I jumped on the Project Life bandwagon!

I totally love my memories, but I've never been the best memory keeper.  A glaring reminder of my failures is two small jars of sand that I keep in an old suitcase.  When my husband and I were married a decade ago on Siesta Key in Sarasota, the wedding planner gave me a small amount of sand that was scooped from the very ground where we were forever joined.  Aww, just look at those two kids...

I thought it was pretty cool to have that sand, so I decided to get sand from every beach we visited on our honeymoon cruise.  I missed the first beach in San Juan, Puerto Rico--got some sand in Barbados--and then missed every other St. Whatever island that we visited, because, you know, collecting sand is just SO complicated.  And in those ten years, there have been dozens of other islands and beaches.  And no, I've not since collected a bit of sand intentionally. (For the record, however, my car always has good ol' Melbourne sand in it...)

That said, one night I was up at 2am with a discontented wee nursling, naturally perusing Pinterest , and stumbled across something called "Project Life".  I.was.blown.away.  It's like a plain photo album on crack--in the sweetest of ways--of course.  I've admitted a million times that I love scrapbook paper but not scrapbooking, and it's because scrapbooking is too daunting a task.  Coming up with an effective layout is just more than I can handle--but with Project Life, the layout is done for you and you just fill in the slots.  Here's what one of my Project Life pages (dedicated to Elliott's 3rd birthday) looks like:

I think it's important for moms (okay, and dads, too) to be memory keepers in some capacity--we all find our own way to do so.  Up to the point that I started Project Life I had a memory box for each of my girls, and I have a notebook in which I keep a timeline and random funny things.  I'm not excellent at keeping up with writing things down, but I'm getting better, in part because I started keeping a sentence-a-day-journal.  (Sounds exactly like it is--write one sentence daily. Bam.  That's your journal.)

Project Life is technically a brand, but I like to think of it more as a memory-keeping springboard.  You can buy all of their fancy cards and such, but for me I've settled into using the PicMonkey editor to create the majority of my book.  Though I do have the Project Life album and page inserts, in addition to a handful of the ancillary cards that make the books pretty, I am finding my own "style".  I prefer, for instance, using one font throughout my book with lots of white borders around my pictures.  Trial and error have definitely led me to that discovery, but clean and simple is working for me. {Not to mention I'm kind of cheap, so going crazy and buying a bunch of stuff just isn't my style.}

Lately, I've been using my Instagram photos to catch snippets of daily life and it's pretty easy to edit those into photos to add to my PL Album.  There's a digital version of Project Life, but for me I've always wanted something tangible.  In fact, my tech-nerd husband is on board with this memory-keeping system because he thought it was kind of a shame that we had ten years of pictures stored on our computer but it was never easily accessible for our family's enjoyment.  Project Life has allowed me to print just the highlights of our lives (I average about one page to document each month).  Elliott loves looking through the photos and I love sharing our book with family and friends.  As a kid, I adored looking at the photo albums my mom kept, but I, like most people these days, never did anything with our family's photos beyond downloading them from the camera to computer.

Now I do--and I'm so very happy.  Have any of you tried Project Life?  What are your thoughts?  Or better yet, how do you keep your family's memories?

Much love,
T

(I hope you're looking forward to some more Project Life posts... they're forthcoming!)