Blurb and Slurp

...kind of sounds like a cartoon on one of those cable channels... but blurb.com is another website that lets you publish your own book. Something like mypublisher.com, which is focused around photos much like the various photo services (winkflash, shutterfly, snapfish... why do they have cutsie stupid names?)

Blurb, however, can apparently "slurp" your blog in and make a book out of it. (As if for a second I would want this entire blog to be in hardcover format...) It has many other "text" -focused project suggestions.

Every once in a while I think about making a book with some of my own photography, and essays on what each of the photos mean to me, and why they are "special" favorites. I've thought about doing this as a scrapbook (old school, not digital). I might start that someday (those of you who read regularly can finish the sentence.... AFTER PTA).

One example of a photo I'd include is one of the first pictures I have of myself holding my daughter. I'm standing there in a giant terrycloth bathrobe, holding her not-all- that- tiny- almost- ten- pounds- newborn body up against me, cuddling her, with her face close to mine. We are in front of the living room window, not really noticing the camera, and I am looking out at the sunshine of a late fall day.

It was after the end of a long pregnancy, a seemingly even longer labour, and the end of worrying about whether I would ever become a mom. I'd lost a pregnancy before I conceived her, and that baby would be celebrating a birthday right about now. The shamrocks and green carnations remind me of that loss, but this year, it doesn't seem to hurt as much. It finally feels like someone else's life.

The picture embodies one of those happy moments I carry with me.... that moment when I said "it's a girl? really?" in the delivery room. I may have made some choices (or not taken action, and made choices in that way) that I wish I could reconsider, but being a Mom has not EVER been something I regret doing. I already knew that, on that September day.