Getting sentimental!

When I joined in with the Documenting December Zooms this past Christmas season ( we called ourselves the Double DD's, LOL) I had every good intention of finishing up a small book of memories from December... and then when we did the recap on Jan 7th - I had nothing to show for it - I wrote what I did, but had not printed a photo. In speaking with the group I chatted about kids growing up ( which they all do) and how I needed to find JOY in documenting and figuring out what this hobby meant for me. 

My teens have a bit of an aversion to photos at this age, and DEFINITELY do not want mom posting about them - the only time I really get permission is vacations... So how do I transition this phase of our lives into still finding enjoyment for my hobby, but honoring their wishes. Shifting my focus is what I was thinking of doing,but before I felt like I would succeed, I needed to reset.

Resetting for me looked like this...  

I am a keeper of all things paper!  In fact, I was joking that my family has been trained, anything that is a paper just automatically gets thrown on my desk!

Step one for me was getting paper. documents, memorabilia back under control.

I ordered these boxes on Amazon ( yes I looked through my suppliers 1st but could not find anything like this)

 

 

Next was the hard part - I made a london fog for myself, and started pulling everything apart and started to sort!  That was it, I sorted through baskets and baskets of stuff - 

3 bins were labelled with a sticky note to start

Dain

Aubrey

Family

Garbage/Recycle

I did get a another bin that held just old photos that needed to be dealt with ( I always sort my photos as soon as I get them from the printer so that portion of this job was not too big)

I would say I spent about 2ish hours sorting - with multiple Gracie breaks as she loved to steal the random paper out of the recycle basket, LOL

During the process it looked like this - 

I labelled them with cardstock and stickers ( hello, I'm a scrapbooker so I have LOTS of that!)

Afterwards I had cleaned out so many partial baskets I had room in my cupboard for these!

 

I have to say - honestly it feels like a load was off my brain - I definitely feel more organized and that I can try to tackle some projects I have been wanting too!

 

I hope this inspires you to maybe organize a few things that have been getting in the way of being creative... I will definitely go through those boxes again and maybe work on some past things for the kids and family - I just love having a home for all these random things; and a place to put the items as they end up on the desk going forward:-)