Last Week

Last week I spent much time putting together a photo book through My Publisher and finished today and sent it to print. It was a 100 page book with over 400 pictures.

The building process, drag and drop photos from  above into the spaces then add words.

  Here is the link which will take you to my finished book and you can click through it. I had a coupon for $35 for the full 100 page book, which without the coupon would have cost over $120. Apparently My Publisher puts out that coupon from time to time.

Here are a couple sample pages:

It was a lot of work to hurry and put a whole year's worth of pictures together and I was so glad to be done with the project. I don't get as much enjoyment out of putting that type of book together as I do out of making scrapbook pages, but I am not going to go back and scrapbook previous years, just get them into photo books like I did for 2012. In fact, most years prior to 2012 probably aren't even going to get much in the way of words, it takes too much brain power trying to remember the past.

And here are last week's pages. 

This past week

Okay, so this week isn't over until tomorrow, but I got so excited to get my week pages put together and had plenty of pictures already.  I left a journaling spot that I will fill in after tomorrow.

I think these pages are some of my favorite I've made yet. Not only do I love the design and combinations I came up with, but I was much more thoughtful in my words and memories. I wrote a letter to my children and paid compliments to them, such as in the "surprise of the week" I added.

I keep notes on my iphone in a notebook app and try to at least every night type something up for the day. This is the only way I am able to remember much and get it all together at the end of the week. Without writing it down daily I wouldn't remember hardly a thing. In fact as I was reading back over this weeks stuff I remember thinking, "oh, I forgot about that" and it's only been mere days since these things have happened.

Up till now I hadn't decided if I was going to print these as I go or wait until the end of the year to print it into a bound book. I think I have decided to print as I go so the children can look at these often, not only to see the pictures, but also to read the words. This is why I was glad I came up with more thoughtful things to put in there this week. I think it is good for kids to see and hear the positive things we think about them. Especially because it seems like I spend too much time getting after them and saying negative things out of frustration.


yes I am pregnant, 32 weeks along, due at the beginning of September and it is a boy.

Today

Some photos of our day. 

This last one has nothing to do with us, but I've never seen a grill hitch before, they must be serious tailgaters. 

April 2013

July week 2

So far so good on keeping up with my weekly scrapbook pages. I try to take pictures and take notes so that when i put it all together it is fairly fast and easy.

Here are my notes I kept from last week, and I just copy and pasted them into the layout.

Sun- char bore his testimony

Mon-jer home from work, pulling out bushes, girls room a mess, only set table for mom and dad, those that work eat, dinner spaghetti 

Tues- more bushes out, Becca slams finger in door, girls play at Erica's house, get all wet in the sprinklers, boys ball game, both get great hits that they get all the way home on, mom reads with Becca on the trampoline, dinner pulled pork sandwich, coleslaw, watermelon 

Wed- mom drove to st George, Jer stayed home with the kids, Tom had his friend bday party

Thurs-boys baseball, dad takes kids to drive in, mom goes to movie with gma, gpa, Susan, Calvn and deb

Fri- char baseball game, dad takes kids to work party at docs house

Mom does some shopping with gma and deb, eats out with gma & pa

Sat- all day baseball games, Tom plays 3, his team places 2nd, char and toms team play against each other, dad gets sunburned, 

Char calls mom at least twice a day, to see how I'm doing, sweet boy

Mom eat out with aunt sue, play rummikub after dinner

May

May was a lovely month. The main thing I remember about May is our trip we took to Utah to Pine Valley. The other thing we had pictures of was roasting marshmallows in our backyard on our fire pit. I used to wonder why people made such a fuss about having a fire pit in their yard. Well now I know because we love using ours. Recently it feels too hot to want to build a fire, and it stays light until 10 pm so we don't really want to stay up forever late. May was the perfect month for the fire pit because the evenings were still chilly and it felt nice to have the fire.

January and February

I didn't take many pictures at the beginning of this year which made it very easy to do pages for those months, since I barely had enough pictures to put on 2 pages for the months of January and February. One reason is we were busy renovating the house during those months and that consumed all of our time. Also that is when I found out I was pregnant and I was very tired and spent a lot of time in bed.

First week of July

Tom's birthday was Saturday. We had a lot of fun. We had some friends in town visiting and we took them to Dierkes Lake and Shoshone falls. After an afternoon of fun at the lake we had birthday cake and presents.

I'm trying to do a two page spread for each week capturing some of the highlights of the week. This week was a busy one with visitors on Tuesday & Wednesday (Uncle Steve and family on their way to Tame's wedding in Oregon) and Friday & Saturday, the Prime's, good friends from graduate school.
Also was the 4th of July and Tom's birthday (which each got their own page for even more pictures).

This last picture page is obviously courtesy of much input from two little girls who love all things pink and sparkly.

house remodel before and afters

I'm finally getting our house remodel before and after book put together. I am using the iPhoto book maker and dragging and dropping pictures in and adding words at the bottom of the page. I've only got a few of the pages done, but I thought I would post some of them here.

The Entry

Living Room

Some of the kitchen pages

Family Reunion Picture page

I wanted to capture the family reunion in only 2 pages - very hard to do since I took over a hundred pictures. So in the end I did a third page full of small pictures so I could include more.
The family reunion was fun and the kids had a great time with their cousins.
The weather was supposed to be 100 degrees, but fortunately each afternoon it cooled off, and we had shade thanks to shade tents.