December Daily: 2011 Edition

Well friends, you've forced me to do it. I had every intention of skipping December Daily this year but seeing all my other friends who are participating this year made me want to join in. Then I had an idea. The reason I wasn't going to do December Daily this year is because I have been doing January, Feb, March, April and so on, daily this year! And so I decided I need to share this with all of you!

A few years ago I started reading the blog of Becky Higgins and fell in love. Becky was a scrapbooker working for Creating Keepsakes but her blog was so much more. Her blog was filled with great ideas for decorating, cooking, organization, and above all memory keeping. Becky is an infectious person who has so many great ideas and LOVES sharing and inspiring others. During 2009 Becky left Creating Keepsakes and started her own business so she could focus on her passion, creating solution based scrapbooking products. Becky considers herself a life documenter, a historian of her family's everyday life. I loved this idea and it totally spoke to me. I love looking back at pictures of when I was younger, seeing old school papers, and had since I was young begged my parents to tell me stories about when they were growing up and what there day to day was like.

With the December Daily I completed and loved in 2009 and 2010 I was documenting the day to day of my family's life. The everyday memories, traditions, and relationships our family was building on a daily basis. So this year I decided to go a step further and purchased Becky's Project Life kit. I started in January and instantly fell in love. I was afraid I would not complete it but I am so proud to say that I have completed the entire year. Almost (will by the end of the month) 365 days of daily picture taking and documenting. I cant even begin to explain how much I enjoy looking back on our year and having a documentation on what we were up to, and I am completely overwhelmed when I see my boys looking through and recalling these memories.

So.......I have decided to share the album on my blog everyday this December. I have wanted to get the album pages saved electronically in case God forbid anything would happen to it (know for sure this is the second thing I will grab if there is a fire, after my children of course). And I also want to share with anyone who reads (probably only a handful) how awesome Project Life is and hopefully inspire each of you to try it out for yourselves. I will share two weeks a day which should have me finishing up the end of December. I'm also going to share how I've used Project Life and how it has changed through-out the year.

And so......Week 1

::January 1-7th::

(Click all pics to see more details)

The first week. The album is set up to hold 7 pictures and then 7 note cards explaining each picture. I began with 4x6 for each day and then a note card for each day. The kit also came with little stickers so you could mark the days of the week on the pictures and little arrow stickers to you could mark which note cards went with which pictures. I started out doing this but then my outlook changed which I will get into later.

Bottom left is a picture of the kit and me loading up the album. This is all explained on Becky's website. However this year the kits are set up a bit different which I will get into.

(Parker will someday love that I put a picture of him in his undies on the www)

The kit also comes with these neat month dividers so you can separate each month and flip through much easier.

Ok well this took me over an hour so I think I'll just post one week today and start up with two tomorrow!