The Last Pages of the Christmas Journal

The day after Christmas, we loaded everything into the van and headed off to Chicago. Much to our surprise we were there for dinner, and were able to celebrate Christmas with Sarah, Adam, and Caleb after dinner.

I got this crazy idea in my head that I wanted a car with a Christmas tree on top to embellish the journaling card. I didn’t have any dies or stamps that worked, so I went to the Silhouette shop and quickly found this cute car. It had been so long since I used the Silhouette, that the software had changed (and the whole interface), so getting this cute car on the journaling card turned out to be quite the time-consuming process. I was happy with it, although the state of my workspace was pretty awful by the end of the process. Lesson learned: use your tools regularly!

Nothing much happened on the next two days. Everyone was tired, and happy just to hang out together. On the 29th, though, Tracy and I decided to take Caleb to the Chicago Botanic Garden to see Wonderland Express. We’d gone last year, and loved it, and were lucky to get early morning tickets this year so it was a lot less crowded. This year Caleb was able to find all the items on the scavenger hunt which we all enjoyed.

Caleb celebrated his fourth birthday on the 30th. His first “friends’ party” was on the 2nd of January so that will go into my Project Life album. We kept this day pretty low key, opening a few presents off and on during the day. The photo of Caleb on the bottom left is on the annual poster that Adam makes each year. When Caleb wakes up the poster is there to greet him. This year each of us wrote a message to him. There was enough snow that Caleb was anxious to go outside, and he and Adam had a fine time in the front yard.

I guess one advantage to being behind in the process is seeing what other people do in their Christmas albums. One thing I’ve always liked, and saw repeatedly this year, was an end of the year review. I’ve never taken the time to print out all the photos for one before, but I loved going through all the photos from 2015 and trying to decide which ones to include. It also made me aware of some I wish we’d taken! In the end, I could have filled another page easily. I love that you can see in just two pages how much my grandchildren grew during the year.

Now, once I get the Valentine Day’s projects completed, I need to get back to last year’s Project Life pages. I promised myself I’d never get this far behind again, but we’re just too busy for me to keep up, and it’s not going to improve any in the next couple of months. I’ll just keep snapping the photos, and keeping my daily journal, and eventually I’ll be caught up again. Thanks for hanging in there with me!