project life | a summer week

These days, I'm wrapping up my son's project life album, which documents each week of his first year of life. For those of you who are concerned about the scope of something like this, being able to keep up, etc., I'll let you in on a little secret...

Our son will be TWO at the end of August.

Se la vie. I kept up pretty well throughout his first year and kind of fizzled out at the end, moving on to other projects and what-not. Nick deployed. Life got busy. The album moved to a shelf and stayed put.

But I'm determined to completely finish it this summer, and I'm trying not to beat myself up about it.

The whole point of this is to have something tangible we can flip through, which documents the first year of our first child's life. I literally have a couple weeks to go. So here's a layout from late summer twenty-twelve.

A close-up of the left side:

And the right:

Time period: Late August 2012

Memorabilia: The first two deployment calendar squares in an insert (see below)

Moments documented: a visit from Nana, transitioning Ben to milk (and off of bottles!) just before his first birthday, an adults-only dinner celebrating friends' 10-year anniversary, preparing for deployment.

I play around a lot in Photoshop, although that certainly isn't necessary for project life. I like how this 4x6 photo pocket came out with the mix of color and black + white. Sometimes a caption is helpful.

And sometimes it's just not necessary. This is from the right side: two horizontal photos on a 4x6 with some white space added to allow both photos room to breathe.

This week I added an 8x10 insert. The red block you see is a calendar square, which is something we do for deployments. This particular week, I had to put together the first two calendar squares, so I attached them to a sheet of white cardstock (front and back) and added the back story as a caption.

Here's the layout in the album:

Project Life is a memory-keeping system created by Becky Higgins. You can learn more about it HERE. For this layout, I used the Design A pocket page and a journal card from the Seafoam Edition.