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.

Move More Eat Well 2012

I've been spending little bits of free time in the past few days setting up the crafty side of some of my 2012 projects. 

Here's a look at the notebook I'll be using for my Move More Eat Well class.

Album cover:

Album spine:

Here's what the inside cover looks like. On the left I've got a tarted-up version of the first five weeks of my training plan for easy access. (After these five weeks are up, I can "archive" the schedule in a page protector in the notebook, and a new schedule will go on the inside cover.)

Here's a close-up of the first five weeks of my training plan. Underneath it is the schedule for my YMCA and the full Hal Higdon training plan off of which I've based my own schedule.

Title page:

I've already made two more spreads in this album, but they are not ready for sharing. Well, the pages are ready for sharing, but I am not ready to share them.

School starts again tomorrow, so I can begin to return to my regular routines. We've had just enough vacation, and I feel refreshed and ready to get back to "normal."

2012 Creative Projects

The new year is almost here, and I am getting pretty excited to embark on some year-long projects I have planned to fuel my creative spirit.

1. Take Twelve. I will be taking 12 pictures on the 12th of the month, for each of the 12 months of 2012. Each month I will make a two-page spread with that month's 12 photos.  (And yes, each page will measure 12x12.) I will be using the Take Twelve Guided Inspiration Kit from Ella Publishing to facilitate this project.

2. I will also be participating in Twelve, the new workshop from Stacy Julian over at Big Picture Classes. I am not exactly sure what will be happening in this workshop, but I've learned to just trust Stacy, follow her process, and bask in the resultant joy she inspires. I've made this bin with twelve dividers per her pre-class instructions. Can't wait to learn more about what we'll do with it.

3. Next. I'd like to take a family photo -- all 5 of us -- once a week a la Karen Grunberg's Us Right Now project. I may or may not be turning these into a simple photo album, or a slightly gussied up photo album (i.e. mini book). This will be the first year (of many, many, many I hope) in which we will be our full family of five. I think these would be fun to flip back through at the end of the year, with or without commentary, to see what we looked like once a week for 52 weeks. I think the key to success here will be setting up a photo-taking routine that is simple and quick. Karen appears to just sit at the kitchen table with a remote control on her camera. I'm thinking Sundays would be a good day for us...

4. I'm on the fence about what to do with my One Little Word for 2012. I am not ready to give up my word from 2011. I might just keep it for 2012, too. Then again, I might choose a new word. I am not certain whether I will make any pages or projects about my word this year. I loved what I started to create last year with my OLW. Perhaps I should just continue with that... Or I might just let it be my mental talisman. Hmph.

That's it and that's enough. I've got a few more plans in the works for 2012, but these are the ones related to creativity and/or memory keeping. If I am able to keep up with any of these projects, you can be sure I'll share the results with you here.

One Thing at a Time

This is the time of year when I am filled with ambition. I want to do everything. I want to decorate the house. I want to do special arts and crafts with the kids. I want to volunteer. I want to listen to every Christmas hymn, anthem, and ditty. I want to say yes to every invitation. I want to run more. I want to prepare for the new year and new challenges. I want to get a job and do it well. I want to be a better mother. 

I want to do everything I normally do (or everything I say I normally do but secretly don't do) and then add, add, add.

I know it is not possible. This is not a post about that. I don't need anyone to tell me "you can't do it all." I get that. I am not frustrated by that. I am not actually trying to do it all.

This is a post about wanting to do it all, and hoping that the want never goes away. This desire to do and be everything fuels me. This is such an exciting world; I get to be in it.

But ambition, when allowed to run rampant as it does this time of year, can be a bit maddening. It really needs direction. I say that because this week has flown by, and I feel like I've done everything and nothing. When, yesterday, I suddenly realized it was November 30th and that tomorrow (which is now today) would be December 1st, I was completely shocked. 

How did it sneak up on me?

It was, rather suddenly, fish or cut bait time for several seasonal traditions that I wanted to start on December 1st. I decided to fish.

Or, rather, to bird.

Two weeks ago at our church we participated in a morning of prepping for advent.  (Never mind the strangeness of preparing for a season which is all about preparing for something else.) I happily found myself at a table with my three children and my husband, and four out of the five of us were PAPERCRAFTING together.  Imagine my insane delight.

The idea is that each paper bird holds a part of the nativity story, and that each day in December we would read part of the story and talk about it as a family. Thus, through the season of advent, we would hear the Christmas story bird by bird.

So yesterday, when I suddenly realized the date, I got motivated. Madelyn and I finished it all up at home together. We found the sticks in our backyard together. We added numbers using stickers from my stash together. I added the verses and yarn by myself, and Maddie hung them on the branches by herself. I was so happy that it worked. That there were ways she could help. And that we actually did it in time to start "using" it today.

As I sat there trimming out 25 verses and tying on 25 pieces of yarn (which takes a lot longer than you would think), I realized that my seasonal surge of ambition was finally being directed somewhere.  I felt calm. I felt productive. I felt hopeful for everything else that is coming this month and next year.

I thought, one thing at a time, just do one thing at a time, and enjoy the time you are choosing to spend doing this one thing. You can't (and don't want to) snap your fingers and have all 25 birds done at once. You have to do it bird by bird.

Bird by bird!

How could I possibly have forgotten about Bird by Bird? I've loved this book (whose title has nothing to do with papercrafted advent birds) since my freshman year of college. I had this passage tacked on my wall over my desk all through grad school:

Say to yourself in the kindest possible way, Look, honey, all we're going to do for now is to write a description of the river at sunrise, or the young child swimming in the pool at the club, or the first time the man sees the woman he will marry. That is all we are going to do for now. We are just going to take this bird by bird. But we are going to finish one short assignment. -- Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

One short assignment. Done.

Don't Ask Me How or When I Made This

It's been a while since I posted anything crafty. 

It's been a while since I've done anything crafty. 

I think life with three kids 5 and under is taking its toll on my creative life. Plus, the spare time I do manage to find is being used in other ways: to read or to dream about reading, to write or to dream about writing, and to dream about working--that is--finding a sense of accomplishment outside of motherhood.

Which is not to say that I don't love and get some sense of accomplishment from my current "job." Nor is to say that I don't dream about papercrafts quite regularly. I think the Gutsy Dad is tired of hearing me exclaim: "Man, I just want to go scrap something!"  

"Then do it already," he says. 

But obligations and other preoccupations step in.  Or, let's face it, sleep steps in. I also dream of sleep.

So here is my latest. I don't even remember when or how I snuck the time in to make it. It was a few weeks ago, maybe.

(photo of Jillson is from her pre-k class in Kansas from last year)

I hope you all are enjoying a beautiful weekend. I sure am.

Anatomy of a Mini: part four

These first two pages came together rather quickly.

The above photo in the "play" layout demonstrates my belief that imperfect photography sometimes makes for the perfect photo. This was one of those "self-portrait," hold the camera out at arm's length and see what you get type pics. We all look a little off, but somehow this picture just makes me smile. Every time.

Here's a (blurry) look at the the two layouts together. Thankfully, their pairing is less chaotic than the previous double-pager.

Next up: a fantastic word, two favorite "leftover" pictures from our wedding album from Wedding #2, and journaling that reflects exactly how I felt and feel. Scrapbooking nirvana achieved.

The final layout in the mini should come as no surprise to anyone who has read this post. The quotation on the left page holds a ton of meaning for me. It's from a larger passage of Still Life With Woodpecker by Tom Robbins. This book was a life-changing read for me. (I read it one summer during high school.) It wasn't like the other literature I was reading. It was so rogue. I think I underlined something "meaningful" on every page. 

At the end of the novel, I read this and my heart nearly stopped:

People are never perfect, but love can be. That is the one and only way that the mediocre and the vile can be transformed, and doing that makes it that. Loving makes love. Loving makes itself. We waste time looking for the perfect lover instead of creating the perfect love. Wouldn't that be the way to make love stay? 

Love is the ultimate outlaw. It just won't adhere to any rules. The most any of us can do is sign on as its accomplice. Instead of vowing to honor and obey, maybe we should swear to aid and abet. That would mean that security is out of the question. The words "make" and "stay" become inappropriate. My love for you has no strings attached. I love you for free. 

I've been holding onto these ideas ever since then. 

So when I was prompted with the word "free," the quotation came floating back to me. I love it even more now that I can read it in the context of my own relationship. I especially love that the word "free" holds extra meaning for us. As a young couple getting a grasp on our finances and digging ourselves out of educational and credit debt, we used to celebrate many, many things that were "free." We would challenge each other to come up with fun things to do or see that were free, and when we found them we'd say "And guess what?  It's FREEEEEEEE!" and "We love free!"

The quotation on the right is a longer excerpt from a poem called "The Daydream" by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. (You can read the whole thing here.)

When the Gutsy Dad and I were first married, and he had to go to Korea for a year without me, I stayed behind in Austin, TX. As it turned out, a man who was an extremely influential mentor in my husband's early career was a guest lecturer at UT that year. He and his wife took me under their wing. She inspired me because she was kind, independent, and not defined by her husband's (extremely successful) career. That is harder than it sounds when your husband does what mine does--even for someone like me with proper and official Women's Studies training. She and I talked honestly about how I could make a go of it, being supportive of my husband without losing myself. She was enthusiastic and genuine and very patient with my naivete.

When we moved away from Austin, she gave me this calligraphy print, which was my introduction to the Tennyson poem. (It's from a different part of the poem, hence the slightly different wording.)

I've had this print, framed, hanging on my wall in every home ever since. (If you look closely, you can see the upper left corner of the print has been chewed. Tilly did this. When we lived in Gig Harbor, WA she went through a major twit phase. One day while I was at work, from what I could tell, this picture fell off the wall, the frame broke open, and Tilly helped herself to the paper.)

In its current position in our Georgia home, this quotation is, quite literally, the center of a very happy life.

And that's it. That's the end of the anniversary mini. You can see the other parts here: cover, part one, part two, part three.

Anatomy of a Mini: part three

Moving right along in the mini album. (Cover is here. Part one is here. Part two is here.) These pages are fairly self-explanatory, so I won't go into great (and often boring) detail.

But I will say this about the "enjoy" layout below: the blue butterfly hiding Madelyn's private parts and the orange/pink circle on Jillson do not actually appear on the layout in the album. In the album, they are 100% nakey. I just felt the girls might prefer it if I did NOT share their private parts with the entire internet.

A rare photo of the Gutsy Family pre-kids:

A favorite quotation from Eleanor Roosevelt (thank you, 10th grade American history class), paired nicely with a photo from the Gutsy Dad's marathon and another from a stations-of-the-cross hike through the German countryside.

Unfortunately, when these two pages ended up next to each other in the finished album, the result was rather busy. Na ja.

"Cherish" turned out to be one of my favorite layouts in the album -- our crazy life by the numbers. (And one of the more recent pictures of us. Since I made this album in August, this is the only photo in which Bronwen "appears.")

Only one more installment to go!

Anatomy of a Mini: part two

More pages from the 10th anniversary album that I made for the Gutsy Dad. (The cover can be seen here; the opening pages are shown in this post.)

This layout shows a picture from our actual wedding--the one that happened ten years ago. (Photos of me in a big white dress, appearing elsewhere in this album, are from Wedding #2, which happened only 9 years ago.) 

The prompt word "share" reminded me of this favorite quotation from Buddha. I definitely believe that happiness grows when it is shared. (Please see footnote about my Sing & Smile campaign, below, for more on this topic.) But I also believe that the opposite is true: burdens must also be shared. How else can you lessen them?

This has got to be one of my favorite family portraits of all time. Madelyn is featured, um, prominently. Jillson is barely visible. All you see of the Gutsy Dad is his hands. And yet it really holds a whole lot of wonder for me.

One of the challenges I faced in putting this book together is that I could not choose the focus words -- those were chosen for me. I knew I wanted to address certain themes, so I enjoyed trying to figure out which words to use for what theme, and what photos would help augment the theme. 

We live in a strange state of acquiring more, but trying to do with less. It's tricky for me to explain. But there are times when I can look around at the man and girls I love and think this is it; I need no more than this. This is never truer than at the end of a long separation.

Here's a look at the two pages together:

And that's it for today, dear friends.

xoxo,

The GM

TOTALLY OFF-TOPIC FOOTNOTE:

The Sing & Smile campaign:

As many of you know, I love singing in choirs. It helps that I also love church music. I know not everyone is a singer (and maybe more people would enjoy church more if they didn't feel forced to sing?), but sometimes--as a choir member--it bums me out to process down the aisles, singing my little guts out, only to see people with their faces buried glumly in their hymnals or--worse--staring into space, determined not to sing, not to even look at any of those weirdo singers walking down the aisle. So, shortly after joining the choir in Kansas City, I decided to launch a one-woman sing & smile campaign. Why should I allow grumpy parishioners to ruin the fun for me? Do I really need to pretend not to see them? Nope. I have enough theater training to know how to throw a dazzling smile. So now I sing and smile and thoroughly enjoy myself. I make it a point to smile and make eye contact with as many people as possible. (Not in a creepy way; more like a "hey, how are you?" way. At least that's my intent.) There hasn't been a single Sunday since I started my smile campaign that I haven't smiled, from ear to ear, while singing the processional hymn. Every now and then it pays off -- one grumpy person gets snapped out of gloominess and smiles back. It is true that these people may be smiling back because I look kind of crazy and they are trying not to laugh or display annoyance. It is also possible that not a single one of them is willing, suddenly, to sing. But it's also possible that these people are actually happy. And that is enough. To me, this is happiness shared.

Anatomy of a Mini: part one

Realizing this may be of interest only to my scrappy friends (and to those of you who are diehard romantics), I thought I'd devote some time to the innards of the anniversary mini-scrapbook I made for the Gutsy Dad.

At the end of August I participated in a free two-week workshop from BPC called "Words to Live By." Every day, for 12 days, a different instructor introduced a special word with thoughts and ideas about how to interpret it creatively. I challenged myself to view each of those words in the context of my decade of married life.  

These are the results.

A word or two about the album: this is a 6 x 6 mini album, which started out completely naked. I love this size. Jump rings and the lack of page protectors make it possible for the pages to be as chunky as you want. It's very easy to use 4x6 photos (full bleed), crop photos down to fit inside, or to reprint favorite photos at much smaller sizes at home. I also love the freedom of being able to have elements hanging off the margins of the pages.  

The cover of this album can be viewed here. It's the first time I've stitched through so many layers (the chipboard letters, the patterned paper, the cover itself), and I am so pleased the needle held. I didn't trust the adhesive on those letters and took a cue from Karen Grunberg to stitch across the bottom of the letters.

Above and below you can see the title page. Since the album cover had that cute window through which to see and read the "words to live by" tag, I felt I had to do something to protect the printed tag from smearing. What you may or may not be able to see upon closer examination is that I added a page (the aqua strip) connected to a 4x6 transparency overlay.  In the photo above, the overlay is over the right-hand page. Below, the overlay is "open," and the title page is exposed.

Our first word was "give." I could've gone in a million directions with this word. Ultimately, I decided to focus on the greatest gift I have received from the Gutsy Dad: strength.

The photo is from our second wedding. (I'm fairly certain you can click on the photo below to read the journaling.) I think my favorite thing about this spread is the pennant I made (upper right).

That's it for today. Stay tuned for future installments detailing the innards of this mini-book.

Yours in scrap-geekiness,

The GM

Today Makes Ten

Today, the Gutsy Dad and I celebrated our 10th anniversary (of our actual, first wedding) by having a perfectly regular day.

The day began with baby hiccups at 2:30am. Audio courtesy of a slightly groggy Gutsy Mom and her iPhone:

In the (real) morning, all five of us went to the bus stop together.

The Gutsy Dad went running with Madelyn in the jogging stroller; I paid bills online and made some business calls.

We thought about going out to lunch so we made ourselves presentable, but then we remembered the deli where we wanted to eat is closed on Mondays. So, instead we stayed home (looking presentable for each other) and ate some of the awesome church ladies' food.

We read naptime stories with Bronwen and Madelyn.

While Maddie napped, we gave Bronwen her first at-home bath, made some inky footprints of her adorable tootsies, weighed her, and took 300,000 photos of her since she is officially one week old today. (She weighed in at 6 lbs 15.5 oz, up an ounce and a half from her discharge weight.) Scroll to the end for the adorable baby photos.

While Bronwen napped, we opened anniversary presents: gorgeous cranberry & sienna pottery which my parents brought back from Village Pottery on Prince Edward Island. I absolutely adore the colors in these ceramics. The Gutsy Dad and I have been collecting this pottery for a few years, but our collection took a serious hit last year when a shelf fell off the wall and shattered most of our pieces. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for re-starting our collection!

And I gave the Gutsy Dad this mini-book which I made in August and have been dying to share with him.  I'll share the inside pages with you in the days ahead. 

After Jillson came home, we read stories and practiced sight words, and then the entire Gutsy clan went on a family walk. Please note the random head gear fashioned by the girls out of scrapbooking paper. These fashions were designed primarily by Madelyn. She and Jillson had "crowns;" Jillson's was modified into a helmet-topping loop thing. Zephie tore her paper collar off in the first 30 seconds of the walk; Tilly kept hers on. 

I still can't believe Jillson is finally riding her bike as well as she is.

Dinner was again courtesy of the church ladies: tomato basil soup with garlic bread, green beans, and fresh corn off the cob. Iced tea. Kinder Schoko from our German neighbor for dessert.

Now the Gutsy Dad and I are watching the season premiere of The Sing-Off, snuggling with the littlest diva, and enjoying vanilla ice cream with homemade chocolate sauce.

I loved today.