For years now I have been following
Ali Edwards, guru of simple, storytelling
scrapbooking. Somehow she makes it all seem less complicated, more doable, and every time her layouts are stunning and relatively uncluttered.
Every year she chooses one week, seven full days, to document the every day happenings in their family. Our scrapbooks often highlight the highs of the year...trips, holidays, special occasions, and this is all great. But in between those highlights are a whole lot more ordinary days that actually are a more
accurate depiction of our life.
I've observed this week for three years now, simply by doing that: observing Ali as she does this project. But behold! Something has come over me this year, and I'm in. I didn't participate the past few years because I thought since we don't have kids, there wouldn't really be a whole lot to document in terms of actual things happening. But looking back, had I started this project, I'd have a week of our "normal" life while we lived in Montana, our "normal" when we lived in Minnesota and our "normal" last year in Nebraska. And I'm already bummed I didn't jump on this wagon earlier.
So this year, I'm grabbing my camera and will take pictures of the ordinary: my daily bowl of
raisin nut bran that gets me started each day, my husband picking away at his laptop, my work, our church, and all the other ordinary things that given a bit of time and perspective, won't all seem so ordinary.
All of the details can be
found here...it's a lot of digging around to get a feel, but at its core, it's creating a scrapbook of ordinary life, grocery shopping receipts, to-do lists and I'm excited to get started.
Anybody want to do this with me?!! It begins Monday April 19th.
This post is another tip of the hat to my mom. Somehow she finds these awesome albums that tell you what pictures to place where. This book is a book about Ivar's baptism that she put together. This is her 7th baptism book as she has made one of these for each of her grandkids. It means that she comes to the service equipped with a list that she usually passes onto my aunt louie with items listed like: exterior of the church, baptismal font, baby with pastor, inside of the church etc. Then those 20 pictures get placed throughout this book that weaves a story around the pictures, explaining what baptism is and then you add the details: 
It's a super cool teaching tool for passing on the faith, so that when Ivar is older we can talk about baptism and what it means to be baptized into the kingdom of God. My niece Sonna was baptized in Flathead Lake and she will "read" this one to us with her own script, "once I was a teeny, tiny baby and there's pastor wayne in his shorts and we all walked into the lake..." 
My mom is the queen of the mini album. For each of her grandchild she has created a "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" book using all of the members of our family for the different pages. My niece, Sonna, once called and told me she could 'read' her book all by herself and then read the thing to me three times in a row. 
I have written a lot on this blog about my plans for 
What I love about 
The funny thing about this process, is that it is essentially old-school scrapbooking, when you would print your pictures and place them in an album immediately. There are no embellishments. There isn't even the responsibility of journaling for every single event. I like having one page of journaling at the end...this month it was mostly explaining who we were with for what occasion- not a lot of personality. But again, at least these pictures are compiled, printed and put in an album.
I have a few persistent friends who have been asking that I post 
