Her ‘yeah right, I can’t be captured or contained, mom‘ look.

Okay… so the title of this blog post is a tad misleading. I’m definitely not in the business of setting up traps to keep Mila from messing with things she’s not supposed to have; although, it wouldn’t be a bad idea. Instead I’m talking about all the pictures I capture of her.

Let me put this in perspective for everyone. Currently, I have 10859 pictures on my camera roll. By the time this gets posted there will most definitely be more. I’m actually afraid to look how many pictures I have on Google Photos (which is an amazing app with unlimited space!), since it has all my pictures from college. Most of that gigantic number is pictures of Mila. I’m always snapping photos of her so I don’t forget a thing. She’s probably going to be pretty embarrassed of all of them when she’s older, but I’ll worry about that then. Even though I love Google Photos and feel like they’re safe on there, I still worry about losing them. I would be heartbroken if they all just went away. The one thing I regret with Jensen is not having enough pictures of him and we unfortunately lost one of them. So this is a big deal for me to capture and keep hers.

Before she turned one, I wanted to make a HUGE scrapbook of her first year, but I didn’t have time. Instead, I started browsing for photo book apps. After I compared a few of them, I chose to start using Shutterfly and all I can say is I wish I would have started using it earlier.

Every month you get a FREE 6×6 softcover book with 40 pages. It may seem a little small, but I love mine and have put all Mila’s month pictures in from her first year. I also upgrade it to the hardcover book which is a minimal charge. If you have the app, they always have freebies you can get to add to your order. I’ve bought three easel back canvases (a 5×7 canvas of a picture of your choice), a leather pocket that holds my cards for my phone, and other sized photo books too. The only negative to Shutterfly is the shipping prices. They’re not awful, I think I just hate paying for it.

Mila LOVES looking through her books and trying to say everyone’s names in them. For me, it’s so nice to actually look at hard copies of pictures. I don’t know about everyone else, but it’s a relief when I can just not have my phone on me for the night. When I want to look at pictures and not stare at my phone, I just flip through our photo books. I know it probably sounds lame, but they’re just so nice to have. It makes me miss the days where my family would get out the picture totes, look at as many as we could, and tell the stories behind them. I hope Mila and I will do the same when she gets older too… maybe with the pictures being more in order though. Sorry mom!

Honestly, I wish I would have started getting my free books as soon as they started doing it. I actually recommend people to Shutterfly as much as I can, especially to new moms. It’s awesome you can make the books from your phone and recap the month or whatever. Not saying that new moms have the time.. LOL.. moms have no time. BUT, I know how many pictures we take and love to see. So, when I got my notification today that I could order this months freebie, I knew I wanted to share about it on here in case someone didn’t know about their offers. Like I said before, there are a ton of other photo book apps out there too! If you use one of them, let me know about it and if they have great freebies too. I can’t ever have enough pictures in my house.