The Scenic Route to Parenthood: My digital project life IVF scrapbook

I mentioned a while back in my post about beating infertility, that I was documenting our entire IVF process and experience. Well I finally got around to finishing my very first digital project life scrapbook (which is so much fun and so easy to make!) I love love love how it turned out and I think it's such a great way to easily show curious people what the process entails.  I laid it out there in a story-like format explaining the hows and whys. I'm also hoping to show our son one day when he's way older (I have this secret wish he'll want to be an embryologist one day).

I started at the very beginning - this album takes place over a period of 6 months or so - listing all the medications I was to take, documenting the 10 days of injections, egg retrieval, fertilization report, genetic testing results, and subsequent frozen embryo transfer cycle with those medications, the embryo transfer, my positive pregnancy test, and milestones we reached along the way. Brian even got his own page at the end to talk about his feelings and the very last page is the photo of the pups we used to announce we're having a boy.

Materials:
8x11 Album: Shutterfly (affiliate link)
Digital Project Life Kit and Templates: Amy Tangerine Cut & Paste Mini Kit and Element Pack 1
Adobe Photoshop CS6

A very quick run down of how I put it together:
Basically, I purchased and downloaded the digital project life kit and templates, arranged and played with each page's layout incorporating photos and text in Photoshop, saved the layout as a .jpg (making sure it would fit my album's dimensions so it wouldn't get clipped) and uploaded to Shutterfly. Then you just drag and drop into your Shutterfly album! So much less mess than paper.

I've always loved Shutterfly. Many years ago I gave our families little wedding albums and the quality is always perfect. And even still, in this album, the pages are thick and smooth, there are many options for types of album covers and sizes, it's just all very customizable, professionally done, and affordable.

And can I just say, the elements in this Project Life kit are just adorable and many happened to fit in perfectly with my IVF theme even though they weren't meant for that.

Like I mentioned before, I love the way this album came out. It took 6 months to make only because I was slowly adding to it as we reached each milestone in the IVF process. And being all digital, it was so easy to put together in Photoshop. I used to be a scrapbooker many years ago and the mess I'd make from all the paper and supplies (not to mention all the storage space needed) was one of the reasons why I quit. So I'm a huge fan of digital scrapbook layouts! It's easy, neat, and you can work on it while you're sitting on the couch.

But I love going back to the very beginning to see where we started and how far we've come.