The family yearbook project: one page a month and a finished gift by summer

The school year starts, and everyone knows how it ends: by summer nobody remembers what happened in November. There are three thousand photos on the phone that nobody ever looks at again, and all that survives of the good months is one stray sentence. The problem is not the family's memory, it is that there is no place to put things.

The yearbook fixes that with one minimal rule: one page a month, always on the same day, say the last Sunday, and twenty minutes with the clock running. Twelve pages later you have a book no cloud can manufacture. The AI plays assistant, offering the questions of the month and three ways to lay out the page; the answers and the photos come from you, and that is the only reason the book will be worth anything in ten years.

What goes on one page

• One photo of the month, printed and glued in, or a drawing if that month produced no photo worth keeping.
• Three sentences about the month, one per person, handwritten and uncorrected.
• The quote of the month: the funniest or strangest thing anyone in the house said, with the name of whoever said it.
• One measurement: the little one's height, the song that played all month, shoe size, anything that changes.
• And something that was hard, even if it is one line. A yearbook where everything goes well looks like no real year.

The prompt for the questions of the month

We are a family of [WHO, WITH AGES] building a yearbook at one page a month. We are in [MONTH]. This month these things happened: [TWO OR THREE THINGS]. Give me five questions each of us can answer in a single sentence, a mix of funny and thoughtful, none answerable with yes or no. Add one extra question aimed at a child of [AGE]. At the end, suggest three simple ways to lay the page out on paper, with photo and text, no design software.

Save the prompt in your notes: it stays the same every month, only the month and the two or three things that happened change. And one warning that saves arguments: the AI does not know your family and must not fill the gaps. If nobody remembers October, the page stays short, and that is fine; an invented memory ages horribly. The photos do not need uploading anywhere either, they get glued onto paper.