APP-solutely Fabulous

I had always planned on taking posed monthly pictures of Will, but when he was one month old, I was completely sleep deprived and completely forgot about the little onesie stickers that a friend had gifted us that I had planned to use. I was really excited about dressing Will up in a cardigan and anxious to get the shoot done in the tiny bit of quiet alert time we had at that point, so I just propped him up in his recliner, snapped a bunch of pictures, and was done with it. When looking through the pictures the next day, I kept wondering if I should retake them with a framed number or if I could try to add a number in iPhoto (I can't; that is photo shop I was thinking about.), but then, I remembered the A Beautiful Mess App that I had downloaded earlier in the week while nursing in the middle of the night.


A Beautiful Mess is a genius DIY blog by Elsie and Emma, and about five months ago, the ladies launched the photo editing iPhone/iPad app by the same name. For $0.99, you get fun filters, delightful doodles, fabulous fonts, and beautiful borders. (I've been reading A LOT of children's board books lately.)

The app is very easy to navigate, and you can buy even more doodads, but the ladies seem to provide new free options with updates too.  I have been happily using the app for the last five months to create Will's monthly update pics. The last two months' pics are below.

The only issue that I ran into was printing the pictures.  If you print pictures that have been saved to your camera roll from the app, you just need to be aware that they are square like instagram pics, but other than that, everything is easy peasy... and here are some other fun pics because oh-my how fun is it to add colors and words to pictures.

Also, when taking Will's monthly pictures (or really any pictures of Will), I always just point and frame the camera on my phone and then start snapping (clicking? tapping?) away while smiling and acting crazy to get him to smile. I sneeze, say, "Baa Ram Ewe" in my best sheep voice, or shout, "Booshie!" Which is why I sometimes get priceless pictures like this...