26 Things: The Confession

Things did not go as planned.

Speaking of plans... remember this?  I had it all figured out for 2014.  I even got the first four "things" done.  It was not meant to be.

Instead I have this...

And I am extremely pleased to finally have a completed project!  It is not the project I started, but I love the project I finished.

I have come to the conclusion that December Daily (how it is generally thought of in the scrapbooking world) just doesn't work for me.  I really, really want it to, but I just haven't figured out a way to do it that makes sense for me.

Here are my issues...

1.  I do Project Life.  The overlap between the two books was insane.  My 26 Things book was turning out to be just a PL mini book.

2.  What I really wanted to document with this were our Christmas traditions, which are basically the same every year (which is why they're called traditions).  I didn't feel like it would be a new book each year.  What I may attempt instead is a Christmas tradition book.  I thought about printing as a bound book... but I might do it in something like a Sn@p album again, so it can be added to as things change.

3.  Christmas is the worst time for me to take on another project.  During December besides all of the running around and holiday activities, I was also trying to stay current on PL, finish a 75 page gift album and make photo calendars.

I had other issues as well.  I really tried to finish up my project as I had planned.  I was still plugging away at layouts last week to try to finish it up just for the pure sake of finally finishing a DD album.  At that point, I didn't even care that it was just a duplicate of my PL album.  BUT... then the reality set in that I had nowhere near enough "things" to fulfill my 26 things requirement.  I was already stretching things and was still 8 or 9 things short.

I had my list of possible things that I had made... but to be honest, we didn't actually get around to doing a lot of them.  The kids weren't interested in riding the Santa Train this year, I didn't get photos taken of the decorations at church, we didn't end up going to Clara's school's Christmas concert (it ended up that the band didn't perform at all, she just had to be there with her class and I had to be somewhere with Alex that night)... the list goes on and on.  December just got away from us this year.

So... what did I do?  Well for some reason, I decided to do a photo-a-day in December to post to Instagram.  I'm not quite sure what prompted it, but I started it and saw it through.  I think as I saw my original project beginning to fall apart, it upped my motivation to keep with this one.  Last week when I found out that I was still short on pages, I wanted to quit... just give up and be done.  But then I remembered my daily photos from December.  They were all organized and labeled in my collect app, so I exported them, and sent them off to Persnickety to be printed.

It was not the project I had envisioned.  But it is done.  Going forward, I think this will be my December Daily each year, and they'll all go into this same binder.  Next year I would love to add more fun cards in between the photos, but I'm okay if that doesn't happen.

I still feel the *need* to come up with a hybrid project though... but what to do that would be fun, have a purpose and no real deadline.... hmmmmm...