Week in the Life 2019

Once upon a time, I liked to scrapbook. A lot. I read scrapbook magazines, bought scrapbooking books, read alllll the scrapbooking blogs. You can guess where a chunk of my play money went, too. 😉 I loved this creative outlet. In a sense, it was my form of gratitude journaling as I documented school memories, places we went, books we read, etc. However, as it's gotten busy, scrapbooking has taken a backseat to schooling, teens, all the driving, and just life. Scrolling through other people's photos and adventures took place over documenting our own. (Sad, but true!)

This week, I'm taking back a little bit of me. I miss writing and story telling and taking photos. I've found an old Week in the Life kit I purchase a few years ago from Ali Edwards and have dusted it off. (Quite literally with the dust!) I'm making plans to be mindful of next week. What I do, where I go, what I eat, what I'm reading, and what I'm grateful for. While I'm also working on getting back into the swing of our family's Project Life albums, I think this project will mostly be for me. I haven't decided if and/or how much I'll document online. I don't want to pronounce that I'm going to blog every single day ... that's a sure-fire way to set myself up to fizzle out by Wednesday. Maybe an occasional photo on Instagram here or there, but maybe not. This is about really being present and so grateful for MY life and no one else's.

Project Life // The Birthday Boy Week

There were a lot of photos for this week's spread. Enough that I used an additional Design A page protector to fit them all in. I did quite a bit of journaling (more than normal for me) on the photos directly to fit in a few more stories for the week - lots to tell as we celebrated the boy turning five along with a few other happenings. : )

Project Life Reality :: Catching Up

So. I'm pretty behind in my Project Life album. I didn't touch it much this summer and now that the weather is cooling off, I'm definitely feeling the urge to get out my scrapbooks and see where I'm at.



Catching up for me means two things:

1. Make a list. Instead of feeling overwhelmed about what I have and haven't done, get a list actually on paper and see what is missing and needs to be filled in and completed. Then I break it down into somewhat manageable chunks. After looking at my list, I initially noticed that I hadn't printed photos for most the summer. Since I was at least pretty diligent about getting the photos off my camera and phone and into our external hard drives (I'm mildly obsessive about cleaning the photos off my phone so I don't run out of memory) they were at least all in one place. : ) It took a couple of hours on a weekend and I had a huge batch of photos uploaded to Sam's Club and ready to pick up 24 hours later. At least now the photos were in my hand and not on my computer.



2. Start at the present. I flipped to the end of my album and did the most current week - which for me was the first week of September. It's for sure quicker (and more enjoyable) for me to scrap the current batch of photos when my memory is the freshest. I definitely want to get back to the older photos but my enthusiasm is definitely higher at getting the fun pictures from our weekend at a family camp we attended and time a mini-maker science fair (and my new favorite photo of me and B with Chewbacca). : )



I still love Project Life and am so thankful for this way of capturing our family's memories. It has definitely simplified this process for me while still allowing me to be creative and preserve photos and memories for our family.

Project Life :: May Update

I managed to get a couple more weeks in my 2015 Project Life album - yay! This weekend was delightfully low key with soccer done for the year which meant I managed to squeeze in a few scrapbooking minutes. These are the last two weeks - May 11-17 and May 18-24. I utilized the Project Life app quite a bit on these layouts making collages to fit in a couple of busy days. I haven't yet printed through the app yet; I just save them to my phone and print them with the rest of my regular photos.



This week was full with field trips, the end of Awana, standardized testing for one, and soccer for a boy. I had a Hobby Lobby coupon and bought the first new core kit that I've added in a while - the Fine and Dandy kit. I love the colors in the kit - so summery that it was perfect for layouts for both of these two weeks. My one thought on my first run through the kit was that it sure seemed to have a LOT of vertical cards which I rarely, if ever use.





Up close of the collages I made in the PL app. I played along with Ali's Day in the Life (blogged here) and didn't want to include an insert in my album. Two collages and it was included right along with the rest of the week.




Rain showers and bikes, a little jazz guitar, the last soccer game of the season, another field trip to a local nature sanctuary, and finally! The pool opens!




I found a couple of these 4x6 sleeves that adhere in your album and used one to add a couple collages from last Friday's field trip. I don't love the little sleeves, but I didn't want an whole insert either. It works. : )



I have a handful of weeks I need to catch up journaling in from the spring so that is my June project. I also pulled my 2014 album (July-Dec) off the shelf and was pleasantly surprised that I wasn't as behind as I thought in there. If I could stay current, plus do a week or two of catch up a week, I'd be a happy camper this summer. : )

A Day in the Life :: May 12, 2015

Yesterday, I (casually) participated in Ali Edwards' Day in the Life project which she does a couple times a year. I absolutely love the idea of capturing our day in photos and took a handful of pictures throughout the day Tuesday. This was an unusual Tuesday for us - we were out of the house almost all day, traded one of my kids for someone else's for the morning, and went on a date night where my phone stayed in my purse a good chunk of the evening. All absolutely ok and I ended up with less than a dozen pictures that gave me a great capsule of our day.



6:30am // for me this is sleeping in a bit. A little person woke me up in the night and I had a hard time going back to sleep. But now, coffee and Jesus before a full day.



8:30am // picnic packing for our field trip and homeschool park day. @thepioneerwoman steak bites on salad.



10:45am // in the middle of our walking tour of our local downtown area on a homeschool field trip.



11:45am // ending our field trip with frozen yogurt.



1:00pm // feeling incredibly nauseous watching them spin on the tire swing.



1:30pm // park day with friends is the best.



3:15pm // finally home. Sorting and putting away boy clothes.



3:45pm // we all need to sit and rest for a bit so read aloud time it is.



5:20pm // thawing the taco meat for dinner.



6:30pm // date night.

Thanks, Ali, as always, for the inspiration to capture the everyday dailyness of life.

Project Life :: Spring Catch-Up

As school is winding down for us (we have somewhere between 15-20 days left!), it's time to catch up on Project Life. I have done a halfway decent job of staying on top of getting pictures printed at least. That's usually my project while the girls have music lessons once a week - during that hour and a half I try and clean photos off my phone and upload them to my computer and to Sam's if I have time. I can usually take care of that in about 30-45 minutes if I have kept up with it and don't have a ton to do at once. That always makes it SO much easier to catch-up if the photos are here and ready to go. Granted, last night I had a huge sorting party first trying to get my photos in some sort of chronological order and that took a while.

If you look at these layouts they are all over the place. Some pages are a hodgepodge of photos from a week (or maybe even a couple weeks) and some pages are devoted to a whole event. I have several soccer pages like that where my Dad came and took photos of kids and there were too many good ones to include so I included them all. (I spared posting all the soccer pages here). :) Lots of labels for journaling when just a quick note would suffice since some pages I was heavy on photos and light on room for journaling cards.



B's birthday layout.



So much soccer cuteness.





N2 had her grandparent trip this spring with my folks and they enjoyed several days at the St. Louis Zoo. You'll see I used lots of this size page protector to get several events covered.



Spring recital...




Elizabeth, you made the album. : ) I had the chance to meet my online friend Elizabeth a couple weeks ago. A former writer for Simple Scrapbooks, she is someone who's scrapping style I have long admired, and through a mutual appreciation of scrapbooking, photography, and raising three girls that love to read, we moved from blog reading to the occasional email to an in-person meet-up. Sometimes the internet is kinda amazing.



Miscellaneous life.




I'm still quite behind on this spring, but so thankful for how easy it is to get caught up and get memories in our albums.

Project Life 2015 :: February, Part 2 (and a smidge of March, I think)

Memories from the last few weeks of February. Lots of reading. Lots of snow. Not a lot of variety in my photos, but it's a true glimpse of those cold, cold weeks where we were home reading and eating and that was about it!






So much random-ness in my journaling cards. I'm on a mission to CLEAN OUT my stash and if it's out, it's getting used up.



Only one insert snuck in here. Someone is working really hard to write his name. : )



Photos + memories document = good stuff.