So I started a reply to Becky Higgins post here and of course it turned into a novel... so I'm posting it here. The post was about "how to best tackle/organize documenting a family’s life!" So here goes... I have been doing project life (PL) for 2 years now.... first about my other albums
Each of my two children (now 4YO and 2.5YO) has their own personal album and school album….
Personal album- This album includes each childs firsts (bath, teeth, Halloween, etc) and their first year (several of the sketches of these layouts are exactly the same to keep it simple for me and ensure that I have similar content for each child). It also includes layouts for each childs birthday. Sometimes the birthday layouts are in the old scrapworks anthologie system with partial scrapping and partial just pictures in divided page protectors… makes it easier for me. (since these are not available I use these now). For each child’s first year I have several “Today you” pages which document things they are doing at that several points in their first year… for my son the last 6 months of his first year is documented in Project life (which is much more detailed than the Today You pages I used to do)
School album- I’ve been keeping this since my kids started daycare….for each year of daycare/preschool I have included:
- a class picture
-a quick write up of the year in general (not sure if I’ll keep this up once they go to regular school but it is useful to have freeform text for their daycare years)
-one or two key art projects or activity sheets (I am finding that I end up sticking these in their Project Life album as well.. oh well)
Project Life
My first 1.5 years of doing PL is very different to the last 6 months and that is ok…. Also what I found is that whatever I scrapbook that doesn’t fit into my kids personal or school albums (described above) I just stick in my PL album. This way I can scrapbook (the traditional way) what I feel like doing and don’t get overwhelmed that I am behind. If I feel like just throwing extra pics into a page protector and not scrapping them… that’s fine as well. Its actually more liberating for me… I can scrapbook a little or a lot but everything is still documented regardless.
I regularly make photobooks for my grandmother who is not able to travel to the states to see my kids… so I print out an extra and stick it in here in a 8x8 size page protector (its ok that the picts are duplicated).
First year of PL- I would do 3 pages a month, one page for each child and one page for family things (this included things about me and my husband) … I had envisioned at that time that I would separate them out and stick each childs individual monthly pages in their personal album.
Second Year of PL- I got more into the swing of PL, documenting, seeing what others were doing, also I no longer had infants in the house so I had more time (and clarity of mind). I also found that I was constantly duplicating things each month b/c I wanted each child to have events documented in their pages.. it just was not efficient.… so between February and June I worked my way up to a page a week. Now I do a page a week… special family events may get their own page (child specific events like birthdays ends up in their personal albums), really cute artwork or school work which reflects my childrens developmental milestones (like drawing a circle or a face, letters, etc) or social aspect (like Nalania drawing her brother a picture).
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