You can now pick up your snapfish.com prints, posters, or photobook orders

The pricing is higher when you choose Pick-Up. For example, A 4"X6" print costs 9 cents when Snapfish prints and ships it to you, however it costs 19 cents when you choose to pick it up at Walgreens. BUT, you pay no shipping, and you get it the same day when you choose Pick-Up. It's a nice option to have when you are caught in a pinch and need prints or posters in a hurry.

Just one caution, your PC does use up more power than a digital picture frame, but hey, if you were just going to let the screensaver run anyway, why not have it go through the thousands of photos on your hard drive.

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Here's one incident I'll relive many years down the road: I was chaperoning my son's 5th grade field trip and at snack time, I saw him trade up the snack I packed him, fruit leather, for a bag of Doritos. I found out that he had been trading the snacks I give him for fancier stuff for a while.

Tips for journaling your kid's life:

• You don't need to have perfect handwriting. Look at mine, and that was on a good day. I've scribbled worse in a hurry. If it's legible, it's good enough.
• Write about the child, not the event. I could write about the 5th Grade field trip - where we went, where we had lunch, how many kids were there, but isn't it more interesting to write about my discovery of this young trader?
• Keep it short and sustainable. Better to write frequently, than to write one long journal entry once a year. Look for the Big thing in the little things. Journaling actually helps you be a better observer, you see things with your heart. Write a paragraph, write a sentence, don't feel pressured to write detailed, complete entries or it will become yet another 'chore' in your busy day.
• Draw. If you are afraid your less-than-perfect handwriting becomes permanent in a journal, you'll sweat more about your drawing. I used to be that. Until I read Daniel Price's little book, How to Make a Journal of Your Life. He had us draw a simple object, a spoon, without looking to surprise me that it did look like a spoon. Since then, I've added drawings to my journal pages. It adds a nice contrast to the text, and like they say, sometimes, a drawing is worth a thousand words.
• Location, location, location. Where's the best place where you are least harried, where you are most likely to be in a more reflective mood? For me, it's their bedroom. As we wind down the day, while they are reading in bed, I pick up the journal and scribble a few things.
• Read past journal entries. Sometimes, I get my biggest motivation to journal when I read an entry from 2 years back. It brings back a memory long forgotten, it made me chuckle to remember, and it gives me more resolve to journal more frequently, knowing how much joy I get remembering.

Ok, your turn now. Grab a blank book, write something today, for tomorrow you will be too busy running around to remember. A journal is a place of joy remembered. If you've been journaling your kid's life, share with us in the Comment section what you last journaled about.

Video Disclosure: This is a blog about Memory-Keeping for busy families. The video below serves simply to illustrate in a comical way the value of creating home videos. It does not in any way reflect the political inclinations of the author.

Home videos is a fun component of a family memories collection. If you've not made a home movie before, you may think the process and camcorder gear is still complicated, expensive, time consuming. Not so. There are many options today, like the extremely popular Flip Video camcorder where you shoot a video, then flip a USB port and plug it into your computer.

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• www.SimpleVideoEditing.com - Helpful blog for first time home movie creators
• Keep your home movies short and sweet
• How to interview kids in front of the camera
• How to create Home Videos Tips and Ideas

A digital picture frame - Ok, he may find this in a store, but what makes it a unique father's day gift is not the frame but the photos you put in it. Put photos of his grandchildren, his fishing trips, thanksgiving, even the simple digital frames can store hundreds of photos, so surround him with hundreds of memories. Click here to see where I put my digital picture frame.

A Father's Day Photobook - It's very easy to produce a bound hard-cover photobook these days. Here's a tip, before you even start creating your photo book, gather all your photos into one folder. Many photobook software such as Picabooor shutterflyhas auto-create feature, if your photos are all in one place already, you can simply select the folder and the software automatically inserts your photos into the pages in the design style of your choice.

I Love You, Dad, Sketchcast - Dad far away? Say it with sketchcast. I wrote a post earlier on creating a Valentine's Day sketchcast, it's the same idea. Get cute, get clever, put a smile on Dad's face on Father's Day.

Father's Day Cookbook - At www.tastebook.com, you can put together a cookbook of his favorite cooking style. What's different about tastebook is that you can add your own recipes, or select from thousands of recipes from their partner sites, choose your own title, and even add your own photos on the recipe pages. He'll never have an excuse again for feeding the kids nachos when mom's away.

Create a Slideshow of shared good times - It's so easy to create a slideshow with your digital photos. Photos of his grandchildren, vacations together, thanksgiving, slide.com will turn them into a jazzy slideshow in minutes.

Write a letter - Want to see a grown man cry? Have your children write letters to dad. Is it their wobbly handwriting, is it their simple choice of words, is it their innocent view of the world, but a kid's letter of appreciation, of a memory of an ice cream sundae trip, of a camping trip with dad - touches a father's heart like nothing else.

Transfer his old films or videos to DVD - Film and VHS tapes degrade over time because they are made of magnetic media. Converting VHS to DVD stops the degradation and preserves your movies in a digital format. Furthermore, many of us don't even own the film or VHS players anymore. Transfer his film and video into DVD that Dad can simply pop into a video player and relive the memories. The service I recommend to our readers is www.homemoviedepot.com. Check out the website, if you decide to use their service, enter coupon code joyremembered to get a 10% discount .

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2. No Need to Print Your Photos First
The process is also quicker because you no longer need to print your pictures before you put them into your scrapbook pages. Just download your digital camera pictures to your hard drive, then add them to your digital scrapbook pages.

3. All the Colors of the Rainbow at the Touch of a Button
Trying to find a paper with a background color that matches your daughter's Easter dress? Many Digital scrapbooking software, Memory Mixer for example, has an eyedropper that lets you match a background color to any color on your photo.

4. Digital Software is becoming so much easier and intuitive to use.
No more steep learning curve trying to pick up the creative craft of scrapbooking. Everyone I've spoken with that's made the switch to digital says they love how much faster they can complete pages.

5. Saves Setup Time
For some traditional scrappers, the idea was whoever dies with the most tools and supplies wins. But this also means that getting ready to scrapbook takes time with all the huge collection of tools and supplies

The only physical space required in digital scrapbooking is for your computer, scanner and printer. The other "space" requirement is the size of your hard drive in your computer. Digitized images do take a lot of megabytes of drive space, but have you seen the price of hard drives lately? You can get a 500 gigabyte drive (that's 512000 megabytes) for under $100 these days.

6. Saves Clean Up Time
If you have young children, you don't want to leave your traditional scrapbooking stuff - stickers, cutters, glue sticks, precious paper stock lying around too long. But it takes time to put them all away and take them out again to resume. With digital scrapbooking, when you need to pull away from your project, you just press the Save button.

7. The Undo Button
If you make a mistake, you don't have to redo the page or reprint a photo or get more supplies. You just press the Undo button.

8. Duplicate copies are a anap to produce
If you have 3 kids and want each child to have her own family scrapbook of highlights that year, you just order duplicates of your digital scrapbook . With traditional scrapbooking, you will have to recreate each book painfully, or make color copies which come out looking like … copies.

9. Last but not least, it last longer.
When you do traditional scrapbooking and journalling, you have to be very careful to use archival quality materials. Use a glue stick that's not acid free and your pages will turn yellow or photos will fall off before your kids grow up. Digital scrapbooks can be printed by many online printers in high archival quality and bound in hard cover to look like a professional coffee-table hard cover book.

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Have you been part of a group project for a teacher's appreciation gift, be it a photo book, scrapbook, journal, etc? Drop by a comment below and share your teacher gift idea.

Most of us have received emails where excited friends attached photos in its full large size glory… you have to scroll and scroll to see the full picture. The reason that happens is because photo files downloaded from cameras are large. While you want a large photo file to print high-quality prints, a big photo file attachment creates problems in emails. What to do? Shrink the photo file size. The email will open quicker and the photo will fit in the email window. Your friends will be a lot happier.

If you use Windows, you have a built-in file-reducer for emailing photos. It's very easy to use but most people don't even notice it. Play the video below to learn how and start emailing photos again without losing friends.

Writing letters can feel intimidating in today's world of quick emails and instant messaging. But for the same reason the printed books will not be extinct, letters written from people we love will have a special place in our hearts. If you've never written a letter to your child, here are some tips and ideas to get you started.

Start with a Positive Attitude - Writing a letter to your child or a loved one is not something you have to do. It's something you get to do. It's a gift you have the privilege to give, a means of expressing what's inside your heart on a written page.

A short note is still a letter - When we think of 'letter writing', most of us think of a full page of hand-written prose written in ink on a piece of crisp paper. How about a lunch box note, how about a one-paragraph journal entry, a card…

Choose the medium that's most natural to you - I write my letters to my daughter in a blank journal. She's 9 now and I'm on my second journal. Many moms I know choose fill-in-the-section books like The Mommy Journal. One father writes a blog of letters to her daughter Libby, or another busy mom I know prints her emails to and from her daughter and slips them into plastic sleeves in binders. Find something that fits in your lifestyle or it won't be sustainable.

Make it a tradition - Many moms tell me that the time between christmas and New Year is conducive to reflection, sense of gratitude, family togetherness - and that makes it a good time to write a letter to each of your child. Or make it a tradition to write at the start of a school year, or on her birthday. The idea is to establish a ritual to remind us to sit down and share our heart in print.

Get others to write too - Encourage grandparents to write, encourage your child to write back, save all these letters, they are a piece of history that makes your child the adult he will be. I take my child's journal when we travel on vacations. On August 17, 2001, there's a letter a Singapore Airlines Boeing 747 pilot wrote to my son because I asked. A bunch of pages later, there's a letter from the first violinist of the Boston Symphony Orchestra written after their performance with the children's orchestra which my son played in. All I did was open the journal to a blank page, have a pen ready, and ask at a good time.

Write a letter from your dog - In the book, Lunch Box Letters the author talked about how when his daughter was at camp, he would write letters to her in the "voice" and "paw-writing" of her dog, Dynamite. It would be full of humor recounting events from the mindset of a four-footed animal and her daughter got a lot of giggles from them. Many years later when her daughter was in college she said how she longed for more letters from Dynamite.

I hope you've been inspired to write a letter today, in whatever form, whatever medium, whatever length. Leave a trail of your thoughts today to slip into your children's tomorrows.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster. ~Isaac Asimov

All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. ~Ernest Hemingway (1899 - 1961)

When an old man dies, it is a whole library which burns. ~African proverb

Just Released - Our 21-page Guide on Birthday Traditions for Busy families

This free resource guide is available to all our readers. At the top left corner of this page, simply enter the email address you want your birthday traditions guide to be mailed to.

The guide is broken down into 4 sections:

• One-Minute Ideas (it is after all written for busy families)
• With a Little More Planning
• Half Birthdays and
• Traditions of Faith

You will also find a pageful of resource and links at the end of the book to explore further as you create your own family birthday traditions.

Here is one of the idea in the book:
Birthday Munchkins in Bed (page 7)

Forget the lace doily and dainty vase on a tray of home made treats … Grab a box of munchkins and milk, gather the family on the birthday child's bed, wake her up, sing Happy Birthday and munch away happily. Crumbs on her bed? Haven’t you heard of a washing machine?

If you are inclined, you can make this even more memorable with a 12:01 a.m. midnight birthday breakfast. Once you start this, the other kids will demand it for their birthdays so don’t start before counting the cost.

The "Birthday Traditions for Busy Families" guide is available free to all our readers. To request it, simply enter your email address in the box below. The free 21-page guide will be automatically sent to your email inbox.