A new sight/site

AB is in Spokane today taking his Fundamentals of Engineering exam after months of studying and panic. Panic mostly being this last week. He called me at lunchtime during break and said the first half went surprisingly well. Let's hope the second half this afternoon is going as well.

Me here? Two kids and just me? We are also doing surprisingly well. In fact. My living room, dining room and kitchen are picked up, laundry is going (so I have a basket to fold... I can do that tonight) and two kids are napping. Not sure how that happened.

I told Leif he could have quiet time in his play tent that our good friends bought him for his first birthday. A kid's tent? Priceless. Anyways, he promised he would be good because I told him if he started playing around it was into bed with him for quiet time. I FINALLY got Skadi down for a late nap (plenty of interferences earlier on), I walked out and sure enough. He was in the tent konked out.

We had a pizza/popcorn/movie night party last night with The Bee Movie. Ok, love it. I thought it was great. Not sure Leif was as sold for some reason. This morning we got ready and Leif went for a haircut, then we got "lattes" since he did so well and home we came.

Blessed silence. A rare sight and sound in my house.

And speaking of sites...

Blurb. I have a love hate relationship with Snapfish. They sucked me in with cheap prints and now I have about 3 years of photos on there. Great... except their book making site just sucks. And I had problems with customer service last year. Yet, all my pictures are there.

I am working on making a first year book for Skadi. My alternative to scrapbooking... something I tried and frankly loathe. Maybe I am just too impatient. My patience lies elsewhere, sewing, cross stitching, cooking a fantastic meal. Not scrapbooking. I built the thing on Snapfish but was having issues.

Friends pointed me to Shutterfly, but I hesitated knowing I would have to upload all my pictures again. Oh and Shutterfly ticked me off last year too. (Stubborn? Me?)

Well my sister in law recommended Blurb. I went to check it out last night.

Love it.

You download the software, build your book and upload the book to order it. Love, love, love it.

No dealing with my slowish internet connection (we will be dumping satellite service as soon as our 2 year contract is up). And no dealing with crappy online software that may or may not save routinely. I have lost whole books on Snapfish. The books are beautiful. Well at least the pictures of the books are. But if Angie as a professional photographer recommends it, I know they will be gorgeous.

And the price? No worse than Snapfish or Shutterfly.

The thing that is really intriguing to me is that they offer a service to turn your blog into a book.

Yes way.

I need to check out their "slurp" service. The price is right. But over the last 3.5 years I have often wished I had a way to get my blog posts - certain ones at least - easily into writing. For things like kid's memory books, etc. I am hoping that I can pick and choose so that when my kids are older they aren't wading through my whiney posts about work to find the funny things they said as kids. If I can pick and choose which files I want...

well a whole new world of book making will open up to me!

Check it out!