Blessings

The best and most wonderful blessing this month is that my father-in-law has put his faith in our Lord Jesus and he was baptised in a beautiful and moving family service last week. Our family give thanks and praises to God for this awesome blessing!  Despite being hospitalised again for a few days in late September, he is steadily on the mend health-wise too. So thankful.

The LORD bless thee, and keep thee: 

 The LORD make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: 

 The LORD lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.

Numbers 6:24-26

I will be making a photobook of this significant occasion and plan to give a copy to each of the seven families in the family. Hoping I can make the book as beautiful and meaningful as the occasion has been!

More Blessings of the Everyday

Daily life can be mundane or ordinary, but it is a glimpse of our lives at this point, and I love looking for the beauty and fun and funny and interesting, and recording them - I do love looking back, and maybe one day my children or grandchildren might too!

Project 365 for August

Daily life pictures include fresh fish at the market, solid colored T shirts that J insists on, household cleaning supplies (that iphone picture was for my shopping list), our new ikea battery-operated milk frother, visiting grandpa at the hospital, and more. I really liked the word art by Jen Wilson 'Open your arms and welcome the joy of today'!

A lot of days in the 2nd half of August was spent bringing home and sorting through boxes of stuff we had in storage, a lot of purging and reminiscing, I might blog about this some time. What does it mean for a hardcore memory keeper to purge, downsize and simplify? It was tough but necessary!

Project 365 for September
Are we in October already? Where has the time gone?
Well, it appears that in September we visited the Comic Convention, watched a movie, had friends over, visited grandma (my mom), caught some bollywood filming action near my office during lunch break, played games, enjoyed delicious mooncakes during the mid-autumn season, and played more games.

And won a recycling bin design contest, met friends to celebrate my belated birthday, enjoyed the Great outdoors, caught some of the Singapore F1 action (without tickets), spent time with grandpa at the hospital, chanced met Ryan at the bus stop on our way home, made a homemade Shogi chess board...So that's where our time went!

Project Life - September 
I selected the stories I wanted to tell, to amplify in Project Life for Sept - only 1 double page spread with an insert. First up, the Comic-Convention that the boys attended, that sparked off all things geeky at home, hehe

I spent a wonerful morning with R at his school boarding open house - he opened up and shared so much about school and friends with me, pure magic from mommy's point of view!

Just some random stories, a favorite photo taken on my morning commute, Our favourite coffee brews, and story of Ryan reading all the Harry Potter books in a week.(He never did want to read them in the past, and suddenly he starts and reads through in a week!)

More pictures of time spent with family and friends, all part of this months' many joys!

Linking up at The Mom Creative - head there for lots of inspiration!!

Beijing Pages
I continue to chug along on my Beijing album, it's now nearly two years from that trip  . The next few layouts were from days we spent in the vicinity of ancient PingYao, full of old city walls, buildings and estates, all grey and beige-y, so I used primarily black backgrounds. Very striking I must say!

We visited the House of Wang - a formidable homestead of a powerful and wealthy family, that started as a bean curd maker, and grew rich and eventually made it to become important officials in the Qing Court. The family lived here for like 14 generations, and built home after home as the family grew, all living together within this giant complex. The descendants lived here till the 90s when it was converted to heritage site. The homes were well preserved, most furniture and paintings were left as they were. We found out many stories, like the one where daughters when they turn 13 will be escorted to an upstairs bedroom, never to come out until they are married usually around 14 or 15!! We also saw the Royal Decree - a decree/instructions from the Emperor himself to the family, with his Emperor's Seal - in chinese tradition, the emperor's words are sacred law, it has been known that if the emperor asked you to kill yourself, you would. So to receive such a Decree was high honour, the family kept it for a couple centuries!

We also visited nearby Zhangbi village, a village with an underground fortress set up in the 14th century by invading Mongul armies, who later settled here with their families when the Yuan dynasty flourished. Our English speaking guide was a descendant from these Mongolian people and still lives in the village! They consider themselves chinese now and were very happy to see that we overseas chinese are still able to speak the language and are proud of our heritage. Incidentally I have been told that in my ancestry on my father's side, I had a Mongolian great, great, great grandmother! 

And finally a layout to remember almost totally authentically original guesthouse in the old city that we stayed in. Way cool!

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

Project Life August

Just a quick post to share my August PL pages. Took a break from my 20th Anniversary album and so enjoyed updating my PL - always so fun.

August is the month when my father in law was hospitalised for kidney failure and we are so thankful that he has been able to start dialysis treatments, and that his body is responding well and he has come home after two and a half weeks. Though he is still weak and has poor appetite, we are hopeful his health will improve and rejoice together in our hope in Christ.

The story is about J's obsession with crew (height) socks, nothing higher, nothing lower is acceptable. So much so he uses rubber bands to hold up his favorite old socks without complaints. :)

One of my best friends who now lives in Malaysia also came for a lovely, lovely visit.

And it is also my birthday in August. There are indeed too many candles now lol, so we did not bother with a cake :)  Dh surprised me with many hidden gifts, card throughout my day including a handwritten love letter! And the Nora Ephron book about growing older that is hilarious.

I tucked the love letter into the pocket behind the filler card :)

And we also brought back all our stuff from 'paid personal storage'  and sort through them to 'downsize' some more. Something Old covered what I found so far and kept or had to throw out. Including a shot of me (now) wearing one of my old pair of spectacles (from twenty years ago!)

We've cooking more so this get's recorded in Today's menu. Then there is our Tea Time ritual every evening. And stories of the note dh left on our door when he was locked out, and of Ryan and his Paranoia, everyday stories that are precious to me!

Included tea bags and all from the various chinese, japanese, herbal and other teas we consume these days. Love that I can keep these in PL!

Linking up over at The Mom Creative for Jessica's Project Life Tuesdays. I follow her on Bloglovin and enjoy many of her posts and finds, do check her blog out!

Did you noticed that I had a lot of fun designing my own filler cards? After breaking out my old Bamboo wacom tablet last month making the doodle frames and figuring out how to write digitally, I can now put whatever words or sentiments I like on them, so cool :) That's my 'handwriting' there!

So here's my first try at filler cards, in jpeg formats, wrapped up in a file for you to download Here.

Also want to share lots of super layouts by Kim (aka Five Seventeen Creations). Kim's family just moved to Florida and she has all these super Disney World photos of her beautiful family. And Kim is so good at using my templates and creatively transforming them like this:

Now I bet you are inspired! Thanks Kim for sharing with us your lovely family and beautiful layouts!

Twenty Years

Thank you everyone for your prayers and concern, an update to my previous post, my father in law has been discharged from hospital after two and a half weeks. Thankfully his condition has improved, though he is still rather weak, and he has been able to have dialysis treatments three times a week, and we hope will regain his strength over time. It's so wonderful that my husband has six siblings and everyone is close by and rallies around to help. It is such a blessing to have!

Twenty Years

About two weeks ago, we brought all the stuff we had stored at a personal storage place while we were moving and renovating, back home. We don't have enough space in our new home to keep them all, and while sorting through all the boxes to try to cut down the stuff some more, we re-discovered all our keepsake boxes, with old scrapbooks, photos, journals, and more!

I had been planning to do a photo book for our coming Twentieth Anniversary (In December), so this was great!

I re-discovered (some forgotten) scrapbooks we kept of our first dates, letters, movie tickets, the scrapbook was named 'Couplehood' :)

another named 'Parenthood', full of articles we read, stuff we wrote, letters, cards, when we first became parents,

old 'pocket-style' photo display, I remember now those pockets were purchased from Ikea, pre-cursor to Project Life (!)

tonnes of old photos,

and so many keepsake books - baby books, my family, my first home, etc! (on the right) (on the left are my photobooks and Project Life albums) :)

Dh and I spent quite a lot of time reminiscing and wondering where the time went, how we have spent the last twenty years, thinking what did we each bring to each other in our marriage, what defines us and our family now, what meant the most, the good, the difficult times, how God is faithful, all the blessings, all our adventures, oh how do we begin to describe twenty years?

I was so inspred by Pink Ronnie's R&R Memoir Book - which she describes as her record of their journey together as a couple. One day I will pull all our letters, scrapbooks, photos, cards, and so on into a complete Memoir book, but for now I want to have a photobook of us through the years.

So I got started, and couldn't stop, and I have completed 23 pages!! It has been so rewarding (and tiring too), selecting photos for each year, scanning those pre-digital photos, reliving every year and so much memories! 

The first part of our Twentieth Anniversary photobook

Here is the first page - our absolute favourite page so far!

Yep that's yours truly, I must have been a happy kid!

Then the dating years, the wedding and the honeymoon

And thereafter a page for every of the twenty years so far - ready for time travel?

What a journey! Isn't this really something?

So much to savour, so much to relive, enjoy, cringe, that is humbling, give thanks, praise God, treasure, reminisce, look back, look forward to... The process was rewarding as much as it was tough - which photos define us that year? What do I want to highight? There was so much possibilities. In the end I chose the simpler option of photos that show us as a couple, growing as a family, photos that highlight our relationship with each other, highlights of things we did or trips we took together. More personal stuff, triumphs and challenges were left out - this is after all, a photobook to celebrate making it to our twentieth year, to be shared with family and friends, no need to be too profound I think!

I have more pages planned, with themes like our homes, family and friends, what defines us as a couple, etc. And DH suggested a page on those hair and fashion trends (or disasters, what was I doing with helmet hair???) through the years, lol!

It was also interesting to note that in the pre-digital camera years, we only had photos of events, or trips, very few of anything else, what a pity! Even in the digital but pre-camera phone era, there was still a huge lack of any everyday photos. Mainly we had photos of the babies in those years, which are precious, but so much else is missed! Wish I thought about project life/week in the life/day in the life then! Way to go for the younger families who have everything going memory-keeping-wise now!

For the album, I broke out my dusty old bamboo tablet and doodled some frames, as I did not want this to look like my travel albums. Also, frames were needed as I knew I'd be choosing disparate, different looking photos from a particular year to put on the same page, so the frames will help unify them. Must say I'm quite pleased with how they turned out. Hand-drawn and a little whimsical, not too fussy and quite versatile.

Have put up the layout templates (like the one below) into two packs in the store. Hope they provide inspiration and a starting ground for a fun album for you too!

And here's a 12x12 template based on that first page for you to try. Clip your photos to the photo layers in the template. Have fun!

Download Here

P.S. No PL nor Beijing layouts this month, had only been working on the anniversary book :P  Will catch up in October, hopefully!