I Really Should Go to Bed

This evening has been weird. Reid went to sleep at 7:30, so my entire evening timeline has been thrown off. Did I use the time to cover albums? to put together a scrapbook page? to work on my Christmas planner? to do the dishes? Nooo...my rear-end has been on the couch watching The First 48 and NCIS reruns.

I am getting back into my scrapbooking groove. In January, I took Stacy Julian's class on how to organize photos and scrapbooks. And, I have the book Photo Freedom, so I understand the system. I bought all of the organizers, but that is pretty much where it stopped. I am FINALLY starting to get stuff in the system. I bought a stack of American Crafts albums with the chipboard covers and I have started covering them and putting on tags - All About Jackson, All About Reid, Holidays, People We Love, Places We Go, All About Damon, All About Me. Jackson has several volumes and I think I have finished two of his five. Reid has two volumes and one is finished. And, yesterday I finished up covering the Holidays album.

Last summer when we were in Atlanta, I dumped a little cash at Archiver's and they were having a promotion with Shutterfly - 50 free prints for every $50 spent. Let's just say, I ordered all of our vacation pics, plus our Labor Day Colorado trip pics and only had to pay shipping! :-)

Our Sunday School class is having a crop October 23/24 and I am planning to crop our Atlanta trip and have some back-up kid pages to work on, in the event I start cranking out the pages. I stocked up on letter stickers Monday and, now all I need is for Hobby Lobby to put paper on sale before now and October 23...then, I will be set.

As soon as I get all of the albums covered and get all of my photos organized, I would like to start albums about my parents. I would like to make albums for me, each of my kids, my brother and his wife, and his kids. Grandma also wants one. I thought about doing digital albums and then ordering multiple copies, but I have some memorabilia to work into them. I need to sit down with all of the photos and memorabilia and figure out the best way to approach them. My kids and my niece and nephew will never know my Mom and they will have vague memories of my Dad, so this is something that is very important for me to get right.

I am also taking a five-week class from Big Picture called Take the Crazy Out of Christmas, which builds a Christmas planner. I saw the class last year and wanted to take it, but didn't, thought I could do it on my on. Didn't work very well. I like the way they set up the planner and, even though I won't use all of the categories they set up, I am going through the set-up exercises so I will have a complete book...just in case, I want to change my mind from year to year. The teacher is a little too much "cheerleader," so I am bypassing the audio messages, but the rest of the class is good information and a little scrapbooking.

I love my Cricut a whole lot more than I thought I would. It is so much easier to use than any of the other systems I have had. It just cranks out my handy dandy letters, I put them through my X and shazamm I have my headline! Love it...now, just have to add to my cartridge library. :-)