Project Life - December Daily and the finished project

Today is the day I finish off Project Life for 2013 for you all, and I'm so excited. I can finally take this weight off my shoulders...well kind of?  You see, I've already started my 2014 Project Life album so I'm still at it. Documenting life really never ends as I tried to explain to my hubby last night, but that's the beauty of PL as well. Its easy enough to continue doing without a lot of pressure.

Ok so as I mentioned yesterday, I wanted to share the month of December separately because I actually combined my normal Project Life along with a second project called December Daily. This is a project that Ali Edwards does every December 1st- Christmas Day. The gist is to concentrate on one story or moment each day that may or may not have to do with the hustle and bustle of the holidays. Its just a way to document the holidays differently. Ali does this project completely in its own 6x8 album but since this was my first year doing it, I did not want to complicate my life anymore than necessary so I decided to make this a part of my Project Life Album. I would just be documenting something daily instead of weekly within my normal 12x12 page protectors. No problem.

To differentiate these pages I started this section with its own cover page. Simple and honestly not super decorative but it worked and it was done. I'm always about just getting it done.

Ali gives you page ideas and one of them was to write a letter to Santa, so that's what I did. I added this letter on the back side of the cover page to set the tone for the rest of these pages, and I added a collage of our lights and decorations for this year. I think I'm going to do that every year just to see If we end up doing things differently.    
                                                                                    

I started my daily pages by doing 2 days per side so here are days 1 and 2.  I started day one by taking a picture of the very first X-mas card we got in the mail. I love getting Christmas cards and I thought it would be nice to remember that Jerry's boss was the first one to get her card to us. Day 2 was Cyber Monday and I wanted to remember that for the first time ever Jerry and I actually took huge advantage of some really great deals that day and got a pretty good jump start in our holiday shopping. I really felt like this took off a lot of pressure and holiday shopping was fairly stress free this year and that felt sooo good. I hate last minute shopping. Definitely something to remember.

 

I'm not necessarily going to talk about each day to spare you too much detail, but I hope you can see that I really did try to document one simple thing that would make that day special to us from our new Elf on the shelf, a Starbucks coffee treat, an attempt to make a new holiday decoration to a special day for Mikey.

  

So day 7 I dedicated a whole page to Mikey's B-day...it just had to be that way. The next few days were kind of jammed packed so I had to resort to my collages to get a few more details in, but I was happy with that. Another picture I think I will also do annually will be the wrapping paper I will be using that particular year. It will be fun to see the different themes or colors used under the tree.

We had a jammed packed weekend including 3 Xmas parties one Saturday night along with another celebration the following day.  That following week I missed one day, but I wasn't going to worry about it. The rest of the week was busy with the start of our novenas, more food binges,

 and school holiday functions for the boys.

 

This last week before Christmas got a little tough since that's when my mom had her accident and things got a bit chaotic and stressful. We tried to keep that holiday spirit going by attending the remaining novenas and using them a source of prayer for my mom and her recovery, and we tried to make Christmas Eve as special as possible for all of us. It proved to be a special week for me to remember all the love and support our friends provided us. True friendship at its best this week and I couldn't have been more grateful to be in their company during this time.

Chrismas Day took its own page as there was all kinds of fun to be had as we spent a little bit of time with all our different family members throughout the day. And I ended up finishing up the week with New Years Eve antics we wont soon forget.

An overall note about this December Daily: One thing I was pleasantly aware of, if you look back, you'll notice as I did that I really spent a lot more time documenting in words as much as I did with pictures. Much more than I have done all year to be honest, and that has given me such immense satisfaction...more than I can express! I've always been really big on journaling, but I've definitely been lacking in that area throughout the year, and this project helped me remember just how important journaling is to this whole process. So I've made it my goal for 2014 to concentrate on definitely including a lot more journaling in my pages. 

And here is the last page of my 2013 album.

Completing this page made it official for me. It was finally done!!!

Woohoo!!!

But the story definitely doesn't end here. As I start working on 2014, I'm already implementing some changes to reflect some things that I've learned from doing the project this past year. I'm learning what works and what doesn't to make this experience better or maybe just different...again, we'll see. 

 Thank you all for coming back post after post to go on my family's picture journey along with me. 

 I apologize as I know that there are only so many pictures any one person can look at a time, but I appreciate your patience and sticking with me throughout the year.

From my corner to yours...hope you'll be back for 2014!

XO