My 40th Year Project

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?

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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
• 40th Year Project: Part 5