june rewind #3: my birthday surprise!

the kids and i drove home from atlanta on my birthday. it was a good trip home, especially thanks to tammy, who kept a very tired birthday girl company on the phone for the last 3 hours of the drive! :) that was a wonderful gift, tammy!! i had to laugh when i talked to brian, who was going to lunch at my very favorite restaurant with jonathan on my birthday when the kids and i had just eaten 89 cent burgers from the drive-through. but he made up for it that evening. :) he'd arranged for my mom, his parents, and jeff, kristie, and karina to come over for cake after just the 4 of us went to dinner. i was exhausted, but it was a fun little birthday party. kristie made a cute polka-dotted birthday sign for me, and my mom made my favorite cake: strawberry with buttercream icing. mmmm. i actually froze 1/2 of it in slices and enjoyed it again weeks later. :) thanks mom!!

and brian surprised me with a great great birthday gift! i am horrible to buy gifts for. i never can think of anything i want except like, finished kitchen cabinets, a new front porch, that kind of thing. :) so when brian said he ordered me something, i was honestly a bit nervous and curious. what could he have possibly ordered me? well then the very thin package came, and i saw the return address of blurb.com, and i couldn't believe it! we've talked about making my blog into a book for awhile, but we just haven't taken the time to do it. well, thanks to my marathon sunday afternoon naps, my sweet husband was able to sneakily design my first tenlittletoes book! he wisely chose to just print the first year of my blog, which was sept-dec of 2005. he was actually pretty brave to take on this project, knowing that the control freak in me likes to do these kinds of things myself. but he did a great job! he knows that i hate book jackets, so he designed the cover to have the pictures printed on the actual book (i think that's called image wrap). brian designed the cover to look like my blog design: clean and white. i thought that was a great touch. here's the cover:


inside, each post from 2005 has its own page (or pages!). the links are listed as footnotes. i haven't experimented with designing a book yet, but according to brian, you have a lot of freedom to put pictures where you want and to even add pictures that aren't in your blog. on that note, you can design whatever kind of book you want-- it doesn't have to be related to a blog at all! anyway, here are a couple of samples of the inside pages...

this post was long enough to stretch to two pages.

and here is my first post on tenlittletoes!

this book is definitely a treasure, and now i can't wait to get 2006 & 2007 printed! though those books will be MUCH bigger since i blogged for the entirety of those years. i love the idea of blogs... of online journaling. there's no messy handwriting, no mistakes that need white-out, and i just think better when i'm typing. i love being able to share the blessings and trials of my life with those of you that actual read this blog. that being said, though, there is something very special about holding a journal or other piece of written work in your hand. it is history. it is something physical to be passed down to generations to come. and it looks really great on my bookshelf. :)