The fourth week of the year has passed and, as I imagine they say in Hollywood, Project 365 week 4 is “in the can”. This week, I had a too-many-photos problem. Despite a pretty quiet week, I took a lot of pictures I wanted to include in my album and once I had them in the slots I wasn’t left very many spaces to include the stories that I wanted to tell about them. I ended up hiding quite a bit of by jouraling as you’ll see down below.

I started out by typing the date on the intro card using my typewriter. I don’t have my typewriter out where I see it all the time because Augie tends to bang on it and jam the keys which bums me out. I have to remember to get it out and play with it more often.

Sunday’s photo is just a shot of Zach making breakfast eggs. I had two photos for Monday — one of a rainy walk home from school, the other is one Zach took of the boys and me building a birdhouse. Tuesday I was struck by how much cheese we had in our fridge (14 kinds! No exaggeration!) so I took a picture of our cheese drawer. Wednesday Augie and I went to a local preschool play place while Wyatt was visiting a friend’s house.

I included an insert for the kids’ homework again this week. Augie brought home a duck watercolor (top photo) and Wyatt had a nice piece about his Chinese zodiac sign.

Thursday’s photo shows my FitBit after I hit my goal of 10,000 steps for the day. I had a whole raft of photos for Friday — Korean dinner, cozy kids, and Augie dressing himself. And Saturday I wrote about our family outing (more below).

This was the page where I struggled to get everything I wanted to include into the page protector. Here’s how I solved that problem:

We went out for dinner at a Korean restaurant which was a risky proposition with two kids who don’t really like to try new food very much. The food was lovely though and the kids tried a ton of new things so I made a collage of photos and wrote a bit about their adventurous spirit in Photoshop Elements. After I printed it, I taped on a business card for the restaurant because it was pretty. (Shown in the photo of the page up above.)

I also wanted to talk a bit about how Augie has started dressing himself. I loved the photo with his Perry the Platypus booty showing as he pulls his pants on, so I taped it to a folded journaling card and wrote the story out around it. I love how easy it is to capture these small milestones with this project that might otherwise be overlooked. Since Augie was born, I haven’t had much time to do the big scrapbook pages I used to do, but my 365 projects capture his day to day life pretty well.

I did another bigger card to talk about our Saturday hike and include an extra photo of Wyatt. I’d also like to note that despite living in the SF Bay Area for 20+ years, I still managed to misspell “San Francisco” the first time I wrote it. Yeah.

Questions about this project? Read my introductory post here. I am putting my album together using Becky Higgins Project Life divided page protectors, the Project Life Clementine Core Kit, and lots of products from my scrapbook stash.

Three weeks in and I’m still right on track with my photo a day project for this year! So far I’ve easily been taking photos ever day and often I’m taking several pictures that I want to include in my album.  I’m also managing to keep up with the album about which I am pleased as punch. Here’s what I put together for last week:

On Sunday, I photographed my grocery cart and then listed out everything in it that I could see or remember. Monday’s photo shows the supplies for a craft project that the boys and I put together from one our our Kiwi Crate kits. (Kiwi Crate ships out a monthly kit with all the supplies for two kids’ craft projects in it. I bought a 3 month membership for half off on Plum District last month and so far we really like it.) I had two items for Tuesday: a photo of my new laptop and a screen shot of some texts that I sent Zach when we ran out of Pull-ups at bedtime. Calamity! On Wednesday I photographed our pizza dinner and used the photo to symbolize how sick we all were.

I took a bunch of Instagram photos on Thursday, so I put together a little collage of some of my favorites. I also pulled one of Wyatt posing as Draco Malfoy out for a little bit of extra attention. Friday’s photo was of Augie at the grocery store with me. Saturday was a picture of our traditional pancake breakfast. I took a lot of pictures of food this week!

I did so much journaling right on my photos this week that I had several spare slots open in the middle section. I asked the boys to help me fill them and they were happy to pitch in. Augie drew me a picture of a rocket ship and Wyatt wrote a bit about a video game he’s been playing called Terraria. I also loved an idea that Cathy Zielske posted on Twitter to document the books our family is reading at the moment, so I included that too. I’m going to try to do that a few times this year, I think!

Questions about this project? Read my introductory post here. I am putting my album together using Becky Higgins Project Life divided page protectors, the Project Life Clementine Core Kit, and lots of products from my scrapbook stash.

Does it feel like it’s been all scrapbooking all the time around here? It feels that way to me — just a little bit — but I’ve been on a roll keeping up with my projects, so I’m just going to go with it!

I’ve finished up the second week of my 2012 project 365 album, so it’s time to share:

We started off our week on Sunday with an epic 4 mile hike up in the Berkeley hills. (Epic when you consider that the three year old member of our group walked the whole way.) Monday is Augie’s day off preschool so we went to IKEA for lunch. It is also garbage day, so I took a picture of Wyatt hauling in the recycling bin. Tuesday I took a photo of myself in a full-length mirror to document my daily uniform. The alphabet card was cut from this Jillibean Soup paper and it fits perfectly in the Project Life page protectors I’m using for this album.

I included another 8.5 x 11 insert this week. One side held a piece of art work that Augie made at school and the other side held the agenda from this month’s PTA meeting with my notes scribbled all over it. I maintain the website and send out the weekly email newsletter for the PTA so I do a little bit of volunteer work just about every week.

I also included a photo of Augie playing on the computer at the library for Tuesday. Wednesday’s photo was taken with my new Christmas toy: a  Fuji Instax Mini camera. The little Polaroid-type photos are sized just right for the 3 x 4 pockets in the page protectors and I think they’ll be a fun addition to this album. This particular photo was of Wyatt and his friend who came over for a play date. Thursday I got a haircut, so I snapped a picture of myself in the mirror with my phone before my hairdresser got to work. Friday’s photo documents our excellent dental hygiene practices. And Saturday poor little Augie was sick with a cold and a fever so I wrote out a list documenting what that is like right now. Finally, I had to include a photo of Saturday’s delicious leftover pizza breakfast!

What did you do last week?

Questions about this project? Read my introductory post here. I am putting my album together using Becky Higgins Project Life divided page protectors, the Project Life Clementine Core Kit, and lots of products from my scrapbook stash.

Hooray 2012! Hooray Project 365! I’m going back to taking a photo a day this year and I couldn’t be more excited about it.

I’ve done two 365 projects previously — one in 2009 and another in 2010 — and I blogged the photos once a week. Taking a photo a day can get pretty intense and blogging it can be even harder, so after two years in a row I was ready for a break.  It was a tough decision for me, because I’ve really loved having the photos I took in 2009 and 2010, but last year I decided not to do Project 365.

And then something interesting happened. Guess who ended up taking photos nearly every day of the year? That’s right — me. It turns out that if you have a camera with you all the time and are constantly using it to take photos after 700+ days you kind of form a habit. In December as I looked back at my photo archive I started to realize that taking the photos wasn’t the part that was hard for me. The hard part was blogging the photos. Hmmmm.

I decided I needed to look at this project closely, think about what I wanted to accomplish and then prioritize. Here’s what I came up with:

1. Taking the photos is the most important thing to me. I’ve been taking photographs regularly for more than 20 years. It has always been an important hobby for me, so important that I don’t really think about it much. I don’t spend much time working on improving my photographs or trying out new techniques — I just take pictures constantly. For the most part I’m happy with my photos, so that’s worked well for me for many years now but I’m feeling like it’s time for me to bring a little more thought and finesse to my photos. I’d like to use this year to spend some time studying photography, experimenting and taking things to the next level and Project 365 is a great venue for that kind of experimentation.
2. Having a way to look at the photos at the end of the year is a very close second. I’m not an arty photographer and I don’t take photographs for the sake of taking photographs. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) At the end of the day, my goal for Project 365 is to capture my life and the lives of my family and to give all of us a way to look back and enjoy those photos. In previous years, I purchased Project Life kits and my technique for filling them was to order my Project 365 photos every three months or so, stick them in the photo pockets and then go back to my blog where I’d written about the photos and transfer whatever I’d written there into the album by hand-writing it onto the journaling cards. Copying text off a computer screen by writing it out in long-hand is tedious and boring and I hated it so what I ended up with was two albums full of photos and empty of stories. I love flipping through those half-filled albums and looking at the photos, but what I really want is to flip through full albums so a change to my technique is in order.
3. I still want to share my project on Wendolonia. I like sharing my photo projects here and there is a very vocal (if small) contingent of readers who seem to enjoy reading those posts so it’s something I’d like to continue. The problem is that in past years I prioritized the blogging part of this project above the album-making part of the project. I’m going to reverse that this year.

So here’s the plan:

1. I’m going to take the photos every day, but if I miss a day here and there I’m not going to sweat it.
2. I’m going to put the album together as I go along. I’m planning to print photos at home and to write out my journaling cards every few days. I’m also planning to include stories that don’t have anything to do with my photos and bits of memorabilia here and there. While I plan to add things throughout the week,  I think it’s more realistic to plan to knock out pages a week at a time. I’m hoping I don’t get too far behind on this.
3. I’ll share pages on Wendolonia as I feel like it. Again, I’m hoping to do this weekly, but I’m not going to stress out if I don’t get to it. Also, I’m going to take photos of the pages in my book and share those rather than posting the individual photos and writing about each one. If someone wants to see what I’ve written they can always click through to Flickr and view the photos in a larger size.

So here is what I did the first week:

I’m planning to primarily use the Project Life Style A page protectors (currently sold out) for this album, but I’ll shake it up with some of the other designs occasionally too. The first part of this week talks about our lazy New Year’s day, my impulse purchase of (and new obsession with) Wii Just Dance 3, and heading back to Weight Watchers after being a big slacker over the holidays. I printed the caption and the date right on the Weight Watchers photo before I printed it which freed up a couple of journaling slots for a Trader Joe’s receipt and a small blurb about buying new drip pans for our rental stove. (Which made me vastly happier than one would expect.)

I also included an 8.5 x 11 page protector with a few examples of Wyatt’s school work that he was particularly proud of.

The rest of the week finished with a collage of Instgram photos from Wednesday, a picture of Wyatt at his Cub Scout pack meeting, a longer story about how I had to tell Wyatt he couldn’t check out a book because he was on the overdue list when I helped out in the school library on Friday (man, did that suck) and a photo from a lunch I attended with my old co-workers on Saturday.  The extra little cutie polka dot card is from the Project Life Clementine core kit which is the primary source of cards and paper I’ll be using for journaling on this project.

Here’s a close-up of the collage I made. I wrote a sentence about each of the photos too.

Phwew! I had a lot to say about that!

Are you doing Project 365 or Project Life this year? Are you doing another year-long project?

August 27, 2010: Augie and I went for a walk around the block. Note his sweatshirt — just the day before the kids were splashing in the pool in the back yard. The weather here has been all over the map this fall.

August 28, 2010: Excuse me, Mom, but can this wait?  I’m trying to read this article about converting my tricycle to a remote controlled sippy cup fetcher.

August 29, 2010: Wyatt and his buddy have started taking all of his Imaginext toys out to our back patio to play when they have a play date. It keeps them well-occupied, but getting them to clean it all up can be tough.

August 30, 2010: Poor Augie! I don’t even know why he was crying here, but I thought I’d show photographic proof that my kids are not always happy.

August 31, 2010: Augie’s 2nd birthday! Yay! He spent the day at daycare and I ran around getting balloons and presents and whatnot in order for his party that night. We had a small party with just our immediate family over.

September 1, 2010: Augie takes one of his birthday presents out for a spin. Grandma and Grandpa sent him this totally cute little balance bike.

September 2, 2010: I ordered a small, lite, no whip frappacino, but what they gave me seemed to be large and it definitely had whip. Was it Opposite Day at Starbucks?

August 20, 2010: Wyatt told me that he needed me to buy him some stuff for a secret project he was going to start working on with his buddy around the corner. He started rattling off a bunch of items, but I told him that it was too much to remember so I needed him to make me a list. I asked him to do it in his best “Kindergarten writing” which means he tries to figure out how to spell words on his own based on the sounds he hears in the words. This list is what he handed me. Translated, it reads:

• Boat
• Airplane
• Sub
• Attack Machines
• 2 Goggles
• RV
• Flippers
• Cage

I was too scared to ask what the project was.

August 21, 2010: Zach was home and not working on this fine Saturday morning (yay!), so our whole family walked over to the farmer’s market. We bought the chard and tomatoes he’s holding here along with a bunch of berries and some late season peaches.

August 22, 2010: In case you were wondering — no, Batman doesn’t take off his mask to eat breakfast.

August 23, 2010: For the last day of summer vacation, I took the boys on a trip to a far away park in a ritzy area. The playground here is pretty awesome, but the real attraction for us was the splash pads. It was doubly awesome for the boys when we arrived because the fountains or the drain or something was malfunctioning and it flooded the sandbox making a tiny shallow lake and a beach. Super fun for all the kids!

August 24, 2010: The first day of school! Wyatt lines up on the playground to go into his new first grade class.

August 25, 2010: Augie loves to chew on lemon wedges.

August 26, 2010: Our neighbors had a guest hamster at their house, courtesy of the little one’s preschool, and Wyatt and his friend had fun playing with it.

August 13, 2010: Scrub a dub dub! Two boys in a tub!

August 14, 2010: Wyatt and I were lucky enough to win a couple of tickets to the circus from 510 Families so we spent the afternoon watching acrobats, clowns and motorcycles riding around inside tiny little spheres. Also, paying $12 freaking dollars for a bag of cotton candy with an ugly hat attached to it. And feeling really sad for the elephants and tigers.

August 15, 2010: Augie really, really likes Wyatt’s swim goggles.

August 16, 2010: Wyatt took this photo of the window over our kitchen sink. I bought the rectangular planters with the idea that I’d put herbs in them, but they’ve just ended up holding little bits and bobs that I don’t want the kids to have.

August 17, 2010: When Augie climbs in this particular play structure at the park near our house, his hair gets all staticky and stands on end. Heh.

August 18, 2010: More playground! Wyatt jumps of the artificial rock climbing structure.

August 19, 2010: We ventured up to the Little Farm and fed the animals old celery and sketchy lettuce from the crisper.

August 6, 2010: Walking around Manhattan at dusk with Lisa looking for a place to eat. This subway station on the edge of Central park was too pretty to ignore.

August 7, 2010: Dancing on the giant cheeseburger bed at the CheeseburgHer party. I didn’t take this photo (obviously) and now I can’t figure out where I got it.

August 8, 2010: The yarn wall at Purl Soho. So pretty!

August 9, 2010: Back home. The boys suited up and played Batman and Robin out in front of the house. Now that I look at this photo, I’m mortified that I let Wyatt ride on the trike with his cape on. It looks like he’s about to ride over the edge of it and strangle himself!

August 10, 2010: This photo is terribly blurry, but I had to choose it because it captures one aspect of our August so perfectly. Way back in April, when we went to WonderCon, Zach treated himself to the two volume set of The Life & Times Of Scrooge McDuck by Don Rosa. Zach was a huge fan of Uncle Scrooge comics when he was a kid and he has a pretty good collection of them waiting in a closet for the boy to be old enough to read. He read Wyatt these books when he first got them, but Wyatt and I reread them every night at bedtime in August. These were also his books of choice to look over when he was having quiet time for several weeks.

August 11, 2010: I kept Wyatt home from camp and surprised him with a trip to Six Flags when Augie was at day care. We rode bumper cars and roller coasters and ate lots of blue foods.

August 12, 2010: Eating Trader Joes banana yogurt. Yum!

July 30, 2010: Augie often falls asleep in the car and when he does he’s often holding some strange object. Here he has the suitcase for Wyatt’s spy play set.

July 31, 2010: There’s a new market in our town and we all went to check it out for our Saturday morning activity. We liked this cool coffee set up.

August 1, 2010: Wyatt reads a book to his dad and Augie before bed time.

August 2, 2010: Wyatt made himself a grappling hook out of Tinker toys. I’m not sure exactly what the stuffed snake was for.

August 3, 2010: We got together with some in-town and out-of-town friends for dinner and afterward we took our first ever trip to Fenton’s with the kids (first for the kids, not for us). Fenton’s is a fantastic ice cream parlor that’s been in business in our area for over 100 years and anyone who’s lived in our area for any length of time has some memory associated with the restaurant. It was even featured in the movie Up!:

This was a big milestone for the kids!

August 4, 2010: I saw this crazy idea to take a package of refrigerated cinnamon rolls, unroll them and put them all together to make one gigantic cinnamon roll so I had to try it myself. It was good.

August 5, 2010: I headed off to New York for BlogHer ’10! My friend Lisa and I had dinner at the Carnegie Deli and split a Reuben. Yum!

July 23, 2010: Part of the reason the boys and I went to Iowa this summer was so I could attend my 20th high school reunion. The first event was an informal get together at a very hot and crowded bar in town. This is a picture of me with many of my besties from jr. high and high school. I love these people and it was so nice to see them in person for the first time in many years.

July 24, 2010: Our last day in Iowa, the boys and I went to a reunion potluck at a nearby park  and then after Augie’s nap, we took a final swing through the splash pad with Grandma and Grandpa. I ended up flaking on the fancy reunion that night because the boys were having a hard evening. I also had stupidly booked our flight home at at time that required us to get up at 4:30 am. Next time, I’ll plan better….

July 25, 2010: Augie finally conked out while we were taxiing to the airport at the end of our first flight. We ended up being stuck on the tarmac for 45 minutes though, so he actually ended up getting a little nap in.

July 26, 2010: Back home and back in costume. Augie is dressed in a way too small Darth Vader costume and Wyatt is dressed as The Usual. The $20 I spend on that Batman costume was the best money I’ve ever spent on a toy for either of my kids. Two Halloweens and regular weekly wear for the last two years! I don’t think any of his regular clothing has even been worn with the same frequency!

July 27, 2010: Our lame, pathetic garden. It was such a cold summer that the only thing that really grew very well this year was the snap peas. Even the basil and zucchini didn’t do very well.

July 28, 2010: Augie has started climbing up on my lap when I’m working on my laptop and banging on the keyboard. It drives me crazy, but he’s really cute, so I don’t get upset about it.

July 29, 2010: Wyatt likes to read comic books in bed using his Lego headlamp. He also likes to sleep with five pillows. He does not like it when mom comes in and takes a flash photo of him in his dark room.