Where I’ve Been.

Sorry gang. I’m sure you’ve all been checking here to see if I’ve updated lately, right? Uh huh. That’s what I thought. Well, I’ve been busy. And, as per usual, not busy with the things I should be doing, but instead the things I want to be doing.

I signed up for a free online class that Jessica Sprague is offering. The class is called “Stories in Hand”. It started yesterday and registration for it was closed last night. But those of us that did sign up are having a blast! No one was even really sure what the class was about. Jessica simply said she was going to teach us the system she developed for telling her stories, organizing her thoughts, etc. It sounded intriguing and it was free, so I figured what the hell.

I’m SO glad I signed up! It’s fantastic! We had been given a list of a few supplies before the class started, so I had picked those up last week. Yesterday, for the first day, we were given files to print out for the cover and the tabbed pages for the binders we had bought. Here’s the cover:

And here are the tabbed pages we printed out and put into the binder. There’s one for “Roots”, one for “Self” and one for “Family”.

This is what they look like:

Within the Family tab, she told us to create sub-tabs for each member of our family. So I have one for Steve and one for each girl:

So that was it for day 1 of the class. Today, I got very excited when I saw what the next part was. We were given more files to print out for in the binder. And on these files are hundreds and hundreds of questions to ask yourself and then write/scrap/video/etc. about. Whatever way we decide to document it is up to us. The class is more about teaching us how to keep track of what we want to document, prompts for possible things that will be forgotten if someone doesn’t write them down, etc.

These are the contents and questions we were given for each of the tabbed sections:

There are at least 20 pages of those questions for EACH tab. My god, I’ll be writing and scrapbooking forever. LOL! I’m sooo excited though! I really DO think it’s important to document the things in your life. The things that will be long forgotten after your gone unless someone takes the time to record it forever. Think of how cool it will be for my kids to have the stories behind these types of questions. I wish I had one of these from my mom!

Jessica also gave us these pages to print out for the binder:

We were told to put at least one of those in each tabbed and sub-tabbed section, to write down the stories you want to eventually document. So cool!

I’m not sure what we’re doing tomorrow, but I believe Jessica mentioned making a small notebook or something. After that, we’re going to begin actually using the system, doing exercises, etc. I’m pretty pumped! I wish I would’ve posted about the class here before registration was over so some more of you could have signed up. It’s NOT for scrapbookers. There’s certainly a lot of us there, but many haven’t scrapped a day in their lives. The pages and files are as easy as clicking Print, cutting them down, and punching holes in them. So no comments here about me being creative. This is ALL Jessica this time. LOL!

If she ever offers this class again in the future, I’ll make sure to post about it here and I URGE all of you to sign up for it. Even if you don’t want to actually scrap/write/etc., it’s cool just having the hundreds of questions at your fingertips. I can see it being fun for your kids to pick one of the questions and let you tell them the story. Just awesome stuff.

Anyway, that’s where I’ve been the past few days. Printing, cutting, and punching holes. I’ll be back later though. I NEED to post the photos of my evil sister-in-law and my mother-in-law sliding down the ginormous slide at Bounce U over the weekend. Their facial expressions are simply priceless. LOL!

Later gang! :)

Year at a Glance Album

As mentioned yesterday, my custom deck of cards from Artscow arrived last week. There’s an option to turn off the numbers from printing on the cards. Since there are 52 cards in a deck, I thought it would be fun to upload a picture from each week for the past year and have them put on the cards. Then I had Steve drill a hole through the whole deck and I held them together with a standard office binder ring. (Note: I’ll be buying a smaller ring. This was just the only size I had in my stash right now. I’ll also tie some ribbons and stuff on the ring to “pretty it up”.

I had uploaded a design to put on the backs of all of the cards, so I just took a Sharpie marker and wrote a little bit about each photo on the back of them.

In Photoshop, I put a little “strip” on each photo and typed “Week of _______”.

 It’s been fun so far. Just looking at it this week, we discovered that during this week last year, there was some snow on the ground. Far cry from the almost 70-degree day we’re experiencing today. LOL! The girls get a kick out of it and we end up talking about the picture and some stories from whatever event the picture is from. Good stuff. :)

And once again, I disappeared.

Wow. I’m really slacking on this blog thing. I think it’s partly because I’ve spent most of my time over on Facebook again [waving to Facebook friends], partly because work has been busy (when I decide to actually work, that is), and I’m working on a bunch of projects for Christmas and stuff. I seem to have missed Halloween AND the big election here. Wow.

OK. So let’s start with a few photos of the kids on Halloween. I don’t have many of Grace because she decided she didn’t want to go Trick-or-Treating, so I only have the one of her on the day we tried out her costume idea (for now… I have some others of her I haven’t edited yet). She went to a bunch of other Halloween-related parties, events, etc., so when she didn’t want to trick-or-treat, I didn’t push her.

So here’s Grace. She’s a punk rocker.

Don’t you just love the attitude? LOL! (And obviously, when we went out in public, she wore a different shirt that didn’t bare her midriff.

And now, onto my little Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. She had a BLAST trick-or-treating!

This was the day we bought the costume. She had red sparkly shoes for the Halloween events. See? She had to wear many, many layers because it was freezing, but you could still tell who she was supposed to be, so she didn’t care.

In other news, I got my Deck of Cards mini photo album thingamajig the other day and will come back later to show you pictures of that. It turned out pretty cool if I do say so myself!

And now, I need to enjoy the last 15 minutes before the girls come bounding through the door from school. So I’ll be back later!

OH! And I have to show you why my children have reaffirmed that they are indeed mentally disturbed freaks. LOL!