How to Share Your Baby's Milestones with Long Distance Family and Friends

If your friends and family live far away, there are two electronic items that you need when preparing for your child's arrival and upcoming milestones: a cell phone with unlimited minutes, and a quality camera that takes digital pictures and video.

Belly Photos

Find a spot in your home that offers a plain background for taking pictures. Choose an outfit that feels comfortable in your pre-pregnancy state, and have your husband take your picture from the front and the side while you stand in front of the backdrop, wearing the outfit.

About every two weeks, put on the same outfit, stand in the same place, and have him take the same pictures of you. It's a great way to capture your growing baby belly. Also, as the big day approaches, people are going to want updates on how you're doing.

Updating Family

You may want to start a website where your friends and family can go to read up on your latest developments. A great website for this is www.babababies.com. Once you create your website, make sure to update it a few times a month, using information about which parts of the baby are developing next; a good site for that is http://parenting.ivillage.com/ pregnancy/calendar.

Baby Websites

Make sure that you document your thoughts about how you and your husband are feeling during each stage. When it is finally time for your baby to come into the world, you will want to have a more secure website to document his antics, and www.aboutmybaby.com is a great choice. You can protect the material with a password, and the site does a great job of making sure that you know everyone who views your little one's precious pictures and videos.

You can pick the backgrounds, themes, layout and overall feel of your baby's website, as well as a site name and password. There is a place for mommy's journal, a guest book for old friends and far away family to write their congratulations, and even a statistics area, where you can keep track of your baby's weight from every doctor's visit. The best part is that the website is free for the first year or so (until you start getting too many videos stored there), and after that you can store pictures and videos at an affordable rate.

Birth Announcements

After you bring your bundle of joy home from the hospital, and share those sleepless days and nights with your new baby and supportive husband, it will be time to start thinking about how you might announce your sweetheart's entry into the world. While there are many options for traditional baby announcements, you might want to go with a more unique route; personalized photo birth announcements wrapped around mini candy bar. Check out this website for ideas: http://wrappedhersheys.com/g/F or-Baby-Boys-Add-His-Photo.cfm .

These are just some suggestions about how to document your pregnancy and the birth of your baby for friends and family who live near and far. Above all else, be sure to keep distant relatives as much "in the loop" as you can. Your regular updates and photos will be greatly appreciated.