If you don’t have time for a major scrapbook, you can do a mini of all of your kids, like this one.

Baby albums are an amazing way to look back on the some of the best moments of our lives. The problem I’ve found with being able to electronically scroll through pictures of my daughter’s first moments is that making a photo album didn’t seem urgent. So now, almost three years after my daughter was born, I’m still struggling to make her first baby album.

With cameras on our phones, we can also capture so many more photos than we would if we had to drag our cameras around. That also makes it easy to take a lot of photos of the same thing, and it becomes that much more difficult to chose your favorite shots for your album. And even though you think you may remember every single moment you spend with your baby, you just may forget when you took which photo. Having spent the last few weeks up past midnight scrolling through almost three years of pictures, my best advice is to start NOW!

Start by uploading every single one of your photos onto your computer. Try organizing them into different folders by date, or go through them and name them with the age as the beginning of the tittle so that when you search through them you can easily put them into chronological order. From now on, make sure that at the end of every month up do a photo dump and upload every shot you took into a folder, that way you will have them categorized by month from now on. In each monthly folder start a Word document with any milestones you want to remember so you can easily remember and add them in at right spots.

Decide if you want to make your baby album online using a program like Shutterfly or iPhoto, or if you’d prefer to print them and make your album by hand. Whichever you decide, I strongly suggest you take one or two nights every month and start putting your album together a little bit at a time so you don’t blink and wake up three years later having an anxiety attack about not having a baby album like I did.

Jacqueline Banks is a certified Holistic Health Counselor focused on nutrition and green living strategies. She works with women in all stages of motherhood, from mothers struggling with conception, through pregnancy, lactation and beyond to ensure the best health and nutrition for both mother and baby.