The Adventures of Me: December First

December Daily Day 1

I have to say after completing my first day, I’m definitely a believer. I’m more in
love with this project than ever!

I couldn’t believe how quickly this first page came together and I’m digging the overall style of the page. Kinda like a magazine column. It makes me happy, anyway. As a mentioned several posts ago, when I made the foundation pages, I primarily used Cosmo Cricket papers, but also threw in some Echo Park and some old Daisy D’s from my stash. I did all this before knowing about the existence of the Studio Calico kit, so I will use the album either for another project or for next year’s DD.

I took all these photos on December 1 and did the journaling once I had those taken and printed out. I had anticipated just taking some pictures of my tree and hopefully getting Ellie to look upon it lovingly, but didn’t even think about how my sister, Parrish (Ellie’s mommy) had gotten a super cute advent calendar so she and Ellie could start this Christmas tradition.

I will preface the rest of this with this little tidbit: We have an interesting living situation currently as it is me, Parrish, Ellie, and our mom and dad all living in the same house. It’s not the most desirable of situations, but for the time being anyway, it is the most practical and is surprisingly far better than I thought it would be when I made the decision to move back home this year. I say all that to say this: the big giant blessing out of all of it is getting to see my little musher grow and change every day. How many aunties get that privilege??? Thus, we all got to participate in the Advent calendar activity.

I included in my journaling how Parrish wrote activities for each day on little slips of paper. Of course, Ellie, being only 16 ½ months old, can’t read them, but she did have that little slip of paper clutched in her tiny hand for quite some time after they removed it. Tonight’s activity: listening to Christmas music. But just listening to the music wasn’t enough for the Horton family, oh no…silly dancing had to be involved. Ellie has taken to doing the cutest little squeal when I spin her around, so we danced and spun and acted crazy and we didn’t get any fantastic pictures of it…mostly pictures of me smiling and Ellie clinging onto me for dear life.

I read an article in CK a few months ago describing how to print multiple small pictures on a 4x6 photo sheet using Microsoft Word, so I’ve had fun playing around with that my last few layouts, including this one. The top two pictures were taken using the Instagram app on my IPhone. LOVE it! I had hoped to take all the pictures today using the app, but it didn’t work out how I’d hoped.

Once I had those all sized and printed up the way I wanted them, I journaled and added little caption tags for the photo. Those were printed out, cut out and spritzed with Mr. Huey’s Holly Berry…the special edition spray from the SC December Daily kit. I just happened to pull out the little mini envelopes from the kit and found this tiny Ellie picture fit inside them perfectly, so was thrilled to be able to add that to the layout.

The little sticker at the bottom and the “1” were part of the foundation, so I worked around those. I recently reorganized my stash and have a little drawer of just holiday stuff and found these Making Memories “Happy Holiday” fabric tags in there. They are way old, probably from 2004 or 2005, as is the SEI (are they even still around???) tab sticker I used on the left hand side.

I think I’m going to try and tab most, if not all of my pages, as I go through the
month. I like the idea of being able to see the days add up as I progress through the album. Finally, I filled in a little hole between photos with a cardstock flower sticker and a chipboard “cheer” sticker, both by Echo Park. I also used a couple of the buttons by Pebbles that were also included in the SC kit.