I want YOU…

as you know, I’ve started using PL for this year, and I LOVE it. if you didn’t know that, you can read all about my love fest with PL here. I happen to like doing the photo-a-day method, with each page featuring a week of our life, and the completed book will be a a concise chapter of our family’s life for the year 2011. I think it’s awesome. it alleviates SO much guilt I was feeling about NOT scrapbooking or doing anything to organize, document, preserve, and display all the pictures I take of my family and the stuff we do as we live out our daily lives. I’m doing it as it happens. I print pictures EVERY week. and put it in and journal about each one, so I don’t get behind. altogether, I’d say I spend MAYBE an hour per week on this project. I LOVE doing it this way.

BUT… you don’t have to.

I follow becky higgins’ (the creator of PL) blog, and today she had a post featuring some of the many different ways people are using project life, to fit their own needs.

read it. seriously. there is so much flexibility and you can use it to suit your needs/wants/dreams, whatever they may be.

and here’s the thing. you can be as creative or not creative as you want to be. you can be as artistic or not artistic as you are. you don’t have to be exceptionally well organized. you don’t have to have a lot of “stuff” or space or tools or even TIME, or all those reasons people usually give me about why they want to do something with their pictures but don’t.

and here’s the OTHER thing. are you a hardcore scrapbooker? did you used to be? do you have a lot of “stuff” and tools and the like? yup. me too. remember, I used to be a creative memories consultant. in NO WAY am I knocking traditional scrapbooking. I have spent many hours (and dollars) on traditional scrapbooking and I have loved every minute of it. I still, very much, love and recommend creative memories albums and products. but realistically, I know that all of those excuses people have always used for why they can’t/won’t scrapbook ARE LEGIT. back when I only had 1 kid, I didn’t think they were. hahaha! there’s a lot of stuff I didn’t think was legit when I only had one kid. LOL. stuff like picky eaters and drawing on the wall, and potty training nightmares… (not that my kids do ANY of that stuff… ahem.) my point is this. you can use as much or as little of that “stuff” as you want. you can crop and mount and embellish your photos and layouts as much as you want… but you don’t have to. you can spend time and plan and get all artistic if you want… but you don’t have to.

consider it. seriously. you won’t be sorry.

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first day of school

so, we started school today. this is a big deal because it is OUR first day of official homeschooling. you know, here. at home. most everyone reading this is already aware of the fact that shane has been homeschooled since first grade, but that he has spent the majority of that ‘school’ time, with my mother as his ‘teacher’. this was a fine arrangement, she was willing and more than qualified, and he was learning. but for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being my mother’s current cancer issues, it had become clear that it was time for me to take over. AND,with layla being 4 now, i really wanted to do a little bit more preschool stuff with her. being a little bit of a chicken flake, i (with much urging from my loving husband) decided the best route to go would be with a packaged curriculum. i figured it would be the most time-effective way to cover what we needed to cover, and be somewhat dummy-proof, but at the same time, having the option to supplement with as much

project life–week 18

the three amigos… this trio of the neighbors’ poultry is always in my parents’ yard. and spark way too many “why did the chicken cross the road” jokes. these are the two lilacs I gave my mom for mother’s day two years ago. last year, only one bloomed. looks like this year, both will have some nice flowers! when I get to the bottom of a bag of chips and they’re too small to effectively scoop up salsa, I just dump them in a bowl, pour salsa over them, and eat the whole delicious mess with a spoon. not ashamed. dave got himself a new set of bike tools. everyone had to check it out. first grade music concert. micah had a solo! saturday baseball fun. pitching, homerun derby, bouncy houses, dunk the coach… and of course, eating kettle corn and horsing around.

vomit phobia

most people who know me relatively well are aware of my ridiculous fear of vomit. so essentially, the last year or so has been the embodiment of my worst nightmare. we have now embarked on stomach flu episode 4 of the last 13 months. is that not ridiculous? is that not excessive? what's the deal? should i be concerned? or maybe i'm just paying my dues. shane never had the stomach flu until he was 6, but now we've got it all the time. since may last year, he's now had it 3 times. between january and november of last year, layla had it 3 times, and now we're just waiting to see when she's going to come down with this latest strain. WHAT THE HECK! i never had it this often as a kid. maybe i was just lucky. i don't know. is this normal? how many times can you get this stuff in a certain amount of time before you should think that something is wrong? and how can you prevent it, if at all? i don't really think we have weak immune systems. th

how to make a bad situation worse:

around 7:30 on thursday evening, we had a situation like this: not a good scenario. about 2 hours later, we were in this situation: awesome, right? so how do we get from point A to point B? like this: see the awesome metal ‘edge of death’ on that bowl? yeah. that’s the weapon. in my effort to speedily get the bowl under layla’s face, I actually HIT her in the face with it, and the edge SLICED her upper lip open. yup. right open. it was NOT awesome. I freaked out, of course. she’s still in the middle of feeling terrible. dave was not home yet from a meeting. yeah. mom is majorly freaking out. fortunately, dave walked in the door just as I was sending the “GET HOME NOW!” text. it wasn’t really bleeding a ton, but it was obvious that this was not a band-aid situation. so I called my dad to come and stay with the boys while we took her in to the ER. it’s very nice to have an older kid, so we didn’t have to wait for him to get there before we could leave. but not knowing how long it

Micah’s Birthday

This kid had the audacity to turn 13 yesterday… As was expected, I was a bit of a hot mess about the whole affair. Here’s his “last day to be 12” photo. He ran out of fingers a couple years ago, so taking a page out of Shane’s book, he borrowed a couple of feet from the cat to make 12. But, not too old to choose Lucky Charms for his birthday breakfast. He got his happy birthday facetime call first thing and got to open his gift from Gramma and Skip while they watched… He’s had a boom box on his list this year. You might remember that 2 years ago, it was a Walkman. The obsession with 80s audio continues. Gramma found this one and it seems to fit the bill. Looks totally retro, plays and records tapes but also has radio AND a USB port so he could use some modern tech with it, as well. So, he spent the morning taking advantage of the birthday allowances of not having to do his weekend chores and lifted time limits on video games… all while listening to the radio or one

rachel's continued ramblings

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