His Special Book

I've known for a while that I wanted to create a book for LB that showed all the photos of our journey to each other and also told the story of his adoption. I thought a book would be a good way to start talking to him about his adoption so that his story was something we could talk about from an early age. Obviously when he gets older we will have to expand on certain parts of his story and our discussions will get more advanced but I figure we have to start somewhere. D gets all the credit for putting together most of the book. He organized all the photos and put them in chronological order. That took the bulk of the time. I just came in at the end and added added some text to each page so that it read more like a children's book. The photos I took of the book don't really do it justice but you get the idea. Here are a few of them.

The Front Cover:

Referral Photos:

Family Day:

Airport Homecoming:

Professional Photos:

It is a pretty heavy duty book and the cover is leather bound. We bought it from Picaboo because we had a gift certificate but I am sure all of the major online photo sites do something similar. The icing on the cake is that LB loves it. We call it "LB's special book" and he requests to read it frequently. There was a recent article in my Adoptive Families magazine about creating a storybook for your toddler. The author said, "One way to make the telling more special is to chronicle your child's tale in a personalized storybook. Our kids benefit from tangible "proof" of their connections to us and to their family; your child will giggle with delight when he hears his name and sees things he recognizes about his life in a real book."

I would say this is absolutely true for LB. He will point at me when there is a photo of us or he'll see toys he recognizes and will have to go get them before we can go on to the next page. He seems to like seeing the younger photos of himself and loves to point out the people he recognizes, like us and his grandparents. We tell him about his nannies at the foster home and there are some photos of hometown as well. It's been a good way to start telling him about Ethiopia and for him to see photos of his birth country. Some of the pages in the book tell more personal aspects of his story so it isn't something we'll be sharing with everyone. It was made to be something special for LB.

I am so happy with how the book turned out and that LB has fun reading it. Hopefully, this will be something we can read together for a long time.