Memories… (My Baby Book Criteria)
March 22, 2006
At first I thought, “I’m a creative person. I should make my own baby book for Finn!” Afterall, I have a degree in cutting architecture. But I thought the same thing about a wedding album, and we still don’t have a wedding album. So in the interim (now going on three years) I decided to buy a baby book.
These are my criteria for a perfect baby book:
- it should be non-denominational
- it shouldn’t be too cute
- no proprietary cartoon characters
- it should leave enough room to be able write something meaningful
- it should trigger you to record milestones, events and thoughts that you wouldn’t normally have thought of
- places for Dads to write things, too
- open enough to allow you to free think
- doesn’t play into gender stereotypes
- logically organized (unlike this list!)
Poppy and Mimi makes a great baby book, with a colorful cover and sophisticated pages. It’s a little pricey at $60, though, and doesn’t leave a lot of room for writing long rambling explanations, which I tend to do. The pages I’ve seen look nice, but there are only 30 pages, and the book is only 9” by 9”, so maybe it isn’t quite as comprehensive as I’d like.
The way I feel about Finn’s baby book is that I’m recording this information for her, so I don’t think the book needs to look like it was designed by the Bauhaus; it can have a typeface that is not Futura and I’m ok with kid-friendly illustrations as long as they’re not Winnie the Pooh, Elmo or some other recognizable tv or movie character.
We bought Oh Baby!: A Journal for Finn. It is written by Helene Tragos Stelian and illustrated by Theresa Case (I’m giving credit here, because I think they did a great job of creating a book that is sweet yet not cloying, comprehensive yet not difficult to fill out, and meaningful yet not hippy-dippy).
Not that you can judge a keepsake this way, but at 12 cents a page (v. $2.00 a page for Poppy and Mimi’s version), it’s a bargain, too!
