I HEART MixBook

I often joke that my family is forever looking for a reason to bake a cake.  We celebrate something just about every weekend.  Unfortunately, I miss a good deal of these simply because I do not get back to TN as frequently as I'd like.  I average about once every two months or so and A LOT can happen between my visits!  But I do try to make it home for our "big" holidays.  One of those is definitely Easter.  After church, we all gather in Granny's front yard for "PICTURE TIME!"  I literally run around singing "It's picture time, it's picture time, it's time to get your ready for your pictures!" sung to that "Crayons and your pencils" ditty.  After the pics, we try to have our annual Egg Hunt just before sitting down to a proper Southern Sunday dinner :).

In recent years, the popularity of our Easter Egg hunts have tapered off a bit simply because we didn't have any younguns.  But thanks to a recent baby boom that has us blossoming with new babies, we've been able to bring back the family tradition.  This year marked the first hunt for one of our youngest grandkids.  Here he is just after getting caught stuffing eggs in his pockets!

After the hunt, two of my all-time faves snuggled up on a lawn chair for a chat:

 

I absolutely love this pic of my Sweetie and my Granny.  After I took this, Granny got to fussing about how much she hates digitial cameras.  "I never gets to see pictures since they came out with those thangs.  Y'all don't never print pictures off anymore!"  I cracked up!  But she's right. The most we'll do as far as sharing goes is to post them on Facebook.  So she does miss out.  That got me to thinking...

Ding! Ding! Ding! 

I'll make her a MixBook of these pictures for Mother's Day!  She'll love that!  Since not all of my own pics turned out well, I collected pictures from my relatives who were there that day.  I even snagged some off of Facebook.  Two of my uncles couldn't make it home, so I had them email me pics of their families.  Once I had all of those together, I used the "Classic Easter" template to build a photobook and had it shipped directly to her.

It arrived a week early and before I had a chance to tell her it was on the way.  So when it arrived, it just had the shipping address with no indication who sent it.  She was blown away.  She told my mom, "Look at what somebody from CA sent me!  I don't know how they got a hold of these pictures or how they put this picture book together but I sure am grateful they did it.  I just love this!"

After a good laugh and some splaining, Mama tolder her that I was the culprit and that the book was her Mother's Day gift.  She was tickled pink.

Major. Score.

I highly recommend this as a surprise for your older or less-than-tech-savvy relatives :).