My daughter's monthly scrapbook

Today I thought I'd show you the album I'm making for my second daughter. On the 23rd of every month, I take a picture of her with a stuffed animal (a Lemur, which has quite a history in our household!). I then write up all the pertinent stuff about her for the previous month. I write it like a letter to her, telling her the milestones she's accomplished, what she likes to do, and how she's growing. I then assemble pictures using LumaPix Photo Fusion into a 6x6 collage. I really like the program because all I have to do is choose the pictures that I want and tell it I want to create a 6x6 image. It does all the layout and I'm always impressed with the results. You can tweak it by hand too. I think it was about $35 and it has been well worth the cost to me. Every month I have the same format: the first page is the picture of her with Lemur, converted to B&W; the second and third pages are my letter to her about that month; the fourth page is the photo collage. The papers are Basic Grey and I have several different patterns to alternate amongst the months, but the pink and brown are consistent. I wish I could take credit for this idea but I can't. I copied it pretty much verbatim from the Simple Scrapbooks special issue "album shortcuts". Awesome issue, by the way, especially if you get it with that 40% off coupon at JoAnn's! The album in the background is an 8x8 and I think at the end of the year I will do her 1 month and 1 year photo side by side for the front cover. I have already done all the work of cutting the papers so each month, all I have to do is write and print. I print the journaling on the computer.