When I was in grade school, I used to make flipbooks in study hall. That I should have been studying for my French test or that every stick-figured animal I attempted to draw wound up looking like an alien-anteater, didn’t matter. I was addicted to the flip, the end result, and nothing was going to stop me.

Of course the flipping of hand drawn images has been around for hundreds of years. First patented in 1868 by John Barnes Linnet, the actual flipbook marks the beginnings of animation as we know it today. In the late 1800s people like Thomas Edison were busy inventing gadgets like the Mutoscope, popular in arcades, which flipped actual photographs — leading, of course, to inventions like the Vitascope and early motion pictures.

All these years later, I’m still addicted to the flipbook, though because I still can’t draw (even in Pictionary, everything winds up looking like an alien-anteater), I now rely on others to help me.

By shooting 30 seconds of video and uploading it to a website like FlipClips, anything can be turned into flipping material these days. Your first wedding dance, Barry Bond’s 989th homer, the birth of your first child (rate that one “R” please), or said child’s first t-ball homer… it’s a gift idea that’s a whole lot of super.

But, if you still want to try and make one by hand, check out this cool site and then click on “Start Game The Flipbook.”

And for more on the history of flipbooks, check out what the good people over at Flipbook.info have put together, including a blog written in French, which, had I spent less time making flipbooks in the corners of my notebooks and more time studying the conjugation of je, tu, and il when I was a kid, I’d probably be able to read. Quelle dommage!