Project Life: Mine and a Review

I'm not really sure where I heard about this project first, but I knew as soon as I saw it I wanted to do it. It is called Project Life. I talked about it a little here and I'm so proud that I have kept up with it since the first of the year.

I was originally going to do it just for us (Tim and I) but as the time got close to the birth of Max I thought it would a cool idea to document his first year. In the beginning it was all about him, but as I read what other people were doing with theirs I thought I would change it up a little and make it more about what happened his first year.

This first page (below) is on Max's birthday which happened to fall on New Year's Day, January 1st, 2010. I love the feeling of a fresh start. The kit comes with everything and this first page isn't how I think it was designed to be, but I made it work for what I wanted and there was to much going on to just put one picture and write a small baseball card story about this. I mean it was the birth of my first child, right?!
This is more how it is suppose to look. One card and one picture for each day to make a total of a week, but I know your are saying, well there are 8 picture spots and 8 card slots and there are only 7 days in a week. If you look in the bottom right corner you will see a blueish-green piece of paper. On this piece you are suppose to stamp the dates there (stamp also included in kit) and the extra baseball card slot is suppose to be another card that is similar to the "date card". I only did this a few times. I took a lot of my cues from how Ali is doing her Project Life. Which I totally love! But I thought about using the extra baseball card slots for extra pictures. I thought it was a waste of space to put some random looking card in there. If I didn't have a picture to put there, I just put a piece of mail, a receipt, or something else that was relevant to Max like a tag that came off a new outfit he got.

I also had some extra page protectors that I wanted to use for other items that were bigger than a 4 x 6 photo and that I didn't want to fold up in the baseball card slots. Below you will see it was a card made for Max by Max's Godmother's son, Hayden. I wanted to keep that so I put it in a 8.5 x 11 page protector.

I also wasn't afraid to put the vertical pictures in there too. Just because the picture was vertical I wasn't not going to put it in there because it didn't go with how the book was laid out. The one thing that I did do was to make sure that all the vertical pictures are going in the same direction throughout the book.

Also in the kit you will find these tabbed 4 x 6 cards. Recently I learned that if you fold them in half they will fit in the smaller slots, not sure why I just figured that out but I did. But I use these to tell a longer story. The one you see below in the bottom right corner is about Max's first 4th of July. The funny part about that is I don't have a picture from that day. So I used the story to go where the picture would go. The other thing that I have learned doing this project is that if I don't take a picture that day then it's okay. I was really up tight about not having a picture for every day of his life but I got over that quickly as I realized that there are other things that are more important.

So what do you do if you have a whole lot of pictures from one day that you want to put in your Project life book. Well there are two things you can do 1.) You can make a 12 x 12 layout and put it in there. The kit comes with 12 x 12 paper, for what I assume, to do just this or you can do 2.) Put a 12 x 12 page protector in there with six 4 x 6 picture slots.

My mother recently came for a visit and there were so many pictures that I or she took that I couldn't pick just one so this is how I solved it. I numbered all the pictures on the page, then I took one of the 4 x 6 journaling cards and wrote my journaling for each picture next to the corresponding number. Simple, effective, and it still fits in with the idea of the whole project.

So that's it. I just wanted to share what I was doing and what I thought about Project Life. I think this is an awesome idea to do for the first year of anything (child, wedding, year before retirement). I plan to do this for our next child whenever we we get there. It will start the day they are born and go to their first birthday. It can be time consuming but when you look back you will be so proud. I know I am. I will keep you updated on how it is going. Remember there is no wrong way to record your memories.