Project Update: Five of Us

Remember how I said I wanted to take a full-family photo once a year for the whole year?  Well, so far so good. We're nine weeks in, and we've remembered nine times.

To keep this project doable, I'm keeping it quite simple. We take the photo every Sunday, and there is no primping allowed.  Whenever we remember to take it, we take it.  (Alarm reminders on the phone help.) Since we usually go to church on Sunday mornings, we've been taking the photos in the afternoons, and you'll see that we are in various states of post-church unravelling.

I'm also using this project as an opportunity to practice very basic Photoshop Elements skills by adding a few digital embellishments and a number directly onto the photos before printing.

Here are our first nine weeks:

Poor Gutsy Dad was still recovering from his nose surgery from a few days before.  The balloons are left over from Madelyn's birthday, and I'm pretty sure Bronwen was actively nursing when this shot was taken.

This photo was taken on my iPhone at our neighbor's Super Bowl party. Thank God for the phone, since I had forgotten about the photo until that moment! You can tell Jillson was enjoying her friend's dress-up box.

Forgot until late in the day, so we had to take the photo outside. The neighbors may or may not have thought we were weird setting up the tripod on the lawn to take this pic. These photos are revealing how regularly my girls enjoy dress-up clothes! 

This one was taken just yesterday at my neighbor's house.  Please note that I allowed the kids to pick their own outfits, with no constraints (a challenge for Control Freak Me). Madelyn then got her outfit all wet playing in the neighbors tub (I have no idea what she was thinking), so she is wearing borrowed clothing. Funny. I am unshowered. (We skipped church.) The Gutsy Dad is on a business trip, so he's not in the picture.  Boo hiss.  I contemplated whether we should take the photo one day early so he could be in it, but then I forgot to do that, so that answered that.  Then I wondered if I should have him take a picture of himself where he is, and find a way to incorporate it, but I forgot to do that, too. So I guess it's just the four of us this week.

The printed and assembled version of this project includes a 4x6 journaling card, which I am printing out at home and writing on.  (The digital elements on the photos and the printable journaling cards are from Project Life, found here.  I went with the Clementine version.)

I rounded the corners and slipped the photo and journaling card into a very simple and cheap album I found at Target a few years ago.  (You can imagine my delight when I found this album already waiting for me in my closet. Equally exciting was the discovery that it has exactly 52 pages in it... to last a year. Shopping from my own stash.  Love it.)

The inside of the album looks like this when it is all together. Not complicated.

And there you have it. I'm enjoying watching the pages of this little book fill up.