Having mono for the last few months has really wiped me out. I’m still pretty tired most of the time and after having been sick for much of this fall there is a lot of work to do to get our household back up and functioning with any semblance of normalcy. Once Thanksgiving was over, the specter of Christmas coming hit me like a ton of bricks. There is so much to do in the next few weeks — shopping, cooking, decorating, air travel — that Christmas is looking like a big pile of chores to me.

Yikes! A big pile of chores? That’s not how I want my Christmas to be. I love Christmas. And it’s definitely not how I want Wyatt’s Christmas to be. At three, he’s just at the point where he’s getting pretty excited about Christmas and I don’t want to be the crabby mom who ruins that for him. So I’ve decided to add one more thing to my to do list, but it’s a fun thing so it’s OK. I’m taking Shimelle Laine’s Journal Your Christmas class. Every day for the month of December, she sends a journaling prompt related to the holiday and I’m supposed to write, scrapbook, or whatever I feel like doing with it. My thinking is that if I spend a little time thinking about what I like about Christmas each day, all the other stuff about it won’t seem like such drudgery. I tried to do it a couple of years ago, but I made it to about day 4 before it fell by the wayside and I didn’t have any time for it. I’m hoping I’ll do better this year.

There are a few things I’m doing to make it easier for me to stay on track. First off, I chose a smaller format to make it easier to knock something out every day. I cut a bunch of 6×6 inch pieces of white cardstock and inked the edges in dark grey and I’m planning to use my new favorite scrapbook toy, the Bind-It-All to put them all together at the end of the month. I also pulled all of my Basic Grey Christmas paper out of my paper pile and threw it in an envelope along with a little bit of coordinating cardstock and I’m planning on only working with that stuff. I also created a bunch of number tags too (idea stolen from Every Jot and Tittle) so I could have one for each day and to help tie all the pages together. And finally, I’ve decided that I’m going to take the ideas that I like from the class, and ignore the ones I don’t.

Case in point, my first page here. This page was supposed to be a manifesto about doing a Christmas journal, but that’s just not my style, so instead I did a page about decorating our tree last night.

Journaling reads:

Setting up the tree is one of my favorite parts of Christmas. It was a special thing my mom and I did together when I was a little girl and now I’m working to make it a special thing with my son. We play holiday music on the computer, decorate with twinkly lights and I tell Wyatt about our special ornaments as we hang them on the tree. At three, it’s all still new to him and he loves to play a little with each decoration. Some of his favorites this year were our flying saucer and a train with Donald Duck on it. Not surprisingly, these are our most toy-like ornaments. He doesn’t really understand the need to space out the ornaments yet. He figures if a branch is good enough for one ornament, it’s good for as many others as will fit. You can see an example of one of his ornament clusters below.

Materials: Bazzil cardstock, Creative Cafe rub-ons, Basic Grey patterned paper, number tag of my own design.

Page 2 was made on the back of the first layout and is about the weather:

Journaling reads:

Though I’ve alwasy thought of Christmas as a snowy holiday, I’m beginning  to come to terms with the fact that Wyatt may never associate snow with the holiday. The fact is, we live in California. And though we typically go to Iowa for the holidays, it’s not often snowy when we’re there. All those memories I have of sledding, snowmen and the hairs in my nostrils freezing with each breath are just not going to be a part of my boy’s childhood. But that’s OK. We’re make new memories for him!

Materials: Bazzil cardstock, Basic Grey patterned paper and stickers, Cosmo Cricket chipboard snowflake, Martha Stewart glitter, number tag of my own design.

This is a little album I made with my new Bind-It-All. It’s about 4.5″ x 2.75″. The cover is made of chipboard that I painted green.

For the inner pages, I used coin sized envelopes. I cut the flaps off and then punched a half circle out of the open end.

I then put a piece of cardstock in each envelope with a photo adhered to it. Little pieces of ribbon were stapled on for pulls.

All the patterned paper and die cuts are Basic Grey Mellow.

I made this little frame thingy to hang on the wall while Wyatt “napped” today. It’s an etched acrylic frame with a photo and paper layered behind it. I used my crop-a-dile to punch the holes for the ribbon which was very satisfying. Up until now, I’d only punched paper with it. Finally, I put a little chipboard heart on it.

I ‘m not sure what I’m going to do with it yet. Maybe take it to work? Or maybe I’ll hang it somewhere in the house.

I got my new craft apron from dirty laundry today (check out the etsy shop). I loaded it up with my scrapbook tools and Zach took a few pictures of me wearing it. I looooove it!

And now I’m off to do some scrapping!

I’ve had this wooden W sitting around my scrapbook area for awhile now. My idea was that I would put it on the wall in Wyatt’s room. I’ve taken a couple stabs at decorating it in the past, but never really liked the result. I was cleaning up a little today and decided to just make something out of it and be done with it. I glued some cowboy paper on, cut his name out with the Cricut and called it done.

It’s not my favorite thing I’ve ever made, but it’s good enough.

I fully realize that these are probably only funny to me: