When my now-eight-year-old daughter was born, I was a maniac about sending photos to relatives. Not only did I take more photos than I do now, but it was back in the days of film cameras. I must have spent $9,000 printing out shots of my kid with eyes crossed (her "poop face") with her limbs blurry from flailing.

I'm still a proud mama, but I'm not as good about sending photos to the extended family as I once was. Digital cameras are awesome, and I use Flickr to share my latest shots with my online-savvy family and friends. But for the other members of my family, including my mother-in-law? She doesn't use a computer - and I am lazy about getting the prints made and mailed. The last candids she has of my kids are a couple of years old now...and I'm a horrible daughter-in-law.

Another challenge about using Flickr with the online family is that not every shot I post online is fit for Grandma's eyes. I mean, I'm not posting Moms Gone Wild photos - often...

So anyway, the lovely ladies at Parent Bloggers offered me the chance to test out the online service for families - Kinzin - and I jumped at it.

Kinzin.com is a fun, free and easy and secure way to keep your loved ones up on the latest from your kids. Once you've logged in, you can set up a quick profile for each of your kids, and include a quick "what he/she is doing right now" blurb ala Facebook status or Twitter message. Each child has a dedicated "Kidstream" with a place for journaling, photos and more.
You can see what my page looks like here!

Hands down, though, the best feature of Kinzin is the photo shipping. Check this out...

You can upload photos directly to Kinzin, or you can suck them in from Facebook, Flickr and a few other services - Kinzin will select the most recent 10 photos (or you can select your own assortment) and at the end of each month, Kinzin will print and ship these 10 photos and a custom message to the folks that you've signed up for this service. At $2.99 per address, you cannot go wrong. That's less than a latte, and you'll be keeping Grandma happy - automatically.

Even better, I guess they are doing a promotion right now where if you buy 2 addresses, you get one free. They will automatically send up to 10 pictures ONE time per month to the addresses you have listed. That's like $6, for 10 photos plus a custom message to THREE people who would love to see the latest photos of the kids.

My order just arrived, and the finishing is lovely, and the colors are great. I love that the photos are matte finished, and have the photo name printed on the front of the photo. (I didn't realize that this would be the case, so in future batches, I'll rename the photos to something more descriptive than park_001)

For the delivery service alone, Kinzin is going to make me look like a rock star. But the online hub for interested family and friends is really cool, too - and keeps all those "Mommy Weekends" safely segregated.

To get started, visit the Kinzin.com homepage. To see what my fellow Parent Bloggers reviewers had to say, check out the roundup.