birthday book

after starting 3 different homemade board books, we finally finished one, just in time for Caleb's birthday. we wanted to get him a book with lots of dog pictures in it, since he really loves dogs. but our local huge bookstore didnt have what we wanted, so I took matters into my own hands.

the bookstore did have an inexpensive dog breed book, with nice pictures of all the popular breeds. so I bought that and cut out a bunch of the pictures, glued them on (with non-toxic glue stick) one of our blank board books (which was only $1.25 at barebooks.com). then mama helped me put clear contact paper (only $5 for a whole roll) over all the pages. and it turned out great! I even have enough pictures left for later volumes if needed.

I decided to leave it very simple for expediency, and I like the way it looks too. so it's just pictures of dogs, no words or anything extra. maybe in future editions we'll add names of the breeds or descriptions, but meanwhile it will be fun to point to the picture of the lab and tell him about his "cousin" dog.

the best part is that he seems to really like it. he opened it this morning and started pointing and making the "oof, oof" sound, and requested that we look at it many times. hopefully it will hold up to all the attention it seems it will get. and now that this method seems to work, hopefully I'll finish the bird and catechism books soon.