I have been SOOOOOOOO BAD at keeping up on my scrapbooking. I did a massive wedding album of Craig and I and then I started an album of our married life. I did about ten pages in that, and that's where it ended. I decided to give up on our "married life" and at least start Linkins album. I bought tonz of things, and had big plans to get his done, and up to date. Well that didn't happen. I did about two maybe three pages and haven't had a chance to since! So being that I'm pregnant again, I think this is a priority for me. Really. Because it's important to me that my children have an album of themselves growing up and I think it's a fun "remembering" experience for me and a brag book I guess! Not that I ever show anyone really! Anyhow, so now that it's a priority I have to decide what is best for me because in this day and age there is so many options. So tonight I've been browsing many different websites trying to decide if there's a "digital scrapbooking" company out there for me. When we were living at Holloman, I started Linkins baby album with a company called Heritage Makers, but they charged me $20.....a MONTH!!! That's crazy if you ask me. That's just to use the services, and then you have to pay for the book once you want it made and that's no cheap thing either. I just think it's rediculous to spend $20 a month, not knowing how much time you can devote and the main thing that drew me away from their site and their service is that is was not user friendly at all. Ok I guess it was user friendly, just SLOW, and to look through their stuff was a nightmare. Each tiny little embellishment was seperate, they didn't have packs put together or premade layouts at the time, and each little embellishment took it's time to load so that the view would show up. It's hard to explain what I mean, but it just was not fun. They have some really cute designs though, and I went there tonight and their site has been somewhat updated so it's laid out a different way, and a little faster and easier to use, but I'm not HUGE on their baby papers and it's so limited in options in that theme so I chose to not use them for sure for final. Maybe. So... I went to Z scrapbooks and immediately I decided that their designs were just not as uppy as I'd like. Fairly boring and almost old school like. But I wasn't going to give up quite yet so I browsed through their catalog and decided they actually had some pretty cute designs hidden up in there after I did a search on "baby". So I put together a page. I thought the layout I picked was cute, but seeing the second page of it printed down below, it actually looks old school as I was saying. So, I did a little experiment of my own. As pathetic as this sounds, I made my own scrapbook page on MICROSOFT WORD. Now it's obviously not real 3D and fancy and what not, but really there's potential. I think it's so funny but it's just amazing what you can do with a dinky little program. I actually have a picture editing program and I'm sure I could mess with it enough to have a little success... but then I always go back to the drawing board... and here's my conclusion... I've spent thousands of dollars on REAL LIFE scrapbook supplies. I have like 50 stamp sets from Close To My Heart, and tonz of paper, brads, quotes, etc etc etc that I have bought over the years and a whole bunch of stuff bought precisely for Linkins baby album, so with all that going to waste if I pursue digital scrapbooking, I feel like it's not worth it. But I've been juggling the fact that with the time it would save me to scrapbook digitally, it might actually get done, where as since I keep going back to the I'm going to do it real life style, and then never doing... the stuff is going to waste anyway. So that's my struggle... So below here are the two pages that I have done on the computer. I just want to know today which page you like better. I mean it's simply obvious I'm sure, but just for experiment reasons. Don't pay attention to the white borders - obviously I could only post a certain size of these pages without everything going ski wompus. Anyhow... the second page here also may look a little didgy. That's my word for it kind of got a little blurry or digital looking through the format I used to save it to. The other one didn't get didgy looking but keep in mind that the green page is a page #2 of the layout. I didn't have the chance to upload the other page so it's a little cuter than it looks. a little. Also, forgive me for the bloody pictures...these are Link when he was born. Swollen and everything! He looks like someone elses baby. Someone elses baby with male genitals.

and this one is the one I did on Microsoft Word. It was super fast and easy too. Crazy! Neither one is my style at all, I mean they are my style, but I would consider myself more "tasteful" in that I would want more complex and cute things on a scrapbook page than these, but I guess tonight I'm trying to prove that using an online digital scrapbooking company isn't really always the best choice, or more that using one isn't necessarily going to get you a nice cute fantastically wonderful look. I don't know. So which one do you like more? Also Jenn... what digital scrapbooking company have you been using? Or tried? Or are you using photoshop? And if you are using photoshop, what do you do for paper choices and embellishments? How does that work? I'm just curious though I think I'm sticking to my final decision of scrapbooking "live" here at home in my specially made "craft room". Should be fun! I need to get on it! G'night!