How to Catch Up on a Baby Book That's a Year Behind

(A no-shame guide from a memory book maker who has been there too.)

Let's talk about the baby book on your shelf.

The one you started with so much intention. The one that stopped somewhere around month three. The one you keep meaning to get back to, right after the laundry, right after the trip, right after this week calms down.

You know the one.

Here's what I want you to know before I get to the tips: you are wildly, extremely not alone. Ten-plus years of running a memory book company has taught me that the number of people with a mostly-filled baby book on their shelf is much, much smaller than the internet would have you believe. You're a busy mom, and you aren't the only one behind.

The good news is, you can catch up. You just need a plan and a glass of wine.

Here's how you're going to do it:

How To Catch Up: Step 1 

Open your photos app and work backwards, printing month by month.

Your camera roll is a built-in timeline. Open your phone to whatever month you're behind, scroll back, and let the photos walk you through the year. What they were wearing, what you were doing, where you went - most of what you need is already sitting there waiting for you.

Even better: go ahead and order small physical prints for each month you're catching up on. - here's a list of all our favorite places. Spread the month across your kitchen table. It's a lot easier to journal about the small moments when you can see them next to each other.

How To Catch Up: Step 2

Use the facial search on your phone to find baby's photos fast.

If you're scrolling through a year of photos and getting overwhelmed - good news, your phone has already done the sorting for you.

Both iPhone (Photos → Albums → People & Pets) and Google Photos (search bar → tap your kid's face) let you filter by face. Tap your baby's photo and it'll pull every single picture of them in seconds, in date order. What used to take an hour of scrolling takes ten minutes.

How To Catch Up: Step 3

Skip what you can't remember. It's okay.

This one's important: blank pages are allowed.

If you genuinely can't remember what month they started crawling, don't invent it. Leave it blank. Some pages are just future-you saying "I tried and I loved you and I did what I could." That's not failure, it's reality and it's part of the story of their childhood. 

How To Catch Up: Step 4

Text the grandparents for the details you missed.

Grandparents remember what you don't. What baby wore home from the hospital. Who cried harder at the first birthday party. The exact thing your kid said at Christmas last year.

A quick group text - "hey, what do you remember about baby's first Thanksgiving?" - will get you three answers you never would have written down on your own. If they're up for it, put them on speaker and let them talk. You'll get forty-five minutes of stories you didn't ask for and won't want to lose (write fast!).

How To Catch Up: Step 5

Check your calendar (paper or Google) for events and firsts.

Your calendar is a memory bank in disguise.

Scroll back through last year's Google Calendar (or flip open your paper planner). The pediatrician appointments, the family visits, the weekend trips, the birthdays, the holidays - they're all sitting there with dates attached. Half your "when did that happen?" questions are already answered.

How To Catch Up: Step 6

Paste a photo over any prompt you can't fill in.
(No one will know and we promise not to tell)

This is the best trick in the book, and I'm giving it to you for free.

If a prompt is asking you something you can't remember, paste a photo over it. A picture is a memory, so it totally counts. The book was built to hold your story, not to grade you on how many blanks you filled in.

Nobody - not future you, not your kid, not anyone reading it in fifty years - is going to check.

How To Catch Up: Step 7

Visit the "Memories" section of your photo app.

Both iPhone and Google Photos automatically curate little montages of your year - organized by month, by trip, by person, by holiday. They'll show you "This Day Last Year" and "Best of April" and "Trip to the Grandparents'" without you doing anything.

Scroll through them. It's essentially a free curator doing the hard work of picking out the memorable moments for you.

How To Catch Up: Step 8

Do one page a night. Wine optional (but, you know, highly recommended).

Don't sit down to "catch up on the whole book." Sit down to fill one page. That's it.

Five nights a week and you're caught up in a month. It's honestly the only way this works and keeps you from feeling overwhelmed - and if a glass of wine or a cup of tea makes it feel like a ritual instead of a chore, all the better.

How To Catch Up: Step 9

Done is better than perfect.

The whole reason I built Nuts & Bolts the way I did was because I got tired of memory books being an added chore or a test of motherhood that you could fail.

There is no version of this that goes perfectly. There's only the version where you do it, and the version where you don't. A finished, imperfect baby book - with crossed-out words, mismatched handwriting, blank pages, and photos glued in slightly crooked - is worth infinitely more than a "perfect" book that never gets filled in.

Just start. You've got this!

If you don't have a baby book yet and you're wondering if it's too late to start — it's not.

Our baby books are designed to be filled out of order, with skips, in real life. Grab one at here - we ship hand-bound from our little studio in Colorado.