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.
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
