project life update

you may have been wondering if i'm keeping up with my project life since i've written nothing about it since the first week of the year. the answer is yes...and no. i was doing a pretty good job at getting photos printed on the saturday or sunday of the end of a week and then working on it over the next couple days. the problem was that i had all my supplies and papers etc etc spread out on our dining room table all the time for most of the month of january. near the end of january, i cleaned it up and piled it on my desk never to look at it again for a month. i still managed to print off a couple weeks of photos at one point but they just got added to the pile. it seems that if it's not in my face, spread out all over the table, i tend to forget about it...or i think about it but am daunted by the task. the farther i get behind, the harder it is to motivate myself to get going again. also, not having a printer DOES make it a little bit more difficult as there are always things i'd like to be printing off the internet to add to the pages to fill them out and i can't. i just hate printers and all the issues they bring.

BUT, today, i pulled all my stuff out and set it up on the dining room table again. (hopefully for a shorter time than previously) ben sat across from me and played playdough for an amazingly long time and avery sat for awhile in her bumbo and watched us before moving to her playmat. i am currently working on the first week of february (sigh) but have some lovely new papers to use that i bought a couple weeks ago AND i also took photos of the layouts that i have finished so that i can post them here for you to see.

week 3

i tried to get a little more creative with the stapling the letters to the first picture and the little circles on the journaling card/photo here but it's just not anything like what i see online. i just need to focus on getting the info down and pics in the pockets - that's all that will matter to me 10 years down the road, right? :)

week 4

i find that i'm trying to fit in so many pictures, there's barely any space for the journaling even though the journaling is something that i enjoy.
i took my camera card to walmart and used the machine to print a "collage" of 2 3x4 pics onto one 4x6 which is how i got the before and after photos together - discovering that i can do this will make a big difference in future photo taking/project life-ing.

week 5

i had more room here for some paraphanalia because i didn't take many photos this week. i have my week's grocery list stuck in there and the big white rectangle at the bottom is a picture that ben drew. he just started turning his circles into little faces this week - cool that i'll have that documented, right? i love this.
it's hard to force myself to use different page designs. the above one just has 6 4x6s and i've put some smaller pics on journaling cards (or journaling cards on larger pics) to break it up. it works for those weeks that i take no vertical photos. but i almost need to think of my layouts BEFORE the week starts and then consciously take either more vertical or horizontal pics depending on my page design. haha. way too much thinking. maybe that's why i've been procrastinating.

so there you have it. i'm part way through week 6 as of today and hopefully by the end of the weekend, i'll be all caught up. i'm facing a week with barely any photos but lots of valentines day ones and then following that is a week with all my victoria photos. but loving that despite my totally poor memory, i'm going to have a book that reminds me of all these otherwise forgettable moments. my favourite quote from last week that i'm definitely writing in: after ben accidentally spilled a lot of paint on the floor and carpet, he says, "thanks for cleaning up my mess, mommy." and then gave me a kiss on my forehead. oh ben, you have me wrapped around your finger. ;)