date, week or even break it down into seasons. You could do bullet form journaling with just a few key thoughts of what you remember. To mix it up, do some color and some b/w images and you could overlay text or wordart, which would be fast and easy to add.

I was about to recommend exactly what Ally said.

I'm late to the party, but are you active on social media? If so, you may have shared milestones and other memories there that you could go back and work off.

Awesome! These are great ideas! I have a crap memory (hence one of the big reasons I'm a memory keeper! haha), so your suggestions are super helpful to fill in the gaps!

I went back and I actually have 12 weeks of pages partially made that I totally forgot about!!! WOOHOO! I have the photos and the journaling, but apparently didn't get around to embellishing.