My Inner Cheap Bastard.

Look, we’re all tightening our belts these days, even if our actual incomes haven’t been impacted, our savings and investments certainly have!

I’m still suffering over getting a great birth announcement out for my son. He’s 4.5 months now and, thankfully, the powers that be over at Amalah’s Q&A blog say 6 months is the proper time frame before I’m just too late…

It’s gotten to the point where, obviously, I need to include an updated photo of my son along with one when he was a newborn. Okay. No problem… Except, when my daughter was born, we were more flush. We hired a photographer (first kid, what are you going to do?) and got some fantastic baby shots. So good, in fact, that today as I was skimming some of the photo-baby announcements (yes, I’m stooping so much in my standards that I’m probably going to just go this route), I thought “hey, that baby looks like my daughter.” or “hey, that’s exactly the same pose we did of my daughter in HER photo session.”

So… my dirty little thought? Why not save on a photographer and slip in a photo of her as an infant and no one’s the wiser?

I won’t do it, of course. But I smirked all the same and just had to admit my inner cheap bastard to someone. If you’re reading this, I guess that’s you.

Meanwhile, no, we’re not hiring a photographer. I just have to pick through the photos we have and use the best ones.

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Bonnie Marcus Collection – Some Truly Great Designs for Baptisms and Announcements

Finally! After much hunting, I’ve gotten off the super-well trodden path of photo birth announcements and started to find some decent designs!

The Bonnie Marcus Collection has a few good designs, which, in my observation, is more than most designers.

First, there’s these baptism thank you cards. They come in different color themes (boy / girl):

Then there’s the “Josh’s Diaper” card. I’m not so much for the train at the bottom, but love the image of the baby. Very darling and simple.

Finally, there’s the “big girl with blue carriage” announcement (yes, there are other options for a boy pushing a baby girl, etc). The scan image that all the resellers are using is a very poor quality, but the card looks pretty great.

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A Decent Duck Family Card

Here’s another entry into my “birth announcement cards that don’t suck” category. I’ve edited the category down to be labeled just as “untacky cards” since it fits better in the category list, but it’s really all about birth announcements that don’t suck.

Checkerboard also has an Elephant Family card, but the elephants are drawn a little too cutesy bootsy for my taste, with wavering lines that allude to a child’s drawing. The Duck Family is much better. As with my other recent posts, the prices are unfortunately outlandish. A website called “warm fuzzys” (sic) claims it gets steep discounts… I might call to see about that…

This Airplane card by them is pretty decent too. I like the color choice.

Finally, the “cute puppy” card would be good… if they offered different color choices on the stock itself. Plain white comes across as plain cheap to me here.

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A Few Good Designs from Boatman Geller

Again, this is really expensive, but here are a few more uncraptastic birth announcement cards:

The “Quilted Stitch Blue” (can be used for many purposes, not just birth announcements):

The Baby Rattle design colors are very nice:

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Sweet Pea Designs – a few decent announcement cards

Okay, just one, really that I found. But I do really like it. Tres pricey, but I like its classic sensibility:

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Sweetie Bird Announcements

These announcements are quite cute… even the photo ones. I’m sure the pricing is beyond my means, but it still merits a gander.

http://www.bellabykarah.com/sweetiebirdbirthannouncements.html

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