2021 Photo Album

I always make the previous year's photo album during the current year.  That way I can sort through the pictures from the entire year before designing the book.  That has worked well for me in recent years as I switched from laying out the book by months and instead by themes such as a friends page, family page, vacation time, sporting event, etc.  Normally, I try to complete the previous year's book in the winter of the current year.  For various reasons I didn't do that for the 2021 book.  I really wanted to get it done before the holidays, therefore, I spent the past four days gathering pictures, organizing them on Shutterfly and finally completing last year's photo album today.  

In the end I was very happy with how the book turned out.  Our 2020 book was one of the smallest that I had ever ordered.  With the pandemic, we just didn't do that much that was picture worthy.  We had fun together and spent a lot of time outside that year, but school was cut short, music and sports programs were cancelled and we wore masks all of the time.  All of those situations caused us to take a lot less photos.  

While working on the book, I noticed that the winter of 2021 started off the same way with a lot less pictures than normal.  By April, however, we were in the full swing of things in the Heinisch home.  Meg started hanging out with her friends more.  Cameron was involved in after school activities again.  Brett visited more and Cal traveled multiple places.  In fact it turned out to be a very good year and even though it was time consuming, I was glad that I had so many pictures to sort through.  There were times that I teared up while working on the 2021 book.  At first it was from frustration with Shutterfly's new formatting for photo books.  I figured that out pretty quickly, but then the tears hit when I saw all of the pictures of Richard on our iCloud.  From specific events, such as the Elkhart County Fair to selfies with Cameron, in every picture he was smiling and having fun.  I was so glad to see that, but sad to think about what had happened in May.  One very nice part about working on the 2021 photo album was that it contained two of my favorite family pictures of all time.  Overall, it was a lot of work, but a fun project as well.  Hopefully, I will finish the 2022 one well before November of next year.