School Holidays after Manifestos

We are just back from our (almost) annual trip to Pulau Rawa - such a wonderful break as usual.

Compare that photo with this from a year ago:

Hasn't Jared really grown? Soon I'll be the shortest in the family. The island is as hot and lovely as ever. Lots to put in my June Project Life pages.

We are 3 weeks into our 4 week mid year school break - Inspired by Ali Edwards' Summer Manisfesto my family came up with our own Holiday Manisfesto and it has been such fun intentionally making our holidays count!

We have achieved some of our manisfestos and got to do some other fun things that were not planned - to motivate ourselves I did up a template and filled in the photos as we went along, here is my layout so far ... 

Like it? Scroll down to download the template :)

We are in June now and if you are like me and embarked on Project Life and/or Project 365 in Jan this year, you might have had moments or days where you're not sure what photo or what else to document that would be fresh, fun and worth recording. I love this project so much and I want to get the most out of it, and from time to time I visited some lovely sites and blogs like these for their wonderful ideas and lists:
Capture your 365, Creating Keepsakes, 53 Weekly Themes,  Katie the Scrapbooklady, Studio Calico, FatMomSlim, The Mom Creative 

Decided to draw up with my own list to inspire myself - 3 to be exact - so much potential for more authentic, fun, interesting, meaningful Project Life! 

Project LifeThemes/  Ideas

Thoughts / Reflections

Daybooks/Currently/Right Now - journaling

Quotes we like

Bible Passage/ Verses speaking to us right now

Prayers answered 

Things we're grateful for that week

Challenges facing or overcame that week

Schedules

Each of our schedule/timetable for a week (including school time tables)

Goals for the day/week/month

Daily life to remember

Favorite piece of jewellery/tennis racket/anything and the story behind it

Quirks that we have (or discovered/love/dislike)

Each of our Playlists 

New recipe tried out for dinner

Menu of favourite restaurants

Top ten – anything

Games we are playing, movies we watched ...

Map of some place special we went to

Stuff/products we can’t live without!

What each of us do at a certain (same) time of the day

365 Photo Themes / Ideas       

Us:

What makes us happy

Things that bother us

A close up shot of us holding hands

Our hands/our feet/profile/knees (all four of us in each shot)

Praying/bible studying together

Our stuff:

Our most prized possession

Our umbrellas (in the current sudden storm weather!)

Inside of our closet / storeroom (yikes)                      

Contents of our daily school bag/handbag/work bag  (yikes)

Things we hoard

Something new we love

Something old we love

Something we just learned how to do

All our mobile phones  (on home page)

Our mail pile
Our laundry pile

Home:

Clocks in our home

Shadows in our home

Colors in our home

On The Shelves in our home

Sentimental / Just  for fun:

Screenshots of kids’ facebook, favourite blogs, etc

One of the boys holding a ‘life’ tile from Game of Life
Us holding our wedding photo on our Anniversary

Us holding our baby photos on our Birthdays

Pictures featuring our One Little Words

Bits and Pieces of Life Ideas

Everyday Life

Label/Packaging from household products or favourite foods
Billing statement from monthly online grocery shopping, to look back on how much things cost...  
Newspaper/ Magazine clipping/cartoon strip 

Prescription
To go menus
Post-it notes

Special Occasions
Playbill/Theatre/movie/concert/sporting event ticket
Postcard
Money (coins from traveling, etc.)

Children School related
A page from the boys’ school daily planner (in their handwriting) 
School progress report/report card
School newsletter or newspaper

If I just get half of these into my PL album this year, it will be wonderful! :)

May Project Life
My May pages are completed. here are the digital pages (still using Template set 290)

Here are my physical pages:
Here's highlighting some occasions in May, my parents in law leaving for a holiday to Taiwan, celebrating Mothers' Day with my mom, and an unexpected lovely leisurely breakfast with dh one morning.

This page is dedicated to food revolution (courtesy of Jamie Oliver) in our family. We've been trying out cooking from scratch simple, new dishes made to look so easy and yummy  by Jamie Oliver. The boys joined in too and it has been a lot of fun!

I got my dear friend Chee to visit the  'In the Mood for Cheongsam' exhibition at the National Museum with me, because none of the men in my family wanted to. It was wonderful! We read every sign, studied every dress in detail, enjoyed the amazing forms the Cheongsam took over the years -  originally in chinese silk, then cotton (for the common people), lace, felt, organza, batik, in patterns that were influenced over the years - Art Deco, graphical, floral, minimalist, so interesting! The highlight were also the cheongsams worn by our past First Ladies, our War Heroine, some famous people, what a lovely afternoon!

If you followed my blog, you will know that dh and I had been against letting the boys have PSP, Nintendo, XBox, and the like, for the longest time. But recently we had a change of  heart, since the boys are constantly on their laptops or phones and it is so hard to get them away to talk or do things with us, we decided 'if you can't beat them, join them'! We thought Wii will afford us some great family time, and it definitely has! So much so that I've dedicated an entire page for it :)                  

I'm not showing my entire PL pages on the blog as some portions are of R & J's photos with their friends, or their writings and notes which are to be kept private. Increasingly they are asking me not to post this and that relating to them online :) I'm proud they are forming their own identities and opinions, have to be more discerning and sensitive what I share here :P

But this part below can be shared. Their school term reports came and I always loved to read their teachers' comments, this year I  typed them out and saved them in my PL. They are awesome. I'm so proud of them.

And here is template 309 which I used for my holiday manisfesto layout.

This is now available as part of Template Pack 7 in the store. Thanks for your interest!

Summer Manifesto

Today Ali Edwards so inspired me with this idea on her blog: of making a Summer Manifesto, a list of everything one intends or hopes to do or squeeze out of their summer.

Coincidentally, tomorrow is the start of our 4-week school holidays, our mid-year break, and when I shared this with the family, everyone was game and we made our own list in less than 15 minutes! (not all of us agreed with all of the items on the list, but in the spirit of things, we said we will accept all suggestions!)

I'm printing this out and sticking it by the front door, leaving some space for add-on ideas. 

May we all have a rich and full 'summer'!

Credits: Paper by Jenna Desai, speech bubbles and word art by Katie Pertiet, bike by Jacque Larsen

Bonding with Teenage Sons

This post is for all my April layouts - I'm enjoying PL and being so up to date, so glad I plunged into it with my particular combination of digi and paper project life!

I have been subscribed onto Daily devotionals f rom - Daily Hope from Rick Warren, and a recent week focused on parenting. In one of them Rick said this "When my kids were young, they were never impressed with what adults are impressed by in my life. What they wanted to know is, "Is Daddy fun?" So I intentionally worked hard on this one." Simple and inspiring! Just because we never thought of it : Are we fun? Can we actually be fun to our teenagers?

Being teenagers, being boys (perhaps?), plus teenage angst and moods, plus being constantly glued to their laptops and phones, we do have to up our parental 'cool' factor, or risk being relegated to monosyllable answers and one-sided conversations (me asking, them gruntling), lol. I really want to turn our interactions to be less about nagging, setting boundaries, getting them to get things done, to more real, engaged conversations, more enjoying family together, before they totally grow up!

 So we are intentionally working on being fun : movies, breakfasts, cooking their fav foods, checking out you-tube videos, keeping pet fishes, ice-cream suppers, swimming, beach, walks, and for the first time in our lives, phone games, lol! After resisting it for the longest time, we're finally playing Angry Birds, Draw Free, Scramble, and getting so good we are beating the kids, and getting quite hooked! LOL

How do you bond and connect with your kids, especially if you have teenagers?

                 

Project Life & Project 365

Notice for my 365 digital pages, I've intentionally kept a theme of using graph/notepad papes as background, adding an alpha for the month, and only further adding some word arts and a couple of tags to complete my fortnightly layouts - this makes it really quick to pull together and keeps a running theme. In fact every time I open up kits or go through new kits I pull out any relevant elements and papers and keep them in one file specially for P365 layouts - power scrapping Katie style - it works!    

Apr 1-15                     

Credits: Blended papers by Amber Clegg and CD Muckosky, both from The Lily Pad's Things that matters most Collab, 'Livelaughlove' by Sahlin Studio, alpha by Karah Fredericks, everything else from RobynMeierotto-ChillKit

April 16-30

Credits: Paper by Jenna Desai, tab by Shawna Clingerman, paint by Emily Emeritt, tag and word arts by Gina Cabrera, arrow by Robyn Meierotto, alpha by Kaye Winiecki.

April PL pages

Pre-prepped my photos by using Paislee Press's free 4X6 templates to squeeze more photos into a 4x6 pocket.

Lots of photos from family outings - all snapped on my iphone, not the best photos, but definitely good enough :)

This page includes photos of Jared and his new gold fishes, screen shots from the iphone games that I have recently caught on, hehe;  also a bodum french press pamphlet from a new one dh bought, like including bits of stuff like that.

And this whole page was from a morning we spent visiting the Museum of Toys - fun and nostalgic!

Allergy alert! Jared went for a skin prick test and found that he is super-allergic to dust mite. We are now on full assault on his mattress, pillow, rug etc, and found this (below) - if you can't tell, that is the amount of dust we vacuumed out on that first day using our Rainbow. We had been slacking on the vacuuming since we moved. Totally scary.

I love this photo! Here's our family of Miffys checking their very own photobook (free from shutterfly!)

And more photos from a May Day (public holiday here) that we spent at home. The quote is lovely and is downloaded from Becky Higgins' free stuff.

See above bottom right showing Jared making his prototype for a school Lamp design project. And below is his 'poster' advertising his Lamp that is named 'FlexIlluminate'. Isn't he cool?

I got my 12x12 Project 365 layouts printed when Persnickety had their recent INSD sale! I actually cannot find anywhere locally that prints 12x12 and Persnickety's rates were reasonable so I went for it. Honestly I was very delighted when they arrived - perfect colors and solid photo paper, wow! Highly recommended! Just like printing photos professionally and the colors were very true and just perfectly saturated.

I am also very happy at how they looked in my Project Life album, next to the 4x6 and 3x4 photos, they did not look out of place at all, and everything fit like they really belonged together. Yay

I also did some 12x12 layouts like this one of a fun time in the pool, and these go right into the PL album too. Thus I will only have the PL album for 2012, and will maybe make a separate digital photobook for a long trip if we take one. Also, it looks like I will be able to fit the entire 2012 into one PL binder - another plus!

 Since I had 9 photos that I really liked for this afternoon we spent at the pool, I made a 12x12 layout  for it.

(credits: Paper by Bobita designs, alpha by Karah Fredericks and border by Just Aimee designs)

I really liked how it turned out, all it needed was a border, nice alpha for the title, and a simple kraft background. Use this template for fun, action-filled photos. Hope you find them fun to use and enjoy memory making and keeping!

This is now available as part of Template Pack 7 in the store. Thanks for your interest!

Weekday Wardrobe Organization

Just for fun, I thought I might post this. It has nothing to do with scrapbooking, but to do with organizing weekday wardrobe before the week. I saw this idea in a magazine (Redbook? Real Simple? Can't recall) last year and finally found time to do it. Basically, the idea is to pick out the week's daily ensemble before hand, including tops and bottoms, accessories, belts and what nots, so as to avoid the early morning rush - I'm always running late and not being able to find that matching this or that, so this really helps!

These tags were made in photoshop, printed and cut out, punched holes and attached ribbons, and used to mark out each day's outfits by sunday night. The envelope is for keeping the tags in each day as they are used. And there it is, my organised weekday wardrobe. :)

Thought someone may find this useful too, download the jpeg here.
Do share how you avoid the weekday rush?

What makes home home?

Because of the timing of our move, (between finding the unit we liked in the neighborhood we wanted, and wanting to do it during the one week school break), we did not custom-renovate before moving in, and also had to simplify greatly and only bring what we really needed over. At first I was wondering if we would be able to quickly make it seem like home, and when we first moved in it seemed a little empty, as some of our non-critical/older books/toys/sentimental stuff went to temporary storage, and a lot was given away.     

But quickly the boys' stuff was all over the place again, familiar sights and some dear belongings made their home around, our daily routines clicked into place, so did laughter, chatter, squabbles, music, competitive family games, favorite TV shows, and so on, and this is now quickly home.

I made a PL page to capture some of the familiar sights that make our home: Miffy on the sofa, side-by side  computer work stations, the boys' wires and laptops, gh's fighting fish and my potpurri, our favorite robin-egg-blue ikea mugs, our bathroom counter stash, the now indispensible Happy Call Pan, the boys' truck-themed  bedsheets that have been with them for so long(!), Jared's pet gold fishes (named Cute One, and Cute Two), and their devotionals by their beds. Hhmmm, definitely home :)

Most importantly, the knowledge and assurance that the Lord is with us and blessing us in this new home makes all the difference. I'm so happy to show you that my Exodus 6:7 wordart canvas has arrived! It is our constant reminder and declaration that the Lord is our God, and a testimony of how much He has blessed us.

I only have four PL pages for the month of March, since I'm now capturing a photo a day in digital layout. I'm loving this format, keeps me very up to date on PL! On the left page is simply our Ikea and move related Invoices and the pamphlet on which we scribbled a lot as we went around the store.

One page to record our move :) I bought a set of Studio G alpha stamps for S$2 (!) that I used to stamp 'MARCH' on the month card. I just love having the chance to do a bit of physical scrapping.

Picked some  photos and stories I liked for the next two pages, including this 'square' Jared painted, a copy of a section from Monet's Impressions, for his art homework. (below top right)

More everyday moments! A typical study afternoon, kids on homework, mom on Project Life! Watching LORAX at the movies, Dh and I on a bus journey home... all makes for special ordinary moments  :)

And here are my PL photo a day pages for March:

(Credits: background paper by Andrea Victoria, elements by fruitloopsally and K Winiecki from MSA's Celebration collab)

( credits: Paper by Digital Design Essentials, word art 'matters' by Kate Hadfield, alpha from Miss Mint's Lilac Garden) 

I've been on a roll scrapbooking-wise lately! Thanks to the various offers by Shutterfly, I've completed 4 photobooks in the last 4 weeks, I'm not trying to brag, really! ;P

We had two free 12x12 offers (both me and dh have a shutterfly account). For the first book, I used Ali Edwards'  Top Ten customised book, it was super easy, just find 10 photos, plus one for the cover, load them up, add journaling, and it was done!  I chose the theme of Top 10 Travel photos from 10 different trips. It was wonderful to see how the kids have transformed and the tonnes of memories we have built!

On the Cover we were at Tioman Island in Malaysia - notice how Jared posed in photos throughout the years :)

Title page

Standing at the base of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur - they were four and six! 

At Fremantle, Perth, Western Australia

Phuket, Thailand

Christchurch, New Zealand

Central Park, New York City

Miyashima, Japan

Onuma Quasi-National Park, Hokkaido, Japan

Suzhou, China

Halong Bay, Vietnam

Great Wall, Beijing, China

And for the second 12x12, I let Jared choose photos for a Miffy Family Book! He was elated and here are some of the pages

Yep, they are family

Miffy, Biffy, in Orlando

On the Shinkansen  in Japan

Happy together at Halong Bay, Vietnam

 In New York City

Lucky rabbits, I know!

And I used the 50% off Mothers' Day Offer to print my 2011 Family Photobook, this is the cover. All the pages were already done.

(credits:  Paper by Weeds & Wildflowers, hearts by Michelle Godin)

For the next 40% off Offer Shutterfly gave, I used it to complete my Shanghai Trip book. I stayed up late for 3 nights in a row! Okay, it was worth it ..

this is the suitably red cover
(from Allison Pennington's Hot Mess, dragon by Brittish Designs)

title page  (template by Paislee Press CP No 3, and background paper by Gina Cabrera)

(paper by Ange)

at our uber cool budget hotel
(paper is from Mood papers - Ed by Gabi, elements from Wanderlust by Pink Reptile Designs)

just walking around Hangzhou
(Paper is from Amy Sumrall's Childrens' day, gesso patches by Tangie Baxter, camera by Kate Hadfield)

Enjoying greenery in Hangzhou
(Paper is from Madame Wing's My day my life, tag is by Cherie Mask)

At the mausoleum of Yue Fei - he was a loyal hero who was betrayed and executed for a wrong he did not commit. When the truth was out, he was posthumously honored while those who betrayed him were forever remembered as kneeling statues in front of his tomb. All visitors used to 'spit' on the statues but now we are advised  to 'glare' at them instead. We gladly GLARED. 'Shame on you!'
(paper from Gina Miller's Get Creative)

 Beautiful, beautiful walk in the Westlakes of Hangzhou
（paper from Gina Miller's Get Creative，butterfly by Agnes Biro Morjike)

Enjoying cultural activities like painting and traditional kite-flying
(paper and cutout by Pasilee Press, kite by F Jardine)

Watching the Awesome Impressions Westlake show that played out on the water - yes, they were literally dancing and walking on the lake. You must check out the video clip!

Suzhou and Hangzhou were always said to be the earthly equivalent of heaven, they are very modernised now, but the older preserved areas are still so beautiful.
(Paper from paulakesselring's watercolorpapers2)

Silk Museum was surprisingly fun - we saw live silk worms at every stage of growth - quite an eyeopener!
(paper by Cinzial designs, stitching by Jen Wilson, alpha by Jady Day Studio, silk flowers by Weeds & Wildflowers)

The Wu Kingdom at the Suzhou Museum
(paper by Ange designs, ribbon by Meredith Cardall, flower by Allison Pennington)

At one of the lovely gardens of Suzhou.
(Paper by Artgal, elements from Cinzial's At Home and Thankful for you)
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And a final page to wrap up our album!  (template by Kate Pertiet)

I sure hope that all of these have inspired you to go record your memories, capture the moments, share the stories, any way you like.  

And I'd like to share Template 300 - enjoy!

This template is now available as Template Pack 8 in the Store. Thanks for your interest!