Merry (really late) Christmas!!

I don't know what happened this year!  I always post my Christmas card to my blog on Christmas day... but this year I totally, completely forgot to do it.  And since I usually always post it, five days post Christmas, I had just assumed that I had already.  Anyway... here it is, just a few days late.  But it's still getting to you before the actual cards are getting delivered.  Besides the few we hand delivered, the cards are still sitting in a box on our table.  Oh well.  Some years are like that.  They just get away from you!

Soon I'll get caught up with posting my PL pages from 2014 (working on my Christmas day pages now) and then I'll do my post about my plan for 2015.  I'm still very much in love with project life and can't wait to tackle another year!

Project Life 2014: Week 46

Week 46 was a bit of a tough week in regards to PL, so there are some photos on these pages that are a real stretch in regards to their importance.  I'm actually not sure why I even took a couple of them.  After doing a week in the life, I forgot that I still needed to take photos for regular project life.  During AWITL I took photos of everything, every step of the way throughout the day... afterward, I had the attitude that "I don't need to take that photo, there will be more worthy things later".  Well... then I kind of forgot to take any.  Add to that, AWITL runs Sunday to Sunday, so my week 46 was already a day short.  Oh well... it's done and here it is...

Project Life 2014: Clara's b-day party

Part of the reason I haven't posted many PL pages lately is because I've been debating about what to do with my a week in the life pages.  I'm really super proud of them, but they just had too much daily routine info for me to feel comfortable with posting publicly.  I thought about blurring out the journaling, but as that week ended up being 12 pages long, I just didn't have the motivation to do it.  So, I'll post the last two pages of that week... Clara's 13th birthday party....

Clara was so excited to finally have a big birthday party again.  Last year her birthday was about two weeks before we moved, the year before she was about a month into a new school... so it was fourth grade (10th b-day) when she last had a real party.  She invited all of the upper middle school girls and they had a blast!  I am so glad we were able to pull it off this year for her.

Project Life 2014: Last of week 44

 I can't believe how quickly time has flown!  It seems like this was just a couple of weeks ago, but it was over a month ago!  The girls were even invited back to perform the piece with the red costumes again and it's already been about three weeks since that performance!  I have a ton of pages to post here that I need to get caught up on.  And... sadly, I'm nearly four weeks behind on PL.  I'm not quite sure how that happened.  I blame a string of illnesses for the girl and Thanksgiving.  Plus I was pretty wrapped in completing some Christmas gift projects.  Those are done and printed, so I'm trying to catch back up again.

26 Things: 1-4

My first printed pages for my album arrived!  It is so much fun to see them printed already.  I'm used to doing digital albums that I print all at once as a Shutterfly book once everything is done.  It's kind of neat to actually be able to touch the work in progress.

I'm still not showing the title page yet, since it's basically the same as our Christmas card.  But the cards have been ordered!

Here are my pages so far...

Thing one... this is our first official event of Christmas each year.  Thanksgiving night we watch the movie Elf.

Thing two is putting up our tree at Bearski and I made sure to document all of our new ornaments.  It's a little hard to see, but on the top row is one of my favorite new ornaments... an ornament of bears with skis that we found in Cheyenne, WY this summer!  It's perfect for our tree!

Thing three is the Holiday Trail.  It was the same day that we put up the tree, but I wanted to document it separately.  For the past few years, this is the one and only time my kids will pose with Santa for a photo.  It's the same guy every year and I'm sure it's someone we "know" from around the resort.  I can't figure it out though!  I may need to ask :-)

And thing four had us back in Chicago, putting up our tree here.  The kids weren't into this year... maybe because we had just put up the Christmas tree at Bearski, maybe because Clara was still not feeling well (she had come down with the flu two days before Thanksgiving), maybe it was because they both had homework... who knows.  It was basically just Jeff and I, except when we called Alex up to see if he could figure out why the lights on a third of the tree wouldn't work :-/

Now I've got to get busy on more pages so I can send those off to print!

Here are my supplies that I've used so far, you can find the links on my pinterest board...

26 Things: My plan for December Daily 2014

It's been a while since I've posted, but I've been planning.  It seems like the more I do with scrapbooking/documenting the more I want to add to it with more projects.  It's a lot of fun, but I'm getting a bit backlogged at the moment.

Anyway... on to my newest project... 26 things.  Last year I attempted a December Daily album.  It didn't go so well.  I started strong, but didn't finish.  I learned from the experience though and I'm hoping that will help me be successful this year.

Here's what I learned:

1. Doing DD doesn't capture all that I want to include.  Our Christmas traditions start on Thanksgiving night, so it I needed something that extended beyond December.
2. The daily thing just didn't work for me.  Maybe someday it will... but last year it nearly sent me over the edge.  We don't do something Christmas-y every day in December and I found myself trying to create events that shouldn't have been attempted just to have something for that day.

So now on to what I'm doing differently this year.

1. My working theme for this book is 26 things.  The actual subtitle on my title page says "26 days, events, details, moments and traditions of Christmas 2014".  Why 26?  Because I wanted some of the numbers to coordinate with the actual date.  I wanted #25 to be Christmas Day and since we celebrate with my in-laws after Christmas, I needed another number which brought us to 26.  This theme helps address my two major issues from last year.  I can go outside of December for "things" to include, which then helps out with issue #2 above.  It is no longer daily, no pressure to create things out of thin air for my book.  It's just 12/2 and I already have five "days" worth of things to include in my book and all of those happened in November.  We did nothing Christmas-y yesterday and have no plans for today.. I already would have been freaking out with last year's theme.  
2. I'm attempting a hybrid album.  I've been wanting to try one.  It's not truly going to be hybrid as I doubt that I'll be using any physical scrapbooking products, just designing with digital stuff and printing it out.  I really loved doing our travel journals this summer, so I thought I wanted to add some "smash book" to my project.  I want to include brochures, playbills, cards, etc. as I come across them.  I decided to go for it one day and bought a Sn@p album and some (possibly entirely too many) inserts...

Those are the high points of this year's project.  I'm excited to get started!  I have my title page and four "things" done so far!  They're all off being printed at the moment.  I have to decide how to share them... as the digital file or printed out and in the album.  We'll have to see.  The title page won't be shared for a while, as it is basically our Christmas card and I want to get those mailed out first.

Oh... and since the December Daily idea still intrigues me and I can't totally drop it... I'm attempting a photo a day for the month.  Not following any prompts, just a single photo a day.  I'm posting them to instagram, but I'm also organizing and labeling them in the Collect app.  I'll print them as 3x4's from Persnickety and add them to a section in the back of my album.  I know it's just day two, but it's kind of fun when there's no pressure... just one photo of something Christmas-y, no further story needed.