One Tip Wednesday

Before I had kids, I was always on top of my scrapbooking. In fact, I would make up things to scrapbook just so I would have something to work on. When I was the mother of one, I always had plenty to scrapbook and would sometimes get a month or two behind. Now as a mother of two, I'm a full year behind doing both of their books. I make a book for each of my boys for each year of their life. I have two pages left to finish Tyler's first book and a page left to finish out Samuel's 4 year book.



To help me get started on their 1st and 5 year books, I spent an afternoon outlining all of the pages I would need to do for their books. I always do their books in date order through their birthday party. I created an Excell spread sheet with a column for Samuel and one for Tyler. I have the date of the pictures in the far left column. Then under each name, I put the name of that spread. Where you see blanks, that means that he doesn't have a spread for that particular set of pictures. As you can see, Samuel has far more in his book than Tyler, but I think that just has to do with their ages. Samuel is involved in more activities, but I'm also going to make more of an effort this year to get some extra pictures of Tyler.

Other than the obvious organziation of having the chart, it should be a big time saver for me. I will be able to work through both of the boys books together. So rather than doing Tyler's Christmas pages and then having to later drag all of the Christmas paper and embellishments back out later, I will do them both at the same time when I have all of those things already out. It will also help me not to miss anything as I finish up their books. As I finish those pages, I will gray out the column so I'll know I've done that page. Now - back to scrapbooking!