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.

Time for the January update on my 40th year project. Woo hoo!

This month I started digging into the box of super-special-save-forever treasures that I packed up and sent to California when I helped my parents move out of my childhood home several years ago. Though my parents had made changes to my room in the 15 years since I moved out to attend college, the closet and my huge desk were still packed with my stuff. Toys, papers, notebooks, tchotchkes  – you name it, I saved it. I did my best to clear everything out because I didn’t want to saddle my parents or myself with all my junk so the stuff that went into the box is the creme de la creme. Going through this box is very intense for me because literally every piece of paper in it has some kind of significance in my life. So far I’ve only managed to excavate 2 inches into it! You’ll see a lot more of these historical documents as I add them into my album in the coming months.

Let’s take a look at what I put together:

This page shows:

• I little bit about my love for tea. I really like tea.
• A photo and a smidge about my life from my freshman year of college.
• I great quote from Ira Glass about mastering creative pursuits. These are words I revisit frequently. (Found on Pinterest.)
• Rob Lowe, my teenage crush. I totally forgot how much I loved Rob Lowe until I found the photo of my bedroom in the lower left corner of this page and saw all the posters of him on the walls. He does nothing for me now, though. Isn’t that weird?
• A sparkly photo of myself I took using Incredibooth.
• A photo of my room from when I was in 9th grade. It was definitely NOT this clean normally. I think I took the photo specifically because it was so tidy.

I also included a going away card that my co-workers made me when I left my first post-college job in an 8.5 x 11 page protector. Lots of funny messages with inside jokes inside there.

The back of that page protector has a layout I made after asking Wyatt and Augie a bunch of questions about me. Their answers cracked me up and I realized they think my job is laundress. Nice.

The second side of this layout has:

• A picture of me with much longer hair than I have now.
• A bracelet that I found in the basement when we moved last year.
• My typical morning routine.
• A couple things about my love of books.
• A bit about my childhood relationship with NyQuil (Blech!) and the lengths I went to to avoid taking it.
• A picture of my awesome Sharp boom box.
• And a photo of me on my 21st birthday.

This next spread incorporates both the divided page protectors and a full sized 12×12 page.

The right side has:

• A photo of my goofing around in my first real grown-up lady apartment.
• A card that was thrown out into the audience when I went to a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in high school.
• A print-out of the box from my all time most favorite LEGO set.
• A note on my chances of surviving a zombie apocalypse. (Slim.)
• Stickers from my trip to Disney World when I was 8 that I never stuck onto anything. There’s a Minnie Mouse one behind the Mickey you see there, too.
• A photo of my Grandma Ruby and all her kids.
• And a picture of the first gingerbread house I ever made.

The opposite page holds a report card from 6th grade and my 7th grade ITBS test results.

The back side of that page holds a Mills College admissions office brochure about student life. My roommates and I were interviewed and photographed for the brochure.

And finally, the last page includes these little tidbits:

• A photo and ticket stub from a trip to Minnesota I took with my friend Gretchen for an Iowa football game.
• A photo and quote from Amy Poehler that I like.
• All you’ve ever wanted to know about my feelings for orange pop.
• My 7th grade class schedule.
• More about zombies!

And finally, in honor of the Martin Luther King holiday, I’ll leave you with an insipid poem I wrote in sixth grade that was inspired by his famous and much more eloquent speech:

A Dream by Wendy Thorpe

I have a dream!
I have a dream for peace on earth,
No nuclear bombs, and jobs for all.
I have a dream that Mr. Chauvinist and Ms. Prejudice are dead,
Laying in their coffins.
I have a dream of flowering shrubs.
Trees in blossom, and grass swaying in the breeze.
What I dream is a beautiful picture,
No hospitals, just health,
No poverty, just wealth.
I have a dream.

Flowering shrubs, ladies and gentlemen! Flowering shrubs.

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?

We’ve been having a pretty great December so far. Somehow we’ve managed to pack a bunch of fun stuff in while also keeping it pretty low-key. I’m not sure how things are working out like that, but I’ll take it. A lot of the stuff we’ve been doing are activities from the advent calendar but it’s been spread out with just a little bit happening each day, which is nice.

I also bought a new Hipstapack (the Foodie SnapPak) for the Hipstamatic app on my phone and I finally took 5 minutes to get my Instagram account set up (my user name is wendolonia if you want to follow me). So now I’m in another grungy photo phase and have been taking tons of pictures with my phone instead of the good camera. Be forewarned.

So here are a few of the things we’ve been up to:

Snowman Pancakes! I saw this idea from A Little Loveliness on Pinterest a few weeks ago and couldn’t wait to make them for the kids. That jaunty bacon scarf! It kills me every time I look at it. So last Saturday I decided to surprise the kids with these pancakes. After I started making the pancakes, they turned into terrible little brats — bickering, hitting each other, screaming, getting into things they’re not supposed to touch, making enormous messes — and they did not deserve cute snowman pancakes, but I wanted to make them so I plowed ahead. When I served breakfast their response was underwhelming. One complained that his brother’s piece of bacon was bigger and whined because he doesn’t like chocolate chips. The other only ate his chocolate chips and bacon and threw his marshmallows on the floor. I found myself hissing, “Eat your snowman pancakes!” through clenched teeth.

Yay. Fun breakfast treat.

Our Christmas tree has been a much bigger success. We bought a too big tree from our local grocery store and had a bit of trouble getting it set up in the stand so it didn’t fall over. We also had to remove multiple pieces of furniture from our teeny, tiny living room to get it to fit.

But the kids were so excited about it and were super enthusiastic about decorating it. They even agreed to pose for a nice photo in front of the tree!

Last year Santa put these crazy glasses that make the lights look like cool shapesin our stockings and we have all been loving them. The boys and I spent over an hour trading glasses, doubling them up and running around the house looking at all our lights with them. I put the Santa pair over the lens of my camera and got a pretty good representation of what you see.

The fireworks pair was even more spectacular! We’ve decided we need to bring them along the next time we drive around looking at holiday light displays.

I’ve been drinking my tea out of our Santa mugs every morning, which just makes me happy.

Augie and I also spent an afternoon cutting snowflakes out of paper. He’s a talented three-year-old, don’t you think?

OK, OK — those are mine. Just curiously, would anyone be interested in a snowflake cutting tutorial? There are a lot out there already, so I’m not sure the world needs another.

On Monday, I took the boys to a favorite bakery after school for a surprise cookie and hot chocolate date. Augie was super cranky about the whole thing.

But Wyatt was into it and managed to turn Augie’s mood around. I love these occasional instances of fantastic-ness in their relationship. They’re relationship is a see-saw and it feels like it can go either way at any moment.

We made our favorite cream cheese spritz cookies. The boys helped at all stages which was great fun though the sprinkle stage got a little out of hand at one point. I’m still finding green sugar in various nooks and crannies of our kitchen days later.

And yesterday we took a little time to make some cards for our friends who moved away last summer. I just plopped some stickers, scissors and Christmas-themed paper on the table and let them go at it. The kids were unusually excited to craft and their cards were terrific and funny and creative.

And while they worked on their projects, I made this scrapbook page using the photos you see in this post!

What have you been doing this December?

I’m still working on my big 40th year album and it’s time to give you update #4! I’ve been having a ton of fun doing this project. I know I say that every time I give an update, but it’s true! I find memories are triggered by tiny little things — conversations with my kids, photos I find in boxes, random links on the internet. And approaching it one story at a time makes it feel manageable.

Here’s what I’ve been working on the past few weeks:

This page tells these stories:

• A photo of me from a few months ago
• A print-out of a Miss Piggy poster that I had hanging on the wall of my bedroom through most of elementary school (triggered, of course, by the new Muppet movie)
• A bit about my fairly unusual name
• A photo of my friends and me when we were on the high school track team
• A photo of me with my lovely cousin, Jessica
• My mom and dad
• The story of my love for Amelia Peabody books

The other side of the layout was filled with this stuff:

• A photo of me in front of one of the Great Pyramids. I accidentally wrote the journaling card that explains this photo in a vertical format when the photo slot was horizontal, but it was no biggie — I just slipped it in sideways. No stress.
• Next to that there’s a photo of me in the only suit I’ve ever owned.
• A postcard of my all time favorite kind of candy, only available in England
• A picture of my with my aunt and uncle
• A photo of me in LA taken the year after Zach and I got married.

This spread is a little different because I made a special 6×12 inch layout and stuck it in the middle. The left side shows:

• A photo of me from the years where I died my hair red all the time.
• One of me with my prom date
• A truly fantastic photo of my brother, cousin and me sledding. I’m making a horrible face and our winter clothes are of a beautiful early 80′s vintage.
• A photo I took with Cookie Monster and Elmo at BlogHer this year.

I had a few 5×7′s portraits from my bigger roles in high school plays that wouldn’t fit in the slots in the page protectors I’m using so I made this simple layout to include them and talk about my time doing drama as an extra-curricular activity. You can see the front and the back in the image above.

The other side of this page includes:

• A photo of me with memorable college friend — this was a little tag I made for a mini album that I never finished a few years ago.
• A list of things I’m thankful for. On Thanksgiving day I posted a sentence or two about things I was thankful for on Facebook every few hours. Afterwards I copied them all into photoshop and added in a few more to include in this book.
• A photo of me with a couple of friends I hung out with the summer between high school and college.
• A cute 10 year old photo of me and Zach
• A little bit about how I’m nosy and enjoy watching my neighbors. Judge me if you must, but I find people interesting!

This last layout is another one where I inserted a bigger item in a page protector.

The left side holds:

• A valentine Zach made me a few years ago
• My student ID from college
• A photo I found of the bulletin board in my bedroom that I took some time during my junior year of high school.
• A picture of the cook book bookshelf in our living room. I have a bit of a problem.
• A story about how I slept on a waterbed for my entire childhood.
• An Incredibooth photo I took last month.

I made the bulletin board and cook book journaling cards using Project Life Cobalt collection digital journaling cards. I bought the cards from the Clementine collection too, and I like those so much that I think I’m going to buy the paper version of the collection to use in this album. I think I’m going to do a Project 365 album again next year after taking a break in 2011, so I’ll use them in that album too.

The insert is some paperwork from my pregnancy with Augie. Early on, a test result came back showing that he had a chromosomal trisomy. After many more tests, it was determined to be a false alarm — thank goodness — but it was a time of my life that was totally and completely horrible. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me to look at this, but I have to include some of these things in order to paint a full picture of what my life has been like. The back side of this shows more of the paperwork.

The final page has this stuff:

• A photo with my brother when I was 3 and he was 6
• My favorite way to eat mac and cheese — with tuna and peas
• Princess Leia as Rosie the Riveter which is awesome in so very many ways
• A bit about my love for Christmas socks
• A few scraps of paper I found in a box — ticket stubs for Weezer and Beck concerts and a poem my aunt included with a Christmas gift many years ago.
• And finally, the neon sign for the bar my friends and I went to pretty much every weekend when we were in our mid-20′s.

Interested in seeing more of this project? Check out these other posts:

• My 40th Year Project
• Update: 40th Year Project
• 40th Year Project: Part 3
• 40th Year Project: Part 4

It’s time for another update on my 40th year album! I’ve been trucking along with it and I have a few more pages to share.

In addition to filling the small slots in the Project Life photo sleeves, I’ve begun adding in larger pieces of paper and mementos I’ve found in storage. So far, most of these larger items have been slipped into standard 8 1/2 x 11 page protectors and just stuck right into my binder in the pages I’m currently filling up.

One of the first items I found was a copy of the menu from my college graduation dinner. I must have mentioned the occasion when I made the reservation because the restaurant put a note at the top congratulating me.

The other items on this page include:

• A photo of some college friends taken just before we headed out to one of the big fancy dances.
• A photo of my cousin and me at Burning Man
• A print-out of the original Wendolonia website header (from around 1997!)
• A senior photo and some memories of one of my best friends from jr. high and high school
• A photo showing that I have the same sized feet as Frank Sinatra
• The back side of my pre-college reading list.

My junior and senior years I worked as one of the coordinators for my college’s student orientation and this sheet shows the logo my co-worker and I designed for all the printed materials and t-shirts. It’s pretty good, don’t you think? The other side has:

• A list of the websites I visit most frequently (printed from Ella Publishing’s List It! Everyday Life Edition)
• My first grade school picture and some memories about the dress I’m wearing
• A photo of me with my mom, Grandma and aunts
• An ode to my pencil sharpener
• A photo from a typically freezing SF Bay Area 4th of July

For the next spread I tried something a little different and I made a themed page. This one is about my politics. While I like the randomness of the rest of my book, I think I’m going to do a few more pages like this that center around a more concrete topic. I’m already gathering photos to do a page about all the homes I’ve lived in through the years.

The smaller page protector in the middle of this spread holds a card my amazingly talented Aunt Judy made me for my college graduation.

The next page has:

• My recipe for pumpkin pie oatmeal
• A self-portrait from a few years ago
• A photo that Wyatt took of me washing dishes and a note about how I spend half of my life at that sink
• My bento boxes.

OK, here’s the last spread I completed!

Here we have:

• A photo of me taken at the state fair a few weeks before my wedding
• Some writing about my love of roller coasters with a bonus drawing
• My homecoming dance photo from 1988 (there’s a weird reflection on the photo)
• Another self-portrait
• A picture my mom took of me in Monterey 20 years ago

This is another wonderful treasure. I wrote this list in 1996 (I’m guessing) loooong before I started scrapbooking. I have no idea what prompted me to write it, but it perfectly captures a very specific time in my life. A few of the items refer to things I don’t remember (Why on earth was I dry heaving over the kitchen sink all the time?? Gross!) but most of them took me back in time as I read them. I’m so happy I have this!

The flip-side holds another find from my big box of sentimental junk. It’s printed from a web site where you enter your birth date and it compares your age to a list of celebrities. It also tells you how old you were when certain historical events occurred. Now I know that Jesse Ventura is 21 years older than me, and so do you!

The final page holds these goodies:

• A picture of me that Zach took in Hawaii
• A photo of Zach at a fancy restaurant on our 10th anniversary along with a note about how much I love going out for fancy dinners
• A list of my all-time favorite teachers (the card was printed from Ella Publishing’s List It! Childhood Edition e-book)
• A photo of Zach and me wearing the tin foil hats I made us
• A note about my love for Castle (it was a rerun this week! Grrrr!)
• A photo Wyatt took of me when I was scolding him one day and a note about how I’m sometimes a mean mom.

Interested in seeing more of this project? Check out these other posts:

• My 40th Year Project
• Update: 40th Year Project
• 40th Year Project: Part 3
• 40th Year Project: Part 4

Remember last month how I told you I was going to make a special project for my 4oth year? Well, I’ve been busily working on it and I thought it was time to give you an update on my progress. I’ve been jotting down notes about stories I want to add to this book as I think of them, digging through boxes and adding bits and pieces here and there for the last month. I’m not really working on it every day like I’d hoped I would, but I’m still pretty happy with how much I’ve accomplished already.

Here are the pages I’ve completed:

This page has:

• a photo of me with my second cousin when I visited Europe in 1997 and a little story about a song I heard everywhere on that trip.
• an essay about my Starbucks problem
• a photo of me with braids in Hawaii a few years ago (I alway braid my hair on vacation when my hair is long enough)
• a picture of my feet from this summer
• a story about winning the book fair costume contest when I was Wyatt’s age (I’ve gotta find the picture that goes with it)
• a self portrait from earlier in the month.

UPDATE: After my dad saw this blog post, he dug out a picture of me in my Cat in the Hat costume and sent it to me, so I slipped that into the photo above the journaling card:

Man, I sure was cute! (And kind of surly looking.)

On this page:

• stuff about tomatoes
• a few recent Facebook status updates
• a note about one of my favorite end-of-the-day activities
• an insert from one of the series 5 Lego minifigs I bought recently
• a love letter to my mixer
• and a postcard from Iowa, my homeland.

One thing I’ve found as I’m working on this book: it’s way easier to find vertically-oriented things to stick in the pockets than it is to find horizontally oriented stuff. A lot of the printable cards and journaling prompts and most of the photos of myself that I’ve found are vertical so I’ve had to go out of my way to take horizontal photos and create journaling blocks in the landscape configuration.

Here are some more detailed photos of the pages above:

Here you can see:

• a photo of my messy desk.
• a bit about an album that was part of the soundtrack to my young adulthood and some of the memories that brings back
• the back of the Lego insert
• a photo of my new haircut
• a list of my favorite beverages
• some stuff about my besties who are far away.

And finally this page has:

• a bit about letterboxing and the stamp I carved last night
• a photo of me drinking a huge vodka and orange juice on my 19th birthday (shhhhh!) — this was one of a stack of tags I made a few years ago that was intended to be made into a sort of mini-version of this book. It was a little too small for the pocket, so I mounted it on a piece of coordinating paper and slipped that in the pocket. I’ll be adding the rest of these pages in too.
• a few little notes about my childhood nickname, my senior photo and my husband coming home from a trip
• a list of suggested pre-college reading that I tackled my pre-college summer. I highlighted all the books I read on the list as I completed them and kept at it all through college. Sad fact: I’ve only crossed two books off this list since I graduated in 1994!
• a photo of my best friends and me at our high school graduation.

So far I’m really happy with how this is coming together. I feel like I’m hitting a good balance of photos, memorabilia, stories from my past, trivia and stuff from my current life. I’d like to add a few of the bigger stories of my life still, but if I can keep this up, I’ll have a pretty good summary of who I am I think.

• My 40th Year Project
• Update: 40th Year Project
• 40th Year Project: Part 3
• 40th Year Project: Part 4

Today is my 39th birthday! Yay! Happy birthday to me!

I am a lover of birthdays and I have no absolutely no reluctance telling people that it’s my birthday. I invite people out to lunch with me, I drop it into conversation with abandon and I relish in the long list of birthday greetings I get on Facebook. (I don’t like it when people sing the Happy Birthday song to me in restaurants though, so please don’t ever do that to me!)

39 feels like a big birthday to me — not so much because of what has passed but because of what is coming. I’m about to embark on my fortieth year! Yowza. This seems like too big of a milestone to just let it go by with no reflection, so I’ve cooked up a project to work on this year. I call it:

Wendy’s 40th Year Scrapbook

I’ve been wanting to do a scrapbook about myself for quite a while now for a bunch of reasons. First off, if I’m going to scrapbook about anyone, I think it’s just as much my responsibility to scrapbook about myself as it is to scrapbook about my kids and the rest of my family. I really liked my self-portrait a day project that I did earlier this year and I’d like to extend that a bit. Also, when we moved I unearthed a lot of sentimental objects and papers that have been in storage for years — decades even! I want that stuff out in a book where I can enjoy it instead of packed up in boxes in the garage. My thinking is that if I do just a little bit every day — print a photo, jot down a story, pull something out of storage — it won’t be a terribly daunting task. And at the end of this year, I’ll have an awesome record of my life!

To start, I bought this fantastically gorgeous buttercup yellow photo album. It’s a basic 3-ring binder so I can put a bunch of different sizes of pages in it.

I’ve decided I’m going to primarily use these Becky Higgens Project Life page protectors. They have lots of different pockets in them — many of them 4 x 6 inches — so I can easily slip photos right into them. The other slots are 3 x 4 inches and I have a bunch of cards that size leftover from my Project 365 albums that I can use for those. She has more of these page protectors in different configurations coming out later this year, so I might get some of those too.

I put together a couple pages this morning to kick the project off. Some of the stuff I put in included a photo and part of the writing from my Strawberry Shortcake blog post, a print out of the poster hanging over my desk, a photo of myself looking awesome in guitar sunglasses, and a screenshot and some journaling about my addiction to Google Analytics. I filled in one of the gaps with some cute paper and a monogram.

The second side of the page had some Incredibooth photos I printed out all on one photo sheet, a picture of me in our family’s ridiculous birthday hat from this morning, a flower fairy card I found in a box, a sticker from Burning Man 2000 and a doily that was leftover from making valentines from either high school or college. I still have a couple slots left on this page that I’ll fill in later.

Other things I’m hoping to include:

• stories and photos from my childhood
• bigger pages with papers and stuff I’ve saved in boxes
• bits and pieces of my daily life (kind of like I did for Project 365)
• I’d like to dig into the story-telling prompts from two books I’ve had for a while but haven’t really used much — The Book of Me by Angie Pederson and The Journaler’s Handbook by Tracy White.

I’ll try to post some pages now and then as I get deeper into this project. Stay tuned!

Anyone want to join me?

Interested in seeing more of this project? Check out these other posts:

• My 40th Year Project
• Update: 40th Year Project
• 40th Year Project: Part 3
• 40th Year Project: Part 4