Honeymoon Photo Book

I'm super excited about a new project I'm halfway finished with -- a honeymoon photo book!

I contemplated just going the traditional route with our honeymoon photos by printing them from Snapfish and putting them in a normal photo album, but I wanted to learn more about the other options that are out there.  Since I've made two photo books before (of our wedding pictures for our parents' Christmas presents) with the help of Shutterfly.com, I was definitely interested in pursuing that route again.  But with a project this extensive (TONS more pictures than the fifty or so chosen for our parents' albums) I knew it would take a little more personalization than Shutterfly had to offer.

Front cover of the wedding album we made for my parents

I've been avidly browsing Weddingbee.com for about a year now, and a few posts written by the bloggers have been dedicated to wedding albums, or photo books.  Someone mentioned Blurb.com, and although it took me a bit to finally check it out, I'm pretty happy that I did.

Blurb offers so much more customization plus the ability to tackle large projects with many pictures.  I downloaded their free software, BookSmart, and I was well on my way to designing my album!

I broke our pictures into two halves since there are roughly 600 pictures in total.  The first part will include the beginning of our trip all the way to our first excursion from Monte Carlo, and the second part will pick up after Monte Carlo and end with the end of the honeymoon.  I'm currently constructing the second part, but the first part has been polished up and just recently ordered!

Here's the cover of the first book:

I'm pretty excited about actually getting the book in my hands and seeing how it looks.  The best part was that the total for one book was only about $34 (with a free shipping code), so if it's terrible, I won't feel as upset as if I'd ordered an $80-100 book.  It isn't scheduled to ship until the first of February, but you can bet as soon as I get it in my hands, I'll be ready to (in true blogger fashion) take some detail pictures of it and review my experience with Blurb!

Going through this process also made me realize that I've never properly recapped our honeymoon.  With our one year anniversary getting closer and closer, I think it will definitely be appropriate to tackle honeymoon recaps in the near future.  It'll be a neat way to bring back some fond memories of one really awesome trip, so expect those soon!

Bellingrath 2010

Every year since Mr. L has been stationed close to Mobile, he and I make it a point to attend Bellingrath Garden's Magic Christmas in Lights event around the holiday season.  I love walking around the grounds and looking at all of the lights BG's employees work so hard to put up and maintain -- they're so gorgeous.

This year, we had the pleasure of showing our tradition to our friend Joe who flew in to visit us for a couple of weeks!

Mr. L and Joe with some of the decorations at Bellingrath

Oh hey, it's January -- Time for Christmas recaps!

So due to my lack of posting for like...over a month, I think it's pretty obvious that Mr. L and I have had a busy holiday season!  I'm sorry about my lack of blogging :(  I'm going to try to do better this year, especially once the Hawaii ball gets officially rolling later this year!

So let's see if I remember everything we've done in the past month... (all photos mine!)

Christmas

Christmas Eve was the beginning of our two-day Christmas celebration.  We began the day driving up to Mr. L's grandparents home in northern Mobile County to celebrate with his mother's side of the family.

We ate yummy brunch food:

Shrimp bisque!  =)

And then proceeded to dig into all of the presents under the tree like there was no tomorrow!