I’ve had kind of a mental block around H’s baby book since before she was born. Baby books are not a thing in England, so it was a new concept to Adam and he looked to me for direction. But I don’t know, something about the cookie cutter nature of the questions, the limited space in all the books for writing and photos. We’ve been given several gorgeous baby books to keep a record of H’s firsts, and we’ve even started writing in some of them. But somehow the process just felt…incomplete.

I should point out that at 33 years old, my mother has only just stopped telling me “that’s going in the baby book!” when I do something noteworthy. And that’s only because, as a gift when H was born, she gave me my baby book to keep. It sits in a proud spot on H’s bookshelves, and I can’t tell you how much I LOVED looking at that book growing up (okay fine, I still do). I really want H to know her STORY, not just the facts. I loved hearing those stories as a kid. Don’t all kids? The feelings, the moments, the whole experience that she won’t remember. There are so many things I wish I could ask my grandparents today, so many details I would love to know about my family. So documenting life has become a really big deal to me in my adulthood (hence this blog). And I want to give that to H as my gift to her, a record of her impact on all of us.

And that’s where Project Life comes in. I’ve been very well aware of it for a few years now through my crafty friends. But I’ve always resisted the idea of myself as a scrapbooker. It called up images of sitting in a church basement with a glue gun, decorative paper, and piles of bedazzled, ornate die-cuts just collaging all my life’s memories to death. Not for me. But this is just easy, and it looks cool, and it lets me tell H her story. I was trying to explain why I wanted THIS to be her baby book to Adam the engineer, and as I explained he just said, “So…it’s a system. Cool.” He adores systems, and that’s exactly what this is. A streamlined way for me to get to the point, the meat, the good stuff. I just started this weekend, and I’m hooked. I plan on continuing this book until H’s first birthday and giving this to her as a present, but I will be continuing Project Life for our family beyond that.

I bought the Cherry Edition. I was trying to decide between this and Clementine, and essentially what won me over was the fact that the Cherry Edition was currently available. So I got the binder, the core kit, and some of the plastics.  I’ve just kept it simple so far, I haven’t done anything exciting with layouts yet. I’ve made my way through my second trimester, and once I’ve finished with pregnancy I think I’ll document each week of her life so far.

The big envelopes are also really handy.

I hope I have enough room to get through her first year. This may end up as a 2-volume set.