SHE SAID:

For our first anniversary, we tried to give each other gifts in keeping with the traditional gift giving guide. Since your first year anniversary gift is supposed to be related to paper somehow, Brad made me a photo book from Apple of our first year together. It had pictures of our wedding, of course, but also different places we went and all of our “firsts” like Christmas, Valentine’s, etc.

Since everything is digital now, we’re less apt to take pictures off of the computer, get them printed and then put them in a photo album (seriously, when did people have time for that?). The great thing about photo books is their simplicity. All you basically have to do is upload your photos and wait for it to arrive in the mail.

As you know, we just came home from our winter escape from Florida. Coming home from trips can sometimes be a downer, especially when you go from bikini weather to parka weather. A fun way to relive all of the fun memories while you were away is to spend an evening together documenting it all. We put on a pot of tea we purchased from Disney World and created a timeline of our trip together. It was a nice way to transition from vacation euphoria to reality.

Photo books are a great gift to give and receive. You can have a lot of fun creating story lines to go along with your pictures and they look a whole lot better on a coffee table or shelf than those massive binders with plastic inserts.

HE SAID:

One of my favourite things to do when I visit my grandparents is to look through old photo albums. I like the ones that have pictures of things I remember as a kid, but I especially enjoy the really old black and white ones that give me a glimpse of my family’s history. After I’ve gone through a heavy pile of photo albums, I realize that it is far from a perfect system for storing pictures. The plastic pages stick together, the pictures are sometimes falling out of the slots, and all of the newspaper clippings and other random things being kept in the book make it quite difficult to browse the photos.

The best solution to the problem that I’ve found (unless you want to spend a small fortune on an iPad to look through your photos) is photo books where the pictures are actually printed on to the pages in the book. I used Apple’s service when I created one for Susan, but there are plenty of options out there. For Mac users, it’s as simple as opening iPhoto, selecting the photos you want included in your book, click on the book button in the menu at the bottom of iPhoto, then you just pick a template and fill it with photos. It’s very easy.

The prices for the books range from $5.00 to $50.00 depending on if you choose hard or soft cover, and the size of the book. The one I made Susan for our first anniversary was a large hard cover book, so it only cost about $30.00. The quality ended up being great. The hard cover was nice, and the photos (which were taken with our aging point and shoot camera) looked quite nice printed on the glossy paper.

Even if you don’t have a paper anniversary coming up, a photo book would make a great Valentine’s Day gift. It takes thought and effort to pick out all the photos and arrange them nicely. It’s a great way to share or relive fun memories.

For those of you who won’t be using iPhoto to make your photo book, don’t despair. There are plenty of options online to choose from. Check out these links and see which one works best for you. Black’s, Better Homes and Gardens, Costco, Carsand Mosher

We would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has read our blog since we started it in July. We have had lots of fun and can’t wait to see what the coming year has in store. Your support has been amazing and it pushes us to try to come up with bigger and better ideas.

We’ll be taking a little break to spend some time together with our friends and family, but we have some fun things planned for early January so make sure you come back and see what’s next. Thanks again and Merry Christmas to all of you!

Back in 2008 Oprah featured a couple from Nova Scotia on her “Favourite Things” show. The couple had taken the idea of the 12 days of Christmas and created the 12 dates of Christmas instead. They wanted to promote spending time with loved ones rather than spending a lot of money on Christmas. Unfortunately, we are not the couple that was featured on Oprah, but we love the idea. In fact, we love it so much we decided to do our own version of the 12 Dates of Christmas.

Out of our list of twelve date ideas we chose eight of our favourites to write about. We both wish we could do all twelve, however due to the craziness of this time of year, and our desire to remain married, we were forced to choose only eight.

Without further ado, here is our list (in random order) of the 12 Dates of Christmas:

1. Relive our first date

2. Put up and decorate our Christmas Tree

3. Make home made Christmas ornaments

4. Play a Christmas board game

5. Bake some Christmas treats

6. Assemble a gingerbread house

7. Have a Christmas movie night

8. Make homemade Christmas gifts

9. Go for a Christmas lights drive

10. Go on a Food Crawl

11. Make a Snow Supper (winter theme)

12. Go see a Christmas show (such as The Nutcracker)

Look for our blog post about reliving our first date on Wednesday, December 2nd, and since it is the most wonderful time of year, our most wonderful giveaway yet is just around the corner. Hopefully this list looks interesting to you. We’re looking forward to lots of fun over the next few weeks and can’t wait to hear about all your favourite Christmas activities, traditions, and memories.

One of our favorite movies to watch together is Dan in Real Life. It stars Steve Carell as Dan, a writer who is trying to raise his three daughters alone after the death of his wife. This is not, however, a movie review.

After seeing the movie a few times I started paying attention to the soundtrack. The songs compliment the movie perfectly while standing on their own as good music. I found it on iTunes not long after and it has since become one of our favorite pieces of music.

Up until now I’ve only had the digital version of the soundtrack on my laptop. I don’t like using an FM transmitter for my iPod in the car, and burned CD’s don’t play well at all in it either, so we were anxious to get it on CD. The problem was, the local Best Buy and Future Shop never seemed to carry it. So after months of looking every time we went shopping, and telling Susan many times to “just buy it online” I finally decided to order it through Amazon as a surprise for her.

Later that day we were picking out some music for the car as we were heading out on a day trip (more on that later…) when somehow the Dan in Real Life soundtrack got brought up. Then came the crushing blow to my “I’m such a good husband” ego when Susan proceeded to tell me she had JUST ordered it online from Chapters with some books she bought. Yup, after months of searching brick and mortar stores, we both ordered the same CD on the same day!

So now my surprise has been ruined, my soul has been crushed, but we have two copies of one of our favorite CD’s. One arrived yesterday, and the other is still on the way. Let’s just say I’m glad I didn’t pay for gift wrapping.

And that, my friends, is the story of the Dan in Real Life Incident.