Before our trip to the OC, I was pretty nervous about how Wyatt would handle Disneyland. I was concerned that it would be overwhelming for him, but I was also nervous about how he would handle waiting in line for rides. So one day when I was looking at the piles of scrapbooking stuff all over my desk, I got the idea to make him a special distraction book that I could pull out to keep him occupied while we were waiting.
I started off with one of the cheap, $1 Target albums I keep around. The cover was already pretty good, so I just personalized it a bit by adding a “W” sticker it.
Next, I went through our photo archive and printed a bunch of photos of Wyatt’s toys to add to the sleeves.
I still had a lot of spaces to fill after I did that, so I hopped onto Flickr and did some searches for things that Wyatt is into. I was careful to pay attention to the Creative Commons licenses assigned to the photos as I was doing this. Here you see a bulldozer and a tiger. I also pulled pictures of: cats, fire engines, diggers, trains, dump trucks, toy Thomas trains, a polar bear and a zebra.
There were a few more gaps left at that point, so I supplemented with some downloads on the Curious George and Dora websites.
Overall, the books was a success. I ended up pulling it out on the plane going down to Orange County and it worked very well to keep Wyatt occupied. (It didn’t work so well at Disneyland, but that’s another story for another day.) The pictures of his toys were especially well received, so I’ll probably make a point of photographing some of his favorites (his Mee-Mee and Polar Bear for example) and swapping them out. Which brings me to another nice feature of this book. Because it’s just a bunch of photo sleeves, I can put new photos in whenever I like. This will allow me to keep it interesting and current for him as his interests change. It’s also nice that I don’t have to worry about some of the photos getting damaged because I can just put new ones in whenever I like.
