Whew…that was a busy weekend! December 1st brought with it all the craziness of the holiday season! Our small hometown had a little Christmas festival and it was so much fun! Santa came in on a helicopter and dropped candy to the kids! I set up a little booth for my photography business and gave away a free mini photo session! I had lots of lookers and compliments on my work and lots of people take business cards. So, fingers crossed that I will get some business in the near future!

More importantly, was we put our Christmas tree and decorations up this weekend! It was a HUGE struggle for me! I was emotional to begin with, as we are waiting on results from my husband’s fertility testing. As we were putting up all these decorations and thinking about the season, I felt like I was just going through the motions. It is hard to face another holiday still childless. It doesn’t help that I am starting to get Christmas cards from family and friends and lots of them have new babies or announcing pregnancies. Sometimes I feel very alone in my struggles starting a family.

Despite the obstacles though, we pushed through and got our tree up! A friend was over to get some car parts from my hubby, and he brought his two little sons with! They are 4 and 6 and have lots of energy. When they saw the boxes of ornaments, they could not contain their excitement and wanted to help me decorate! Let’s just say I had to get over my OCD for this one! They are what, three feet tall? And this was the first time little people have helped me with the tree and I had to get over the fact that ALL the ornaments were on the bottom half of the tree! Hubby thought it ws hillarious…I fought the urge to move them all weekend long! Here is what our tree looked like in the end:

I love taking photos of christmas lights and making them look like strabursts by changing the aperture on my camera (using a tripod and f/22) and this time I took it a step further and busted out my lensbaby lens. I usually don’t do well with the lensbaby, because it’s such a different look, but I got this photo and surprisingly LOVE it!

After finishing all the decorating and business work on Saturday, I spent all day Sunday trying to be productive on my scrap projects! I am going to throw it out there…I am stressing about my hubby’s Christmas present! I am only half way done with his racing scrapbook and feel like I need to get it ordered SOON (like tomorrow)! We will see how I do on that one. I was more motivated yesterday to work on my Project Life and my December Daily.

Go figure, I completely changed my mind on how to structure my December Daily! I can just never make up my mind! I think it will be easier for me to include it at the end of my 2012 Project life album. So, I decided to use the 6×6 squares template and put four layouts on one page. Here is what my first page looks like:

I also started the Day 2 layout, to be put on the second full page.

I am much happier with how these pages are turning out and it seems like I can manage the project better this way. I am thinking of including my every day activities into the normal PL layouts (IE: outdoor ice skating, snow tubing, movies, work, etc.) and focus on the special Christmas activities in the December Daily (ornaments, traditions, gifts, etc.) I am very excited to see how this turns out!

I also got a couple of PL layouts done yesterday! I am still trying to catch up and hope to be all done by the New Year so that I can order my album as soon as possible! Right now, I beleive I am missing weeks 48 and this week 49 as well as extra pages for my trip to Las Vegas. Here is the left side of Week 44, when we made Jack-o-Lanterns for Halloween.

On the right side, I made a VERY simple page just so that I could catch up that highlighted photos from the weekend. I did two photos for Friday, two for Saturday and two for Sunday, journaled a little and called it complete!

Lastly I worked on week 47. The left side has photos from the short work week and our trip to Lincoln over the weekend.

The right side has all the exciting photos from Jason’s track championship banquet. This was a really exciting evening for him and I was so proud that he accomplished such a big goal for himself! Way to go babe, you had an awesome season this year!

I also wanted to point out that even though I forgot to take any photos, I did do A LOT of cleaning out last week! I followed the Daily Digi reverse 100 challenge and the goal was to donate or get rid of 100 items that we didn’t need. I did NOT take on the kitchen, because that was just unreasonable! I did however clean out my closet and donate a lot of clothing, shoes and accessories. I also donated some plates and silverware that we don’t use. The biggest accomplishment was cleaning out the paper scrapping supplies that I no longer use since I am digital! I sent out large envelopes of goodies to six of my fasted Instagram friends that asked for the items! It felt really good to send those things off to ladies who will put them to good use! As I continue to clean out and organize, I hope to tackle the stack of DVDs that we don’t watch, the magazines that we don’t read and maybe some of the makeup that’s old or lotions that I will never get to.

I hope everyone is having a great start to their Holiday Season! Let’s put family first and make the most of the small moments in life!