Oh Snap

Nothing says "I Love You" like this...

I don't consider myself to be very good at coming up with creative gifts, especially for Nicole or my mom. I am decent at finding practical gifts I think would be useful for a person (sometimes things they don't even think of), but that can lead to some weird gifts. Examples: one year I got Nicole a mini ladder to help her reach things in her closet; another year I got my mom a laptop cushion; & I think I bought Nicole a hairdryer once. Maybe they aren't, but those feel like weird gifts. All of them were functional and I think they all got a lot of use, but they aren't very sentimental. I'm not in to giving the popular gifts of flowers, spa/massage days, or any of that packaged junk you can get in Bath & Body Works. And when I've tried to be creative with making a card or something like that, it usually backfires and the card is so bad that it looks like I forgot and tried to do something at the last minute.

For Mother's Day this year, I decided to try something different. When Nicole and I were married, one of her friends gave us a photo book as a gift, and I thought it was a great idea. She used a website to format everything and was able to make a book full of different pictures of us - and it had a lot cooler design than the old-fashioned photo album. And while I like putting pictures online as a way of having easy access to them from anywhere, I love the idea of having photo books you can put around the house with pictures from different things you've done. So as a Mother's Day gift for my mom and for my grandmother, I used Snapfish to make a photo book for each of them.

I put together different pictures of my brother and me from all different stages of life and was very pleased with how it turned out. I was able to find baby pictures, old family pictures, sports pictures, and all sorts of other random photos that came out great. I used a scanner to get the printed shots uploaded to my Snapfish account, and the quality didn't suffer much at all. I also took some images from Facebook and saved those to my Snapfish account and didn't have any trouble with image quality in those either. Snapfish made it very easy to get all the photos I wanted and they provided a ton of variety in the layouts of the images and the ability to customize things. It was a good balance of not being too formal, while still looking professional. Another plus is that there always seem to be various discounts and coupon codes online for purchasing Snapfish products. So for once, I was able to come up with a cool, sentimental gift that wasn't corny and my mom and grandmother both really liked their books.

While this isn't a commercial and I'm not brand loyal, especially when it comes to photo books, I had a very good experience using Snapfish. I look forward to creating more photo books in the future and it's a gift idea I'd certainly recommend.