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My Big, Fat, Cuban Family – The Book.

July 22, 2009 By Marta Darby 8 Comments

One of the reasons I started blogging was for my posterity (which is just a fancy way of saying "future generations.")

But let me tell you why…

I am blessed with having my 95 year old mother still around with her mind still sharp and her enthusiasm for life (and my projects) still intact.

That was not the case for her. She left Cuba and her beloved mother, my grandmother, at the age of 47, never to see her again. She often says that if she had known that she might not have made the decision to leave. I think that because of the pain this caused her, there are memories she just refuses to access. It makes me sad.

What we left in Cuba, besides a tight-knit extended family and our home, was the minutia of day-to-day life. All the simple, yet important things that illustrate our existence.

My mom tells stories, not just of people, but of places I may never see. Also, of things, like my grandmother's stove, or her collection of placemats – 52 sets – one for each week of the year, or of a teacup that was in her great-aunt's collection of antique china.

I think that growing up hearing these things made me aware of a greater loss. There are entire lives that were lost. By that I mean that in our need to move forward and assimilate, not to mention the pain involved in remembering, that our celebration of the everyday was muddied. I feel that acutely sometimes.

I have a few things that have family history attached: my grandmother's sewing box, a bedspread crocheted by a great aunt. I insisted that my mom write down (in her own handwriting) the significance of each item on a notecard.

Because documenting these things has become so important to me, I have become by default the Family Historian.

It seems that in this 21st Century, blogging is the natural way to record and capture the day-to-day, the celebrations, the minutia, if you will, of our lives.

My friend, the class factotum, (whom you met the other day) lost years of her blogging and hence the documentation of her memories to a crummy now-defunct blog platform. And I thought how much I'd hate to lose all these hundreds of hours of blogging, so I've been looking for a way to preserve my blog, again for posterity. =D

I have been thinking I would just copy and paste each entry into Word and try to find the pictures and well, you can see that this was turning into a not-so-fun project. Then I toyed with the idea of re-creating each page in Photoshop. I could totally do that, but umm.. no. Frankly it was much more of a pain than I wanted it to be.

(Yes, it's me. It's got to be fun, okay?)

So, I've been mulling this idea over and wrestling with the how-to of turning my blog into a book. While I was on Facebook the other day I saw an ad for SharedBook Blog2Print in the sidebar. I compulsively clicked on the link and within minutes I had uploaded My big, fat, Cuban family, Volume One – from October 1st, 2006 to September 30, 2007 – into a big, fat 400 page memory book. 

(I wish they were paying me for this glowing product endorsement, but they're not. Sad!)

Blog book 

I didn't have much creative control, which, for this particular project, I was okay with. I put aside my perfectionism issues and just went with it.

I love that all I had to do was choose the time frame and add my blog header to the front. The program created the Table of Contents automatically and slurped the entries into the book one after the other, automatically paginating as it went. (Anal-Retentive Me would rather have one neat entry per page, but that's not important right now.)

Blog book contents 

Blog book pages 

There was a spot to add a picture to the back and so I did that and hit the "order" button.

Blog book back cover 

I just received the finished product and can I just tell you how pleased I am with the outcome. But I couldn't help but wish that I had something like this from my grandmother. Or my mom. Or my dad. But, happily, I have included many of their stories on my blog.

And now in this Big, Fat, Cuban Family Blog Book. (I'm ordering Volume Two as we speak.)

No, it's not for sale. It's just for me.

And my posterity. 😉

You might also like:

Celebrating Abuela Cuban Miami – A Story Book Win A Fantastic Family Experience – The Jungle Book at Dolby Cinema AMC Prime – A Giveaway “The Hobbit Book” Family Giveaway

Filed Under: Cuban-American Life, My Big, Fat, Cuban Family Tagged With: books, creative stuff

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Ivis Suarez says

    July 22, 2009 at 3:20 pm

    OMG!!! That is so AWESOME!!!!

    Reply
  2. Leesa says

    July 22, 2009 at 3:24 pm

    JUST ~ LOVELY! Such a wonderful journal for your kids to hand down!I am just working on shutterfly.com this summer on two BIG FAMILY parties from March 2008 and July 2007 – that I have on disc. I am SO BEHIND, it’s pathetic! Basically, I have my own 4 year plan for Mr. C’s college years. Me- organizing our earlier years into Memory books! *wink*

    Reply
  3. Maria says

    July 23, 2009 at 6:21 am

    Thanks for that post, Martha…I loveit and didn’t know it existed!
    Your blog is soooo cool!
    Maria

    Reply
  4. Catherine says

    July 23, 2009 at 1:22 pm

    That’s fantastic! I’ve always thought about doing that to leave it to my children… Sort of a legacy thing. I’m so happy for you! Hope you and your family enjoy it thoroughly. 🙂

    Reply
  5. Mica says

    July 23, 2009 at 5:47 pm

    I love it Marta, that is so cool. I totally agree with you on the memories thing with our parents. History will prove how brave they were and what a glorious generation and culture of people.xoxo

    Reply
  6. keb says

    July 23, 2009 at 8:02 pm

    brilliant! so glad you found a way to “book” yr blog. Since you installed the “you might enjoy this” reference, I do go back & re-read previous entries: the notion of losing any of them to an electronic glitch is horrifying. I so enjoy yr stories. Congratulations!keb

    Reply
  7. Cubanita says

    July 31, 2009 at 2:08 pm

    This is so cool, Marta! mostly for for us, lousy scrapbooking Moms! 😉

    Reply
  8. Michele Caridad says

    August 7, 2009 at 7:40 am

    Wow…i just found your blog coincidently (not that most things in life that are great dont happen that way!) but i did because my family tree on Geneology has this exact name and i typed it in to see if my non-computer-friendly family would actually find it by google…and i stumbled on you…wow…GREAT BLOG! you say so many things that are DEAD ON! i mean…the way you view your family, the way you have become the family historian by default(that’s my mom too!) and you seem to be such a positive person…i love it! i wish my abuela or tia-abuelas or even my mom would do something like this…even make it a book…i plan to follow your blog from now on..you’ve put a smile on my face and warmed my heart! thanks!

    Reply

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Marta Verdes Darby is a Cuban-American food blogger in South Orange County.

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