First off, that was great advice you gave regarding timeouts. You were one of the few moms who had expressed the importance of empathy.
It's wonderful that you are thinking of this now. My mom made scrapbooks for my sister and I, but she has kept them, and eventually I started asking for it, promising to take good care of them. (Especially since I've inherited so many of my granparent's photos and have taken it on myself to be the family archivist, even getting a couple of fire safes.)
Only recently has my mother made color copies of all the pages, put them in page protectors, and that way made copies of the entire scrapbook to give us (me and my sister) as Christmas presents. She's still sentimentally attached to the originals, so she'll probably hold on to them as long as she's alive.
A lot of times, children aren't really sentimental enough to appreciate things like that until they are much older. It may not be until they have kids themselves - or maybe it'll be the grandchildren that are interested. So I recommend creating memory books ultimately in the kids in mind, but I (personally) would hold on to them long after they go off to college (or where ever they go).
The first thing is to get them safe. My sister never had time to make memory books or frame some (pricey) studio portraits of her little girl, and they sat at the top of a closet with the cardboard they came with to keep them from bending, or in a brown paper bag. The colors have definitley been damaged. (Cardboard has acid - don't let it touch your photos.) It can be as simple as putting the photos in page protectors.
Scrapbooking can get expensive quick, but here's a few tips. You can get a big box of economy page protectors from places like Office Depot. (Maybe even the school section of the grocery store.) Then you can use acid-free glue sticks. They're fairly cheap. Make sure you write things, too. It doesn't have to be fancy. I sometimes type something up quick -something cute they said or did, and print it up and just tuck it in the pages of an album.
Find a pH testing pen at a scrapbooking/craft store, and you can use that to test paper that can go next to pictures. I've found lots of (fairly) inexpensive decorative paper (the 8.5 x 11 inch - regular notebook-size) is acid-free (safe for photos). You can pick up a package of that at places like Kinko's. It's the kind that people use to write Christmas letters on - you know. Then you can just use regular school notebooks to keep them in. You can always make that fancier later. First thing is to keep them organized and safe.
I'm amazed and impressed that you have time and energy to even consider such a thing with three boys. That's the hardest part, so you shouldn't let the expense stop you.
Ever since my second kid was born, I've just been throwing things in a fire safe ($50 at Home Depot). Maybe I won't have time to do anything with them until they move away, but at least they'll be safe until then.
