Week in the Life 2015: Tuesday

Hi guys! Thank you so much for your kind comments on my post from yesterday 🙂 This community of memory keepers is seriously wonderful. It’s so cool to be able to connect with people who “get it” and see the value in documenting and telling our stories. I so appreciate that you come here and take the time to listen to my stories AND share your own! Thank you so much!

Here’s what we were up to Tuesday August 18th…

This was not really a “typical week” for us. I usually work part time, 3 days at the hospital and stay home with Emily the other 2 days, but this particular week was a full work week. The flip side of my little journaling pocket is a printed, enlarged digital card from the Black and White story kit. And on the right side of this spread, I went with a 6×8 full page photo that had lots of white space and added some digital art from the Week in the Life digital templates. There’s that black and white and yellow combo again (love!) with a strip of striped paper and chipboard star stapled on.

During the actual week of August 17th-23rd, I spent a bit of time in the evenings typing up some notes about the events of the day in a Word document. It gave me a chance to reflect on some of the little details. Details about how Liam and Emily interact with each other, how bathroom time is never really private time (I did a layout about that one), and things like what we listen to in the car in the morning. Those things are hard to capture with photos alone and I love having them written down. As I was putting my album together, I was SO GLAD I DID THAT!! I was able to copy and past big chunks of text directly onto my photos and it saved me a ton of time. I fell off the wagon of my note typing routine by the Thursday afternoon and don’t have quite as many, but still, I will definitely do that again next year and probably throughout December for my December Daily album this year.

I have a little voice in my head when I’m doing this kind of documentation that says, “don’t forget to make sure you get in the pictures too!”. I try to make good use of the self timer on my camera and my phone, and use whatever happens to be in the area to prop my camera up. I know one of the “rules of photography” is that you’re not really supposed to cut off people’s heads 😉 I end up with a lot of photos with my own head cut off and I’m totally cool with that! I feel like those photos tell a different kind of story and you get a different perspective on the environment. This photo of us getting our shoes on to go in the morning might be one of my favourites from the week. I propped my camera up on one of the kids chairs sitting near the front entrance and set the timer to get it. So in my photo, I wound up with all that green space from the chair and it was the perfect spot to add my journaling. I’m also kind of in love with this particular little embellishment cluster with pieces from the Week in the Life Kit and the am/pm Story Kit.

See? Another “headless” selfie of me eating lunch 🙂 This project is definitely very photo heavy, but there’s still lots of space to include the words right on the photos.

I really like how this little embellishment cluster turned out too, all from the Week in the Life kit.

My parents really helped me out this week by picking up the kids from daycare in the evening while I was still at work. They gave me some much needed kid free time to get groceries and enjoy a few minutes of quiet. You’d think looking at that 3×8 insert that I have 12 foot ceilings or something, but I don’t 🙂 I added some extra white space here to accommodate my journaling using this trick, and I really like how it turned out.

On the flip side of the insert, I added my journaling to the white space of the photo again but I turned it around to run vertically up the side of the page. Just something a little different and fun. The second insert in this spread is an enlarged digital card turned printable from the Black and White story kit, with some stickers, that echo the sentiments of the journaling on the photo.

I’m really having fun playing with rotating the orientation of my text for a different look. This is also a digital journaling card enlarged to a 4×6 canvas and rearranged a bit to add more space for journaling. I put together a super quick video to show you how I did that.

My last page for the day is a 6×8 photo trimmed to 2- 4×6’s with a wood veneer embellishment from the Build Story Kit.

Thank you again for stopping by today! I’ll be back tomorrow with more of Wednesday’s spread.