On Blogging, Reflecting and Gifting

Can you tell I didn't know what to call this post? Still not sure I got it right. Oh well. Let's see if I can hit all those targets.

First, on blogging. It turns out this blog has been a big success for us. We originally started the blog to document our wedding planning process and share our thoughts, feelings and experiences with family and friends. Reflecting on our life together and discussing our plans for the future has been a surprisingly fulfilling outlet for creativity and at times, it has also been therapeutic, relaxing and even invigorating. As we near our 100th blog post, it has been fun to look back over the past year and a half and see what we've been up to. Honestly, this last year has been so busy that I probably couldn't tell you what I did last week never mind what happened last month so there's something to be said about writing it all down, even if no one (okay, there are definitely a few of you dedicated followers-thanks!) is reading it and re-reading it besides the two of us.

That slightly side-tracked note (this post was really supposed to be about gifts!) brings me back to the point - documenting the big moments of our life. For our wedding anniversary, I wanted to put together a book highlighting all of the major "pieces" of our wedding - from the planning and creative process to the wedding itself and even our honeymoon in the Galapagos. I thought this was going to be a tricky task until I stumbled upon Blog2Print, a site that allows you to create a hard cover book from your blog posts. It literally took me 20 minutes to upload and design the book. I chose only the blog posts published with the tag "wedding" and Blog2Print automatically generated a table of contents and page layout based on the text and photos in each post. The book cost about $40 including shipping, which for a gift wasn't a bad deal. It came out great and now we have a permanent reminder of all of the hard work we put into our wedding day. James loved it!

On a somewhat related note, we also got an anniversary "gift" in the form of an article in the wedding magazine, Bride to Be. I know I mentioned this awhile back, but the article was finally published and the lovely Ms. Polka from Polka Dot Bride, who originally published photos and information about our wedding on her own blog, graciously sent us a copy of the hefty magazine this week. It's pretty neat to see our faces in a big glossy magazine. We were featured in a two-page article about "Craft It Yourself" or CIY weddings. I'm also very excited for our awesome photographer Olivia Gird whose amazing photographs really looked beautiful in the magazine. She made us look so good, if I do say so myself. Being published in a major magazine is definitely something to celebrate. Thanks to both Olivia and Ms. Polka for making this happen for us!

Now...about that 100th post. Seems like a good opportunity for that big announcement. Stay tuned, I promise it's coming up next! It's so good it's going to need its own book too!