Well two and a half months later and I’m finally putting together this album! Before I share more I have a few thoughts:

>I love this project and definitely want to participate each year. I bought and used the kit, but had to put together my own album since they had sold out. This year I’m pretty sure I’m going to buy all of Ali’s kits and albums because I don’t have a huge stash of my own, I love her style, and having it on hand really helps me get it done.

>I do hope that the official week in 2015 will be earlier in the year, because this was right before the holidays and there was just no way I could devote the time I needed to put the album together.

>My three biggest sources of inspiration for the album are Ali herself, Jodie, and Andrea. If you felt like it you would be able to see where I’ve copied some of their ideas. :)

On to the album! Above you can see my title page. The front little card tells my “reason why.”

On the back of the card I used alpha stickers for our initials and typed out some info about each of us, plus what we’re into. I liked adding type to the album like this, but I didn’t have the time to keep it up so everything from here on out is pretty much hand written.

For the main title page I used a family photo from the week and stamped the dates on a label.

Now we get into Monday! I decided to use ALL black and white photos for this project. I thought that it would be easier to edit and keep it from feeling too busy. I planned to use more embellishments than usual to add color, but as it turns out I am who I am and the “extras” were kept to a minimum. In the future I think I’ll do color photos, but this was a fun experiment.

For the first photo of each day I printed a 6×8 (using Persnickety Prints) and added a label with the date. I think it’s fitting that the first photo of anything turned out to be coffee.

On the right side of the page are some morning photos.

On the left are more morning photos. I didn’t try to add too much journaling because I wrote everything out at the end (you’ll see).

On the right is a 3×8 insert where I put pics of two of my meals and wrote what we ate.

Behind the insert are photos of the kids at daycare dropoff, a filler card I created, and I stapled the chipboard 1 right onto the page protector.

On the left: my work station at the time, getting pulled over (yikes), to do list.

On the right: daily gratitude list (want to include this for each day), Liam at a checkup, the weather, and a Monday filler card.

On the left: David being funny with Meredith after work, favorite moments card + filler, David nebulizing Liam (thank goodness we don’t have to do that every day anymore!).

On the right: David giving Meredith a bath, Meredith doing puzzles, a 4×6 filler card I created using VersaMark stamping.

This is the last spread for Monday. I wrote out two of Meredith’s quotes for the day and put a picture of us right before bed. Then I wrote out ALL of my notes for the day and they fit perfectly on a 6×8 blank sheet of cardstock. I did this for each day. I tried underlining it for Monday but the rest of the days I left plain because I liked that look better.

I will post each day as I get it done!