Scrapbooking and Journaling Made Easy

I have been scrapbooking since 1993. SCARY! I was in college, living in UT, and this new craft of scrapbooking was just taking hold. The local scrapbook store, "Pebbles In My Pocket," was located in a converted small house. They only had paper, simple die cuts, decorative scissors and lots of stickers. My old scrapbooks are so dated and ugly! I have LOTS of scrapbooks. It was a fun hobby and I got quite good at it. But since all these kids came along, I just don't have the time to make elaborate scrapbooks any more.

A few years ago I saw an idea in a scrapbooking magazine and have been doing it ever since. I call it my "Year In Review" scrapbook.

At the beginning of the year I purchase a blank 12 x 12 calendar from Amazon. I bought this one for the last two years.

I write down one sentence about each day in a date square. I keep the blank calendar on my office desk and finish the whole year before making the "Year in Review" scrapbook.

At the end of the year, I order 4-6 photos from each month to go on the page opposite the journaling. I make one month's page and then use that as the template for the rest of the months. The scrapbooking goes very quickly this way.
Lastly, I make a title page with a collage of photos from the entire year.

Although I would love to have dozens of adorable scrapbooks showcasing my children for every event in their lives, it's just not going to happen. I feel better knowing that we have a general history being recorded for us to all look back on.

But even with this simple scrapbook formula I can get behind. I am only done through August with 2009, and I need to order the photos and get going on 2010. I look forward to doing it though, I just have to find some time...

Some Favorite Baby Board Books

My favorite thing to give to new babies is books since reading aloud is so important and so much fun. I have some baby presents to buy and was thinking about my favorite books to read aloud to my babies and thought I'd share.

Peek-a-who by Nina Laden

All my kids have loved this one, and we've had to buy several copies.

Where is baby's belly button? by Karen Katz

Great for pointing out body parts

Silly Sally by Audrey Wood

When we get to the tickling part I always tickle my babies and just love to hear them giggle

Dear Zoo by Rod Campbell

All my babies have loved this one too.

There are more that they've grown to love as they get more into toddlerhood (I'll post those favorites another time), but these books were all loved by all my little babies. Did your babies have favorite books?

The Sock War

("The Mighty JayBeezies" behind their fort)


Ah! The sock war! So much fun, so little work.

The origins of the sock war are unknown (by me at least) but I remember fondly the time spent as a child throwing socks at my siblings. The game is simple. You divide into two armies and build fortifications in a room or hallway, just the right distance apart for socks thrown by kids to travel. We started with 10 pair of socks for each team. Make sure the socks are well balled together. Here are the rules we play by:

1. You may only throw socks at the other army when you are behind your fort
2. If you get hit by a sock, you lie down and count to 10, as fast or slow as you please
3. You may travel into the area between forts to collect ammunition, but just remember to get back behind your fort before you fire on the enemy
4. If you catch a sock that has been thrown at you, the thrower lies down to count

("The Pounders" ready to attack!)

That's all. There is no clear cut winner or loser, but there will be much arguing over who was hit more. If you want you can set a time limit. We just played until the adults said "we're done". Actually, I called it quits first after about 15 min. (I had a cold) and the kids played with daddy without me for a long time. At one time, I was ambushed while preparing lunch in the kitchen, so we had to add an "only throw socks on the battlefield" rule.

It's a perfect rainy day activity; easy set-up, lots of running around, lots of laughing, occupies much time, easy clean-up, and the kids love it. In fact, they'll quickly do whatever chores they need to get done so we can have a sock war. If you've never had one, try it. Although watch out for dads. They throw socks hard.

Pretzel ABCs

My almost 4 year old usually gets ignored during school time as I focus on getting the bigger kids through their lessons, but it's one of my new year's goals to get him more involved.

When I was a teacher in training, my teachers often talked about trying to incorporate lots of different materials to help teach the alphabet and make it more tactile, like drawing letters with fingers in shaving cream or sand, or forming letters out of wiki sticks (the wax covered yarn) and tracing them with fingers. Christopher is working on his alphabet, and doesn't quite have the fine motor skills to use a pencil easily, so today we formed letters with pretzels.

I bought a bag of thin sticks, large curved ones, and a bag of generic chex mix that used some circle pretzels. I used a serrated knife to cut through some of them to make the half circles I needed for some of the letters. With Christopher, I would make a letter, he'd tell me what letter it was and what sound it made, and then he would try to make it himself. At the end, we made his name and some simple words. Joshua and Maren wanted to play along also. Then we all had pretzels and chex mix for snack time.

Rose Birthday Cupcakes

My sister and sister-in-law helped me make these really cute rose cupcakes for my daughter's birthday last november. We got the idea from a book called "What's New, Cupcake?" which is a sequel to "Hello, Cupcake!" which are both full of cute cupcake ideas. The roses were made out of candy fruit wedges rolled with a rolling pin and lots of sugar to keep them from getting too sticky. You then cut strips from the flattened candy and wrap them around to form a rose. We used flattened green wedges for the leaves.

Filling Our Home with Love

Since Valentine's Day is approaching, our new "be nice to each other" incentive is a little house that we are trying to fill with hearts. I made the house out of an empty square kleenex tissue box and scrapbook paper I had left over from years past when I actually thought I'd have time to scrapbook. The roof is open on the back so the kids put the hearts through the hole where the tissues came out. The hearts I'm using are foam heart stickers left over from valentine making last year. I counted out 65 and when we've put them all in, there will be a family reward.

The kindness in our home really has improved since we've started focusing on it using things like the warm fuzzy jar, happy home, and christmas tree. There are definitely bad days, but overall the children are quicker to compliment each other when we're doing a project together, to let others go first, or to cheer up a sad sibling. Eventually of course I'd like it if they would do those things just because, and not to try to earn a prize, but we've all got to start somewhere.