Me and Mine, April 2017

I didn’t manage to post a me and mine last month as I didn’t really have any family photos to share. In contrast, I have a few this month!

First up, a bit of fun on our family bike ride. It’s a frame from a video so it’s not the best quality ever, but I love it as I was so surprised that LM actually stayed put long enough to capture it!

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But my faves are the two shots from our recent trip bluebell huntingcof

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I adore this picture, it is the kind of family photo I have hoped for for a long time. All happy, all smiling with a beautiful background 🙂

Me and Mine February 2017

We managed to do quite well this month getting family photos. First up was on our day out looking at snowdrops at Easton Walled Gardens, I love this shot!IMG_20170212_195952_416

Then hubs for this lovely selfie of us in front of the lions at Whipsnade Zoo.IMG-20170220-WA0002

We also got some other fab photos of our extended families which I thought I’d include as they we don’t all get together very often, let alone get good family group shots, yet we managed one with both sides of the family this month! First up, hubs side of the family, with Granny & Granddaddy, his brothers, Uncle Simon, Uncle Andy, and Auntie Julie, and us of course 🙂IMG_20170219_124444_754

Then on a trip to the farm at the weekend hubs got a shot of my side of the family, Nanny & Pops, my big Bro Paul and his wife Ericha, and my little Bro Mark with his fiance Fran. 20170225_135346

So it really is a lovely round up of nearly all our me and mine!

My Photo Albums

If you’ve ever read my blog before then you probably know that I love taking photos. I’m not an amazing photographer or anything and probably never will be, but I love taking photos. I love capturing the moment and the memories that are contained within photographs. I love that in that frame, a moment of truth and reality is stilled and can be kept forever.my photo albums

My dad always used to take a lot of photos and while endlessly posing for the camera did my head in as a kid, I always adored looking through our family photo albums. Oh and we had hundreds. I mean literally, hundreds. Every photo my dad took would go into an album. We would have 7 or 8 films (with 36 exposures of course) for one 2 week family holiday and it all went into albums.

Since things have gone digital of course none of us think anything of snapping away, taking hundreds of photos in the blink of an eye without really thinking about it. But what do you do with all those photos? Do you share them on social media or on a blog? Do you go through the pictures you take and label each with a title so you can find them easily? Are they backed up online with thousands of photos with random file names making it almost impossible to find a specific picture ever again?

Because physical photo albums were always so filled with happiness for me as a kid, I have tried to carry that tradition on a bit. Not quite to the extent that my parents did, mind you. Instead of multiple albums per year I am trying to limit the amount of albums. Squeezing 1-2 years into one album to try to keep the amount of physical albums manageable. So, how do I do it? How do I get down from the thousands of photographs that I take every year (and I do mean thousands, I recently found a folder on the computer with 10,000 photos taken in the last 6 months) into a manageable amount that be squeezed into half a photo album?

Well, it takes some organisation.

We have online storage (currently one drive though we have used Google drive and Livedrive in the past) and every photo we take on our phones are automatically uploaded via WiFi, then downloaded onto our home computer and laptop. I then try to routinely organise the folders from my camera roll into other folders. It is easier if I do this frequently, I have left it months before and it is a daunting task at that point! I tend to create a folder per year and then have sub-folders within for events such as days out, birthday celebrations, even a nice walk where I took a lot of photos.2016-09-22 (2)

In the past I have just moved every photo from a specific event into a folder “to be sorted at a later date” but this year I am really trying to only move in the best pictures that are really worth keeping and then deleting the rest as, seriously, there are so many photos! I also have a subfolder specifically for photos of Monkey and LM. I am often snapping them painting or playing etc and I love to keep some of those pictures of them too even though they don’t fit in to a specific event category.

Then, every 6 months or I so, I look back through the folders and copy my absolute favourites into another folder, in preparation for making an actual photo album. I do this in a couple of goes, going through them again to weed out ones that are too similar and keeping the best, or funniest, or ones with a story to them, and making sure I have shots with family members and friends included too.2017-01-28 (3)

The actual albums I prefer are the ones with big self adhesive pages. I’ve never been a fan of slip in albums as all the photos have to be the same way round, and there isn’t any freedom in terms of getting lots of photos into an album. With slip in albums you can fit so many photos of a particular size into the album, and that’s it. With self adhesive albums there is more freedom.

I’ve always loved a nice collage. Even back in my uni days when I would get my films printed out, I would cut up my photos and do each page of an album as a college. I like to think my collages now are a little more sophisticated but the idea is the same. Getting as many pictures onto one page of an album, as possible. I’ve tried a few ways of doing this over the years, but I think I’ve found the nicest way to do it. I create collages using pic monkey (always a blogger’s friend) and have the collages printed out. I have a big collage with about 14 photos printed onto a 10×8 print, and small collages of 2-3 photos onto 6×4 prints and can just squeeze one big print and 2 small prints onto each page, with a bit of trimming taken into consideration.2016-09-22 (4)

I know this is a lot of pictures on each page, and for some it would be too crammed… But I love it. I love being able to see lots of shots per page and for me having more pictures per page means fewer albums in total, taking up less space, which is important to me. I then use some little coloured sticky tabs to add notes to the pages, just to give a rough indication of dates, locations, and at the moment, the kids approximate ages. I love being able to look at a page and immediately see, right that was June 2016, Monkey was just 4 and LM was 20 mths old.20170221_141332

It takes a lot of time and effort to do all this, but for me it is so worth it. Do you organise your photos? How do you do them? Do you have physical albums? Or digital ones? Or you scrapbook? I’d love to hear how you do it. For me, I am have started the task of organising photos from July-December to last year and am enjoying the process of creating my next photo album, so my word of the week, is, albums.

Me & Mine January 2017

Well if January is anything to go by 2017 is going to absolutely whizz by! Can’t quite believe it yet here we are and the first Me and Mine post of 2017.

The first family shot this year was actually taken on the 2nd January! We had a lovely morning out at our local country park with family and were playing and having a generally great time. With us all so happy I decided to grab an impromptu snap, and, well it was a miraculous snap as I managed to get us all smiling in the first frame! It is much irretrievably favourite family photo and I just adore it. IMG_20170102_200014_837

We’ve got a couple of other snaps this month too. LM is growing up so much and she has really started to like smiling for photos (hooray!) so there have been a couple of other family selfies that are just lovely and capture how we are as a family at the moment.First up, a little snap of us all on the sofa one evening after school, reading LM’s current favourite Usborne ‘find the duck’ book.

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In the next one we are in our bed, LM loves to play a game where we all snuggle up and pretend to be asleep then push the covers back and its time to get up. Monkey always loves a good snuggle and well, I’m sure you can all understand why mummy & daddy never say no to a game that primarily involves lying down :).20170107_083235

Rounding off with one final sofa snap, the kids are in their pj’s but I just love LM’s excitement at the prospect of a photo.

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So there we have it, our little family in January 2017 🙂

Me and Mine December 2016

So here we are, the last days in December and the last Me and Mine Project of the year. I find myself to be a bit of a rubbish blogger these days, but I try and at least keep going with this and the Siblings Project linky, both run by Lucy at Dear Beautiful, as I do find them to be a lovely record of our family over the year.

This month I had high hopes of some family shots over Christmas. We did snap a few but they weren’t quite the polished and posed pictures I hoped for, largely down to an uncooperative LM…. And partly because I couldn’t find my tripod haha. So despite my efforts we once again have selfies with the 4 of us in instead, taken at various times over Christmas.

The best, I think, are these that Hubs snapped on his new phone while we were all sat snuggling and watching TV on Christmas Eve in what we call ‘the new room’ as it used to be the garage. It’s not really new anymore but I have a feeling it will be ‘the new room’ for many years to come. Anyway I love the soft light of these pics, even if we struggled to get us all smiling at the same time! I particularly love LM trying to copy her brother’s thumbs up by putting her finger up instead…then she looked at it so confused bless her, such a toddler thing to do isn’t it?photogrid_1483099944667

We also have the obligatory shots on our bed on Christmas morning, blurry in the terrible light, sleepy and with a semi-naked hubs but full of excitement on Christmas morning. photogrid_1483100122004

Finally, my attempt at some nice posed ones when we were all dressed and smart on boxing day morning… Which LM was really not in the mood for, as I’m sure you can tell. photogrid_1483100226473

So there you have it, that was us in December. And because another year has passed (in the blink of an eye it seems), here is the last year’s worth of family shots, to show how much we (or at least the kids) have grown and changed over the past 12 months.me-and-mine-2016

I did a similar collage last year too, if you fancy a look.

Happy New Year all!

The Me and Mine Project

Sudbury Hall and the National Museum of Childhood

Last weekend we were headed to the Peak  District to celebrate my aunt’s 70th. As it is a fair old distance for the kids in the car we decided to do our usual and break the journey at a National Trust place along the way. We chose Sudbury Hall because I heard it had a great play area and also because we thought that the kids may enjoy the museum of childhood if the weather turned sour.photogrid_1478181773530

Continue reading

Me and Mine October 2016

It’s Me and Mine time again, where I join in with the lovely Lucy at Dear Beautiful with her family photography project. Whereas last month I barely managed to capture a photo of us as a family, this month there are a few shots.

The first shots come from LM’s 2nd Birthday last week. Always a good opportunity to have photos taken of us as a 4. The first is low quality and we are all sleepy as it was taken while opening presents on our bed. Just capturing a happy moment together.  Continue reading

Me and Mine Sept/Oct 2016 – an autumn walk

I’m a bit late joining in with the fab Me and Mine linky this month. In fact I wasn’t planning on joining up at all as the only shot I have of us as a family this month is one on our bikes, which isn’t the best.img-20160924-wa0000

But then today, after a slightly odd morning with ratty kiddies who are coming down with colds (and therefore slightly ratty parents too) we decided to get out and get some fresh air on a little autumnal walk. We found the most conkers I’ve ever seen in my life and had a good old nature hunt in general.photogrid_1475411475375

Then during a little game of family hide and seek we managed to grab a few very happy family selfies.
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We had a lovely walk and as always a bit of fresh air did us all the world of good. So this is us, at the beginning of October, enjoying autumn.20161002_123809_000-268

The Me and Mine Project
Monkey and Mouse

Country Kids from Coombe Mill Family Farm Holidays Cornwall

Me and Mine August 2016

I love my little family. We have had such a lovely summer and I just feel so lucky sometimes to be the mummy of my two gorgeous kiddies and partner of my wonderful hubby. Of course,  life isn’t perfect (as perfect doesn’t exist) but it is pretty close.  The kids drive me bonkers pretty frequently and hubs and I bicker about the usual day to day stuff and wind each other up, but in general life is good.

The kids are growing up so much and I know people say it doesn’t get easier, that the challenges are just different as they grow, and I get that, I do. But personally, I find the challenges of a toddler and a preschooler (almost at school, eek) easier to manage than the challenges of a baby and a toddler. I just do.

I feel incredibly lucky when our kids are just playing happily together and we are all having a lovely time together. It’s everything I’ve ever hoped for really.

Ok, going to stop the soppiness now and get to our Me and Mine shot for this month. Taken by our friend Chris, the lovely hubby of the equally lovely Sarah at Run, Jump, Scrap. We had a lovely day at their gorgeous Gremlin’s birthday party and Chris snapped this gorgeous shot of our little family. LM isn’t smiling which is a shame but that’s toddlers for you and it doesn’t detract from how lovely the piccy is. Thanks Chris! IMG-20160828-WA0018

The Me and Mine Project

Me and Mine July 2016

It’s that time of the month again where I share a few photos of us as a family, as a bit of a record of how we all grow and change. Most of this months shots were taken at the beautiful Abbotsbury Swannery on ur holiday to Dorset. Such a gorgeous place though t be honest as ever the shots didn’t quite turn out as I hoped in my head they would. Largely because of 2 children, as it is incredibly difficult to get them both to cooperate at the same time in the position you want them to be,

The first shot is probably the best of the day, a bit of an impromptu happy family selfie, not aiming for a particular backdrop and we are all actually smiling.20160729114147

The next time I actually attempted to use my tripod with the hope of getting some swans in the background. Bless Monkey and his little pose though it looks rather like he needed a wee, and well LM was not in the mood to participate at all at this point. Still, you can see swans behind us haha.20160729114320

Finally in front of a heck of a lot of swans, LM was smily, albeit with her sunnies on, looking very glam haha… but well as you can see, Monkey was having none of it! Grumpy Monkey eh! They did both enjoy the day though and I will share more about the swannery in a seperate post.20160729_163851

My final Me and Mine shot for the month is a lovely happy on th beach selfie. I had no selfie stick or tripod so just had Hubs’ long arms to utilise for this one, and it is by far my favourite of the bunch.20160730_141325

Though actuallly just one more, a little outtake of the shot prior to this one, where Monkey wouldn’t cooperate because “the water is too dirty for me” say what little man???20160730_122618

So that is our little family this month. The smiles hide the tantrums and troubles our little lady is giving us at the moment, but we have enjoyed our holiday so far regardless.

The Me and Mine Project
Best of Worst