I just got back from a family trip to Lake Havasu, Arizona, where we surprised my Mom by having all her daughters, their husbands, and their children show up in the same place. This was actually much harder than it sounds, since we live in five different states and have children ages 6 to 18, with a variety of jobs and clubs and classes and every other thing.

One of the coolest things about it was the birthday present we made using the Picaboo publishing service. It’s a pretty standard on-demand service with a focus on photographs. We spent about a year where all four of us girls wrote down the stories of our childhoods and gathered up and scanned old photos, then my sister Arlene went through and added custom backgrounds (like Lake Wentworth or our family’s classic “gold curtain” backdrop) to the various spreads. We ended up with a large, gorgeous, full-color book that was as successful as we could have hoped (that is, Mom not only cried, but to my knowledge didn’t put the book down for more than a few minutes the entire time).

Another great thing about this particular approach (rather than taking it to a standard print shop) is that the proofs are online, and any of us can order additional copies through the Picaboo online service whenever we like. So we got the deluxe version for Mom, but I will probably need to order a smaller one for my own library.