DAY SEVEN | Today I took Erin to see Frozen for her 11th birthday. Erin is a girl I babysit, but her family has become so much more than that. I was so glad I got to do something special for her birthday, just us girls. (I celebrated her brother’s birthday with just him earlier in the year too.) That evening, Dakota and I went to his company holiday party. It was a lot of fun and he even had to go sing up on stage with a group of guys. It was hilarious! To bad I only got half of it on video (and not the better half). I included the program that was set out on the tables and then a photo of us and one of the trees that was there for decoration. (Again, I don’t have a large printer, so I printed this at Wal-Mart).
DAY EIGHT | Today was an Epic fail. Every year we go to a nature reserve to see bald eagles. We chose this weekend to go because it was the Eagle Days event (meaning you can usually see the most bald eagles this weekend than any other weekend). But, we woke up to snow on the ground! We only had about an inch and the roads weren’t too bad, so we made the small trek to the reserve. And then we get there….and it is closed!!!! UGH! So not fun. Dakota and never been there and I was excited to take him there and to continue the tradition of going each year. And to make things worse, they had about 100 bald eagles there the weekend before so we would have seen a lot this year. (Last year we had a very mild winter-as in no coats- and only saw 17 eagles.) Oh well. So instead I took pictures of all of us in the car. At least we tried…
DAY NINE | Day 9 was a quick blurb about my Junior League Christmas party/meeting.
DAY TEN | On day 10, we decorated the Christmas Tree. So many memories came flooding back as we opened years and years of ornaments. For my page, I printed two 6x8 photos and glued them together back to back. I added the red pompom ribbon to the front photo and then white ribbon to the back photo. I also cut out words from one of the papers from the kit to go along the side of the ribbon to serve as a journaling bit. The right side I added photos of us decorating the tree. In our family we collect a lot of ornaments each year, so I added a photo of the ornaments for 2013.
DAY ELEVEN | I dedicated day 11 to our first snow (which happened on the 8th, but hung around for a long time.) It has been a few years since we’ve had snow this early in the year and I loved it! I cut one of the page protectors in half to accommodate day 12. I love the multiple layers the next 3 days show.
DAY TWELVE | Today was 12of12. The ending of my 3rd year doing this project. And it has been so rewarding. I printed my photo in a 5x7 and included the journaling on the back of the photo.
DAY THIRTEEN | I didn’t have any content for day 13 so I added some photos from around the house. Some things are the same each year, and some things vary. The village always changes slightly year to year and the white trees are new this year. I tired to make sure I got pieces of the house that I didn’t include last year. I just stuck to 4 photos with no embellishments because the photos themselves are pretty busy, I didn’t want to crowd it even more.
DAY FORTEEN | Day 14 was tradition…and moments. Dad and I put the train up. The Lionel train I got when I was 3 because dad was tired of having tea parties. When I was little, we used to put it up through out the year just for fun and built lego bridges for it. The last few years it has gone up for Christmas. We hope to get more track so we can have it go around the Christmas tree and not in front of it. (Sorry for looking so awful in these photos, it was Saturday afternoon and we all were still in our jammies. But that’s what Saturday’s are for.) The white blob is a blurred about part of my address. It showed through the see thru pocket that says train.
DAY FIFTEEN | Day 15, Dakota and I did shopping for Christmas. We are almost done. I added a little filler card from the kit and then cut out some wrapping paper and added some letter stickers and wood veneer letters to write out ‘season of giving’. We have so much wrapping paper in our house and I’m glad to get a little bit of it in this book. Eventually we will run out of paper we have had for years.
DAY SIXTEEN AND THOUGHTS | For day 16, I included our Christmas card. This year I designed it and printed it though overstockprints.com. I also added an envelop to show where we live this year. I was thinking about this the other day and if I had been doing this project from when I was little, my books would have had 5 different addresses on where we lived during Christmas time. The 3 houses we have lived in, the year we lived in an apartment while our house in VA was being built (also the first year we had a real Christmas tree because our fake one was in storage.) And the 6 months we lived with my grandparents while our house in VA was being sold. And both grandparents are gone now. But I also realize that one year I’ll be married and this book will hold a whole new slew of things. This book has already varied so much from last year.
