Disney Memory Books {2012 Edition}

I’d venture to say that one of the (many) highlights of the littles’ trip to Disney last year was meeting their favorite characters and loading up their memory books with signatures.  After our trip, they helped me choose pictures for the books, and we pasted in our Messages from Mickey and things like our Key to the World cards and Monorail Operator stickers.  I kid you not when I say that these are among the most looked at “books” in our house.  The baby falls asleep many nights a week with his clutched in his hands.  Sooooo, I pulled the file out of the coffers, made a few tweaks and have the 2012 edition ready to go!

I personalized a section for each park and special event during our visit.  When we told the PCP’s teacher that he’d be missing a week of school, she was excited and super supportive.  She said there was no way she’d send school work, but that she would love to have him write each day about what he did and saw.  Given that direction, I added a lined page (the lines are hard to see below) into each section that says “A magical memory from…”.  We’ll do our best to have him jot down a sentence or two each night.

The last pages in the book are for signatures.  Like last year, we’ll have the characters sign on the page with the Mickey and then paste pictures on the facing pages.

Here’s how the looked after we finished them up last year…

And here’s how I did it:
1. Created the pages in Printing Press and sized them at 5″x7″ to leave room for 4″x6″ pictures.  I created my own mouse head from three black circles.  I used fonts Brady Bunch and Waltograph throughout the book and dotted all the i’s and j’s with a scaled down version of my mouse head.  (Have I mentioned how giddy it made me that both my boys have a dot-able letter in their name?!?!)
2. Printed the pages and organized them in the way I wanted the books laid out.
3. Laminated the front and back covers.  I use Lakeshore Learning for laminating.  It’s self serve and only $0.39 a foot.  So, the grand total for the four cover pages was $0.39.
4. Had them spiral bound with a ring larger than needed to leave room for pictures.  I used Kinkos for this.  They bound both books for $8.

So, at the end of the day, my two signature books ran me a grand total of under nine dollars.  Not too shabby.
xoxo