Day 2: A Dash of Friendship

 One of the great things about only working part time and telecommuting is the ability to do fun things with my kids during the “off” hours.  Sometimes my job interferes in the “off” time, but we make do.  Today, we hosted a last minute play date with Nate & Allie for some random kid fun.  We hadn’t seen them in awhile due to complicated schedules, but snatched two hours from a wacky day just to play.  I, randomly, was listening in to a call for more than half of the time (was scheduled for much less time).  I had to occasionally jump outside to insert something without little voices being heard, but such is my life.  I am glad they got to play despite my schedule and Jessie covered for me sweetly when I was out.  Very little tears today and lots of fun together and separately.  I was impressed at the variety of the play from dress-up to Toy Story games on the Wii and lots of cars, trains, coloring, babies, animals and books in between.  We also learned that Jessie’s twin nephews were born during the snack portion of the day so a very special day indeed.

            Wacky day also included a Doctor’s appointment for M, Sonic with B, work for Brent & I, followed by PBJ, double swim lessons for the last time this month & Brent’s dorm night. Busy, crazy, and not very holiday centered, but Our December Daily with a bonus dash of good 

friends. 

Day 1, Page 1 - Photo Collage + Patterned Paper

Crafters' Notes:  I had some follow up questions from my friend Amber who was having trouble visualizing how this is all going to work.  Below I've mocked up pages for yesterday (using other pictures so imagine).  The page with the 5x7 could have one to probably 5 pictures if some were smaller.  I am going to keep the photos to the 5x7 dimension to leave a place for pretty paper.  Here the paper is SEI from my stash that I painted roughly around the edges with Gold Stickles for some shimmer.  

I used the same paper on the number found on the transparency (which follows page 1) and again at the bottom of the journaling page (which is effectively page 3).  I added two small pictures to the journaling page as I had extra room.

Transparency + Page 3 

Day 1, Page 3 - Journaling + Small pictures

(You can see Ali's Day 1 here which may make this clearer)


To answer Amber's questions -- No, I do not plan to add more to the transparency pages beyond the numbers.  No, you do not need a printer.  You "can" print the journaling out, but could just as easily write it out.  You do not even need the overlays as you can make any page be your journaling page.  You could do this completely digitally too and type it in on line and add photos there too.  Then you could send it off to be printed at the end if you wanted to altogether. I like the hybrid with some printing and some other papers, in part because I like dimension.  You can also see an example below from last year where I took a much different path with no printing and wildly different pages every day (the whole album is here).  In short the key is Words + Photo each day captured which ever way makes YOU happy.  Does that help? I am very excited to see that Jennie & Chrissie are joining in this fun too!

December Daily 2009: Day 3

December Daily 2009: Day 4

REVERB 10: December 2 - Writing.
What do you do each day that doesn’t contribute to your writing — and can you eliminate it?
(Author: Leo Babauta)

This prompt isn't a great fit for me for some reason, but I think I'll think about things that interfere with my productivity or getting to do things I need/want/enjoy.  I clearly spend lots of time awash in blogs or other internet time killers.  I do think I need more balance in this so I get the things done I want to do in the evening like scrapbooking or blogging or whatever.  That said, I do think that reading helps make me a better writer and looking at other people's scrapbook pages is quite inspirational to my own scrapbooking so I think here, as in so many things, the trick is to find balance and make sure to make time for the good in each without disappearing into the vortex of the internet too far.  

I do also completely agree with my Mom and Sister that writing is a form of therapy and memory keeping.  I think it is part of how our family works and only later in life did I learn that writing is not comfortable or therapy for everyone and that's fine too.  I'm all about finding what works in works, images, projects or whatever and clinging to that.  I love words and the power of them so I'm certain they will always be part of my day and my story.

(Check out my Mom and my Sister's blogs for additional REVERB posts)