How to make a year in review scrapbook

I'm excited that I finished (well 99% finished) my first scrapbook. Last Christmas I was looking through one of my sister-in-laws scrapbooking books "Real.Simple.Scrapbooking" by Rebecca Cooper. I like looking at ideas but I don't want to get into scrapbooking since I have enough crafts I'm into, but they had this simple idea that I thought looked easy and fun. It was a year in review album and my sister-in-law and I said that we would each do one and show it to each other the following Christmas.
The concept is to keep track all year, all of the stuff you did each month. I had post-it notes (this year a notebook) for each month and just jotted down what we did or what happened; such as, weddings, birthday parties, concerts or shows we went to, and things like; Isla took her first step, first words, etc. And I even added some of the cute quotes or saying that Lilo had said, "Don't eber, eber. You don't sit on prickles" (referring to cactus when in Arizona).
Then print 1 pictures to represent that month.
Since this Rebecca Cooper and others of you might scrapbook the big events in your life this concept might work great for you - but for me since this is the only printed record of what we did I couldn't decide on just one photo. I also expanded the book to included a few other things, like news stories of 2009, friends and family page and also to be added music of 2009.
I know, now I took a simple book and made it complicated, but it worked for me.
I used a 8x8 book but if you're doing a single photo per month then you can use one of the mini photo albums, you just have to make sure there are at least 26 pages in it (13 pages double sided). The 8x8 one I bought only had 20 so I bought a pack of refills to add. I ended up using 28 pages.

The first page was News Stories of 2009, plus I added some prices from Dec 31, 2009; Gas, milk, bread and transit. You know so we could say - I remember when gas was only $.983/L and you could buy 4L of milk for under $4 - when we get old and grumpy :)

Here are some pages from the book. On the left side I printed off the list of stuff we did onto a 7x7 square of scrapbooking paper. I got a bunch of scrapbooking paper from my sister-in-law for a different project I was working on and decided not to do. If you don't have scrapbooking paper, anything would work but I did like how it added to the book.
As for the pictures, I cropped and cut out some of them to fit them all in. This is one of the pages that I thought if I only do one picture per page you might never see a picture of my husband or I - just the kids, even so it's mostly the kids.

Here is one of the cool papers that I had that I thought really made the page - thanks Janet for the paper, I'm going to have to hit you up for some fresh ones for the 2010 book.

I was also thinking that I might add some notes by the photos to help remember what was going on then. Such as I forgot to add in the notes of the month in April my husband shaved off his bread of 8 years but I have a photo.

Or notes beside Isla's picture of her pointing at the Disney parade and the other photo of us watching dolphin at Sea World.

I like the mix of cut out pictures with the clean line cropped ones.

I kept the ticket stub from my birthday surprize concert we went to and added it to September.

Isn't this paper beautiful.

And then as I was about to clean up after Christmas and another year of not knowing what to do with the photo cards from friends, I thought to add another page to my book.

I cut out the photos and added them to a friends and family page.
I wrote out their names under the photo (probably should have added ages also - next year). I also thought this would be a good place to add birth announcements (or add them to the month they were born if have room)

The final page that I haven't finished is the Music of 2009. My husband made a play list of songs that we listened to this year, some might have come out in 2008 but they were big in 09. I want to burn a CD and print out the list of songs to add to the last page.

I'm looking forward to making one of these each year. I think it will be fun to look back at the years before, it's almost like a scrapbooking diary.

I wrote the notes as they happened but didn't start putting the book together until after Christmas. I guess ideally you could do each page as the year went on. I'll see what happens this year.

I hope to have inspired some of you to make your own, as my sister-in-law said 2010 is a good year to start.