Anniversary by year · 3 min read

Your First Anniversary With a Baby

The camera roll is now ninety per cent baby and the two of you are in almost none of it. What to do about an anniversary in that year, honestly.

Whatever anniversary it is — second, fifth, ninth — the first one after a baby arrives is its own occasion, and it has a specific problem.

The camera roll has been taken over. Twelve months of photographs, ninety per cent of them the baby, and almost none of the two of you. Not because anything is wrong, but because nobody is pointing a camera at the parents.

The two books, and pick one

A book about the baby’s first year. The obvious one, and it is a real thing to want. But it is not an anniversary gift — it is a baby gift that happens to be given on an anniversary, and the difference matters if the point was to mark a marriage.

A book about the two of you. Harder, because the material is thinner, and better for this occasion. It will lean on the years before the baby, and that is correct.

A combined one is usually two half-books. Best format for a new baby →

What to actually do

Use the years before. The photographs of just the two of you exist — they are just older now. That is what the book is made of, with the last year as its final section rather than its subject.

Sixteen to twenty-four pages, not forty. ₹599 to ₹699. This is not the year for a large project; nobody in that house has an evening.

Prints, if nothing else. ₹270 for thirty, and the wall of a house with a small child in it is the most-looked-at surface anyone owns.

Option Pages Price
Print pack, 30 ₹270
Short magazine 8 ₹499
The years, briefly 16 ₹599
The years, properly 24 ₹699

Flat ₹70 delivery anywhere in India.

The honest note about effort

An anniversary in the first year with a baby is competing with exhaustion. Anything that requires the recipient to do work — choose, decide, organise, react — is a burden dressed as a present.

Made and handed over is the whole brief. No shared project, no “we should sit down and pick photos together” in month four.

And take one photograph of the two of you

Not a product suggestion. There is a whole year where couples end up with no picture of themselves together, and the fix takes ten seconds and someone willing to be asked.

Timing

5 to 14 days from order to doorstep, 5 to 12 to Delhi NCR, dispatched every Monday. Order against the date with a week of slack — a household with a newborn is not chasing a parcel.

Frequently asked

What do you give for an anniversary after having a baby? Something about the two of you rather than the baby, drawn from the years before. It is the anniversary of a marriage, not of the birth.

Should the anniversary book include the baby? As the last section, not the subject. A book trying to be both is two half-books.

How big should it be? Sixteen to twenty-four pages. Nobody in that house has time for a large project, including the person receiving it.

We have no photos of just us from this year. What now? Use the years before. That is what makes the gift work, and it is also the honest picture of the year.

What is the least effort option? A print pack at ₹270, made and handed over. Anything requiring the recipient to organise something is a task, not a gift.


Part of our guide to anniversary photo books by year. See also: the anniversary after a hard year and best format for a new baby.

Small, and done: Print packs from ₹270 · Anniversary Magazine from ₹499 · Anniversary gifts