Project Life. Week 52 and our 2012 end page

I know it’s already half way through February, but I’m so determined to finish off sharing my 2012 layouts before starting on 2013 (which will happen next week, I absolutely promise!). Week 52 was a wonderful week. We’d had an absolutely crazy week leading up to Christmas, and being able to actually celebrate Christmas itself with our church family and our family relatives was such a joy. Like Week 51, I decided to give myself two spreads to play with, to allow myself more detail and flexibility in documenting that week. (Remember you can click on each image for a larger version.)

Christmas Eve marked the beginning of Week 52, so I included a photo of our Christmas tree which I took that night while Rick was out leading our Christmas Eve service at church, and the boys were asleep in bed. It was a beautifully peaceful night. There is also a photo I snapped at a cafe earlier that day (top right) – significant because it was right outside that cafe that I managed to lock us out of our car with Angus and Jamie inside it. Talk about sheer panic and feeling like the worst mum ever – thankfully, the window lock wasn’t on and Angus was able to wind down his window, allowing us to unbuckle his seat belt, freeing him to climb to the front of the car and please the unlock button for us. I could’ve kissed him for hours on end for saving the day. And yes, to remember the occasion, I added journalling to the photo (something I hadn’t done for a long time) so that down the track, I can look back and remember not to do that again!

On Christmas Day, we went to church in the morning and then we went to Rick’s parents place for our Mason Christmas lunch. Most of the photos from the lunch I dropped into 8×8 inserts like the ones I did for Week 51 but I decided to include one of my favourite photos from the event as the title card – the delicious strawberry and mango pavlova that Rick’s sister and brother-in-law brought for dessert. My goodness, I am feeling hungry now just thinking about it. The other photos on this page are of the boys on Boxing Day morning mucking around in our bed. So sweet, they are.

Page 2 simply has more photos from the rest of Boxing Day. We went to our favourite cafe for an early dinner (the kids ate free – woohoo!) and then enjoyed looking out at the beach and watching the scene unfold before us. Seeing that smile of Pete’s in the cafe makes me so happy. He is such an awesome kid, full of so much life and energy.

This next page documents a cafe date with the boys, a beach picnic, a Skyfall movie date night, and a visit from a couple of friends of mine from Hong Kong. That movie date night was such a highlight for both Rick and me. We had mud crab cooked with bean vermicelli for dinner at a Chinese restaurant and it was the best. Rick, who apparently did not like seafood when we got married, ate more than his fair share of the contents of that crock pot! At one point, I looked up from my bowl of rice, thinking there would be plenty of bean vermicelli left, only to discover that Rick had eaten it all! It is so wonderful to remember moments like that.

I feel truly blessed to live in such a beautiful part of Sydney. The top photo was snapped during a post picnic dinner drive to Freshwater, and the bottom photo was taken at Mona Vale beach. I love the fact that the iPhone 4S camera captures scenery so well. The other photos on the page are all of family: we saw my parents off at the airport on the 30th as they were flying to Hong Kong for a month so I made sure Rick got some photos of them with me and the boys – a yearly tradition of sorts. Later that same day, Rick’s parents came over to our place so I made a point of taking photos of them with Rick and the boys. It’s pretty hilarious how Jamie gradually disappears from the photo strip – it’s almost impossible to get him to sit or stand still for photos these days. This page is such a wonderful reminder of how blessed we are to have our boys and our parents. I feel happy just looking at it.

This was my first ever Project Life end page. As I was reviewing my photos from Week 52, it quickly dawned on me that I would make the end page all about New Year’s Eve. It seemed like a fitting thing to do. We’d taken the boys down to the beach that evening for an early picnic dinner (surprise, surprise), and I’m so glad I managed to snap a few shots of us amidst the crowds and chaos. I’m particularly happy I got a shot of Rick and myself, which is not something that I often remember to do these days. I framed that with white space for the first pocket of the page, and added some journalling to record some details of the evening, along with a few sentences about the year. I converted the other photos of us into black and white for some visual consistency, and I absolutely love the silhouette photo I got of the crowd (and the distant kite in the sky) as we were leaving. The bottom two photos were taken at our friend’s house later that night, when Angus and Pete got to hold sparklers for the very first time.

The filler card on the left simply says: “Goodbye 2012. It’s been amazing.” I designed it in Adobe InDesign, using white font on a solid coloured background. The typeface is Rockwell.

And truly, 2012 had been amazing. New church. New friendships. New home. New life.

A new beginning.

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Other posts you might be interested in reading:
My weekly Project Life process from beginning to end
Tips on taking photos for Project Life
What you need to get started with Project Life

You can read all my Project Life posts here.

Materials used: Becky Higgins Design A page protector; Kodak 210gsm glossy premium photo paper. All photos printed on the Canon MP630 Pixma.

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Project Life is a system created by Becky Higgins that is designed to simplify your efforts to document life and help get your photos into a book. To learn more about the product and how to get started, click here.

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Tagged as: memory keeping, project life