Lairi J

I have so many things to write about that have been happening over the last few weeks, but Alaire has been out of school going on three weeks, so that's not great for writing time. I'll have to put up some Christmas pictures later. This was an easy post that I thought might inspire someone else to organize their holiday cards before throwing them in a box in the basement.

I LOVE getting cards and photos in the mail. I also love sending them out. They aren't always out on time, but better late than never right? RIGHT( I also haven't got to the post office with the snow and the thought of dragging 2 kids to the post office in the crappy weather so hold your horses the damn cards will be sent today, tomorrow, or whenever I get around to it!)

Anyway, I save ALL of the cards we get, because I have plans for them. This is a common theme in my house... great ideas that don't always get accomplished!

(Anna Palmer finishes what she starts. Anna Palmer finishes what she starts. Anna Palmer finishes what she starts.)

I digress.

I was talking about holiday cards.

I keep them in hopes that I will put them in a little album and set them out during the holidays so that I can look back and see how families have grown and changed over the years. Well this was the year. I did it. After the holiday is really the best time to work on these kinds of projects. I know I've got a holiday hangover too, but next year I won't be saying "next year" I'll do this, because it's already done.

I headed to Target to get some of these cute mini binders they have in their office supplies section.

For some reason I looked through the clearance stuff in the scrap booking section and found these "Christmas Card Binders" for $4.98. They had two so I bought them both. They were pretty much a kit for what I was setting out to make. Sometimes it's best just to go with the easy route! They already had dividers and sticky tabs for the cards, but I'll show you how I added extras, so you can make your own too!

I took all of my Christmas Cards, which were already divided by year. I separated the photo cards and the regular folded cards.
I also kept "Save the Dates", Wedding or engagement announcements and invites, baby announcements, graduation invitations and school pictures of any little people that I received. So I guess that's a lot more than Christmas Cards, but whatever. It's my book and what else do you do with that stuff?

Next, I used the dividers to label each year starting with the first Christmas Drew and I were together. It's funny how few cards I had the first year when none of our friends were married or had kids.

The binders came with little paper rectangles like this with holes punched and a sticky tab to attach the cards.

Their book only had 24 tabs and I needed a lot more. I just cut out the same tabs from similar paper and ran scrap booking two sided tape on each one.

Then simply place each card or picture on the sticky tape. If the cards are double sided make sure you don't cover up anything you will want to see later.

Place the cards behind the correct year and you are done.

I punched the folded cards. I weeded out money holder cards and kept ones that had hand written notes in them. The girls might want to read some of the sweet things people said to them someday.

The first card behind each year is our Holiday card from that year. If I didn't send one, I put a picture of us on Christmas or our family photo that year.

I put the photo cards after our card and then followed it with the folded cards.

I haven't done this yet, but I am going to make a copy of all of our "Santa Pictures" and put one on the front of each years' divider.

I put all of the extras, like this baby announcement, after the folded cards.

And that's it. The whole thing took me a few hours over the course of a few days. I started out just doing this years stuff because it was already out. Alaire was helping me and wanted to do more, so I went upstairs and got all of the other stacks that I had been saving. She really did help a lot too. She stuck all of the cards to the paper tabs and put them in the binders. I only gave her one envelope, from one year at a time, so there wasn't any craziness.

Thanks for reading. TGIF.

I had to throw in a little people picture. She's getting so big and silly these days : )

I've been gone for a long time, but I am back! Here is another project for the nursery. I made Stella 3 crib sheets. They are pretty easy and cheap too. The sheets are pretty much the only bedding allowed inside the crib, so they might as well be cute.