Baby scrapbook ideas for the first year

Mix three kinds of page: the firsts (first bath, first tooth, first taste of avocado), the people who came to meet the baby, and the ordinary days nobody photographs on purpose. Give each page one photo, one line of writing and a decoration or two. Kept that simple, a scrapbook fits into the ten minutes after bedtime, which is the only reason most of them survive past month three.

Baby scrapbook page ideas beyond the monthly photo

The first night home. Whatever the car seat looked like by the front door, the hospital bracelet, the first photo on your own sofa. Nobody remembers this day clearly, so the page does the remembering.

One page per visitor in the first month: grandparents, the aunt who flew in, the friend who brought lasagne. A photo of each holding the baby is worth more in twenty years than any milestone shot.

The first bath, the first taste of solid food (photograph the face, not the spoon), a page of hands and feet at one month, the first outing to a café or a park, the first holiday, and an older sibling's drawing of the new baby photographed flat on the table.

Then the ordinary pages. The ridiculous sleeping positions. The dog lying patiently next to the bouncer. The one outfit they wore every other day. These are the pages people linger on, because they are the parts of the year that never made it into a proper photo.

Keep each page simple

Let one photo carry the page. A spread with six small pictures reads as a contact sheet; one picture at a good size with space around it reads as a memory.

Pick a paper, a caption and at most two embellishments. Soft gingham, kraft and pastel stripes suit a baby book because they look like fabric and paper rather than a template. A title in cut-out letters, the way you would with a magazine and scissors, gives the page a handmade feel without the glue.

Write the date and one line on every page. Without them a scrapbook is a pile of nice photos; with them it is a record you can hand to your child.

A scrapbook page in Little showing a baby on a slide with teddy bears, page six of an eight-page book — A scrapbook page in Little. Pages turn like a book, and each one holds a photo, a paper, stickers and a caption.

Making a digital baby scrapbook on your phone

The raw material is already in your camera roll. The hard part of a paper scrapbook is printing, cutting and gluing; on a phone, that part disappears and what is left is choosing the photo and writing the line.

Little imports a batch of photos straight into a scrapbook and lays out one page per photo, in order. You then decorate each page with one of 19 scrapbook papers, cut-out ransom letters (117 of them, letters and numbers), shapes in any colour, nursery stickers and 12 typefaces picked for captions.

A page can also carry a voice note of up to ten seconds, so the page for the first laugh has the laugh on it. Flip-through videos of the scrapbook play those voice notes, which makes a good thing to send to grandparents.

A scrapbook that lives on your phone

One scrapbook, the papers, ransom letters and shapes are all on the free plan. Everything stays on your device, with no account. Free on the App Store.

How to keep a baby scrapbook going

Make a page a week, on the same evening, from that week's photos. Trying to catch up on three months in one sitting is how scrapbooks end.

Do not backfill everything. If you missed February, make one page for February and move on. A scrapbook with a thin month in it is still finished; one waiting for February to be perfect is not.

If a milestone photo you already made belongs in the scrapbook too, duplicate it across instead of making it twice. Little copies a memory into a scrapbook page in one step.

Questions parents ask

What should I put in a baby scrapbook?

Firsts, visitors and ordinary days, each with a date and one line of writing. Keepsakes like the hospital bracelet or a sibling's drawing can be photographed flat and added as their own page.

Is a digital baby scrapbook as good as a paper one?

It is more likely to get finished, because there is nothing to print or glue. If you want paper in the end, export the pages and have them printed as a photo book once the year is done.