A Week In The Life

This is a class Ali Edwards has taught in the past and this year, being at home, with a baby due in a few months, she invited everyone to play along with her as she completed this project again this year. It certainly sounded like a worthwhile thing to do and I can't help but always think of those boxes and boxes of heritage photos downstairs with no stories to go with them...so that was part of my driving force behind the project for me.

The concept is pick a week and document each day as you go with photos and words. You can see Ali's posts and etc here. Then at the end of the week, assemble everything into an album of some sort.

We started the Monday of Sept 29 thru Sunday Oct 5. I took about 700 photos that week and sorted them to down to printing about 220 or so photos. For my journaling, I used envelopes (the return ones you never use that come with the bills in the mail) and extra pages from my work desk planner calendar. I tore them all down to about 4x6 and had the thought that I would keep everything 4x6--journaling and photos--to keep assembly easy at the end...I only wanted to journal once, I didn't think I would be able to complete the project if I had to re-write my journaling, etc, so went with this format. Some people typed theirs daily, which seems like a good idea too. I had the thought of maybe binding all the 4x6s with the bind-it-all or a big metal ring or something, but decided on a 2 up 2 ring binder from Wal-Mart, the kind where the photos just slip into the pages. I think it holds 240 pictures or so (which will turn out to be JUST enough!).

I also collected ephemera from the week-receipts, notes, lists, LAD's daycare notes and artwork, etc and included that in the album. After a couple of weeks of working on it, it is basically finished. The album pages have a center strip that is about an inch or so tall and I have intentions of adding strips of patterned paper there, but have left that to the end and may or may not get it done!

I made a divider page for each day using a favorite photo from that day. Then I added words-day of week and date-before printing out, then punched and inserted. I'm really pleased with how it turned out and cannot imagine trying to do this as 12x12 scrapbook LOs, etc. If so, I would have to control my shutter finger better!!! Or my delete finger, but that's even harder!!

Anyway, here are some shots of my mostly complete book. I'm very excited to get it this complete!!! The book is totally stuffed and I doubled up some of the photos on the last day, Sunday.

Here's a synopsis of our week: Randy gone to Alaska for the month of Sept so it's just LAD and I. Monday - Wed normal schedule, up in the AM, breakfast, off to school, work. Home from school, work, supper, maybe a bath, play, read, bed. Wed PM we went to Minneapolis and stayed the night, ate out, swam at the hotel pool. Randy got to Minn on Thursday 6 am on the red-eye from Seattle. Left Minn and drove home on Thursday. Back to work/school on Friday. Sat I got to have most of the day to myself-boys went Airport bumming, i went scrapbook store and shopping. The car was a little quiet after 24/7 with LAD most of the summer! Sunday we bummed around the house and relaxed!

I love this last picture from Sunday. LAD was playing play-doh and somehow we ended up making little balls from all the colors and he was calling them his meatballs and was cooking, etc. Then he put them all back into their little containers and was toting them around in his wagon. So colorful!!

If you got this far, Thanks for Looking! :)