owen's birth announcement

These days, with Instagram and Facebook at our fingertips via smart phones and such, a traditional birth announcement seems unnecessary, if even a little passé. But I love receiving birth announcements and holiday cards in the mail, so I wanted to send one for Owen. Here's the thing: none of my friends are rushing down to Target to print a 5x7 inch photo of our sweet little baby to hang on their refrigerator.

However, most of the friends and family who receive Owen's birth announcement will likely display it in some way in their home for at least little while. It's a fun tradition, and I was excited to photograph and design an announcement for Owen. I knew it would probably be mostly white, so I decided to use a sticker for our return address to add a little color. I printed half of them in teal and half in yellow (the same colors I used for our family stationery).

I randomly photographed Owen lying on a white blanket on the floor in our family room. I hadn't arranged for professional photos, but that's okay - for now. I plan to have some shots taken in a few months so that I can be in a couple of family photos this year! Anyway, he's somewhere around seven or eight weeks here and very serious! He'd just started smiling, but all I could get for the solo shots was a very serious stare. No worries - I think he's cute even when he's not smiling!

On the back of the card, I included a photo of Owen and Ben, which seemed fitting. This is definitely a family affair. I added Owen's name in brush script, which I painted, scanned, converted to a PNG file and colored in teal. The text is simple: his full name, stats and the other members of Owen's little family - Nick, Ben and me.

I had a stash of about one hundred kraft envelopes, so I wanted to use those regardless of what I did with the announcement. I wrote about addressing them here. Despite some crazy circumstances surrounding my postpartum recovery, I was determined to get them in the mail at some point, so I addressed the envelopes a few at a time over the course of a month. I finally dropped them all in the mail last week - later than I hoped, but whatever! They're done and out and we've gotten some great feedback.

There was plenty of white space on the back of the announcement, so I took my time stuffing the envelopes and writing brief personal notes on each card. I also tucked a thank you note into the announcements which needed one. It's not like it's a surprise these days to receive a birth announcement in the mail, but it's still a lot of fun getting a piece of snail mail and a recent-ish photo of a sweet little baby.

Did you or will you send a birth announcement? Do you like receiving them or do you think they're simply redundant? Happy Wednesday :)