I’m a big snail mail person. I just love paper, letters, stamps and the printed word.

So even in this age when a baby’s birth is announced to the world via Facebook just hours – or even minutes – after he takes his first breath, I still wanted to mail out formal birth announcements.

Unlike choosing our wedding invitations, which took me hours of poring over every invitation in the gigantic bound books only to decide to design them myself, I instantly fell in love with this birth announcement from Tiny Prints before Corban was even born.

(I just noticed their sample’s birthday is today!)

But, I thought, why pay their prices when I could probably design something similar and have it printed myself?

And so I did. I Photoshopped up my own version, ordered pretty envelopes and did a test print at Kinkos on cardstock I had found at Walmart.

There were only a few problems: their printing of the photo didn’t look that great, the cardstock wasn’t very sturdy, I would have had to cut each announcement out myself and it actually wasn’t going to save me very much money at all.

Fail.

(Tiny Prints version on the left, my version on the right)

So after all that, when Corban was a month old, I just decided to order the announcement from Tiny Prints. I found a coupon code that brought the price down, and I swooned for their awesome striped back on which you can add a second photo.

Of course, not one to keep things simple, I also had to go and buy some kraft paper labels to print the addresses on and therefore spend way too much time fighting with our printer to get them to print right… but I won’t bore you with the details of that.

So despite my early choosing of our birth announcement, they still didn’t get mailed out till Corban was six weeks old. Luckily, it was right before postage went up by one cent (the little things, right?) and I think people understand that things like formal announcements aren’t exactly the number one priority when you’re adjusting to life with a newborn.

In the end, I don’t care that it took me way longer than it should have to get these mailed. I love the way the whole package turned out. I would definitely recommend Tiny Prints for their really high quality printing and adorable designs. I was glad I had already ordered colored envelopes before I decided not to DIY the announcements, though, because these envelopes are much nicer than the ones that come with the cards. This picture shows a bit more accurate coloring:

Would you/did you send formal birth announcements or do you think Facebook pictures do the job just fine these days? I think despite Facebook, people really appreciate being mailed a picture like this!