Mother's Day Gift Idea: 5 Creative Photobook Themes

Sometimes it's hard to think of the perfect gift for parents and grandparents. They don't have any major needs and they don't need more clutter filling up their homes. But they love personal, meaningful gifts. So for several years, I have made special photobooks for them as gifts. I have printed books through Snapfish, Artscow, Shutterfly, and Mixbook and been happy with the results from all of them for my just-for-fun purposes.

I always like to have a theme for each photobook to make it fun. Since I have little kids, I have based these off of classic beginning kids' books. I usually start by sorting through the year's pictures and finding a mix of the best pictures I have of each of my kids. I then create captions for each picture to fit the theme I have chosen for the book. Some examples of photobooks I have done are as follows:

Book of Colors

I found pictures of my family in various activities throughout the year and chose one main color to focus on for each picture.

i.e., red train (picture of my child on a red train),  yellow flowers (pictures of my children by some yellow flowers in the garden), orange pumpkins (pictures of my kids at the pumpkin patch) 

(Orange Pumpkins)

Family ABC Book

I showed pictures of our family throughout the year with an A to Z theme.

i.e., a is for adorable (picture of our baby girl), b is for ball (picture of my son playing soccer), c is for cowboy (picture of my son dressed up as a cowboy),  etc.

(T is for Train)

(X is for X Marks the Spot, Y is for Yawn, Z is for Zoo)

If You're Happy and You Know It

I changed the endings to this classic song to show my kids in their various activities throughout the year--i.e., "If you're happy and you know it, dance around (picture of my little girl in a ballerina outfit), "If you're happy and you know it climb a tree" (picture of my son and husband when they climbed a tree while camping)

(Climb a Tree)

Book of Opposites

Each spread of pages showed pictures that were opposite in some way.

i.e., happy (picture of one of my children smiling)/sad (picture of my baby crying), clean (picture of my kids in the bathtub)/dirty (picture of my boys playing in the mud), awake/asleep, laughing/serious, etc.

Book of Faces

This was similar to the "opposites" book but I created it when I just had one little baby and I had pictures of all those silly baby faces--sleepy, happy, grumpy, silly, curious, hungry, etc.

For some books, I designed the pages myself in Photoshop--for others I used the templates available from the printing company I used (i.e., the ABC Book is a Shutterfly template). In addition to giving these as gifts to parents and grandparents, I usually have each photobook printed for my kids to keep. They love looking at  these books with their own pictures!

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