One Project Down

I'm nowhere near as ambitious as my cousin's wife Kristi with her thirteen projects in one week, (you can see her awesome blog by clicking here) but I did finally finish this one project. It's taken forever!!! Partly because I was waiting for scrapbooking paper to go on sale at Hobby Lobby, partly because it took forever to find fabric I liked for the cover, but mostly because I had to gather all the information, pictures, etc from other people and then translate it into English before putting it into Ana's book. Thank you Martha--I could never had made it without your help!! (I finally gathered all of Ana's school records--that kid has been to a lot of schools in her short elementary career! Several I discovered by accident as I was getting other records--nobody remembered all of them!) Anyway, it's a baby/school days/life book for Ana. When I was looking for a baby book for Elena, I didn't really like any of them--they all had info I didn't really care to add or were too expensive and plus, I wanted a School Days book, but really didn't want a lot of separate books for each kid, so I made my own.
I saved the format on the computer and I just printed it out again for Ana. I would already have started the new baby's book, but it's being a stinker and won't let me see the gender so I can't buy paper yet. Errr. Maybe tomorrow I'll get lucky. Anyway, for those of you who have not been exposed to the whole world of adoption stuff, a life book is basically a scrapbook with info on the child's life, more particularly about the adoption, birth parents, country of origin, etc. So I added some more pages (that's the brilliancy of this method) and presto, Ana has a life book too.
Here's the a sample of the school days pages. It goes up to grade 12 of course.
About the birth. Amazing I ended up with footprints of Ana, eh?
This is from Elena's book, the ultrasound page. You can see her big, pouty lips already on the last one.
Again from Elena's book--I did a page on the years before school starts. Some more of the baby book part. There's actually a lot more pages than these obviously, I just was taking photos for a random sampling.And this is Ana's life book section--a page on each of her birth parents. There's also a page on her older sister too.Ana's Catholic baptism. They say it's important in a life book to include all events, even unpleasant ones. Not that I mean being baptized Catholic is unpleasant, it's just that my sister had asked why I included that, and I just thought it added another piece to her life. The unpleasant parts might include info on why the child might have been placed for adoption to begin with, if for instance the child had been removed by CPS, etc. Ana gets two family trees! Oh, and this. This is my shopping spree the other day. The dress is for Ana--next year. Regularly $45.00, I bought it for $10.00. And the shirt is the first maternity thing I've bought this time around. Regularly $32.00, I snagged it for $10.00! I love bargains. I also love that shirt. I'll post pictures when I wear it to church on Sunday. I wish the dress came in my size too! Anyway, we'll see if I finish my other to-do projects before the baby's born. I want to finish the stockings, go through my photo albums and write captions by the photos, and if this darn baby will show it's gender tomorrow--make a baby book for he or she. Wish me luck!