B&T 2010

 
Sometimes I get big ideas in my mind and I estimate the time it would take to create these big ideas to be much less than what is actually true. This was the case with Timmy’s Christmas present. I decided to make him a book of our past year, complete with daily activities, quotes, conversations, and photos. It ended up being a little bit more of a project than I anticipated. As in, I spent every free second I had working on it, and I still didn’t get it totally done in time for Christmas. (Tim promised he didn’t mind.)  

I guess I should be happy that it isn’t too easy
to sum up our last year of living.

It was a huge job, and a little overwhelming. But as I looked back through hundreds of pictures, my daily planner, and my blog, I became more and more thankful for all that 2010 has been, and how blessed I am to have a handsome husband like Timmy to live my years with.

The book starts out with a little section full of fun facts and charts and graphs about our year. Tim loves graphs, and it was pretty fun to gather statistics, like where we'd been, how we spent our time, and how many times we ate at Chipotle per month. 

 

There is a section for each month of our year,
with a highlight page beginning each new section. 

I’ve never been good at keeping a diary, but I have adopted a new method for keeping track of days,
and it works very well for me. Every year I buy a small monthly planner, and every day I write just a sentence or two, detailing a little bit of what we did that day. 

It’s easy, and because there isn’t much space, I’m forced to only write a little bit. It’s perfect for me, and it’s so fun to glance back at “last year on this day” and see what we did. Usually it’s just things like, “Grocery shopping. Pizza dinner. Scrabble game.” 

It is fun for me to see our marked days, and how we spent them together. And my monthly planner was invaluable when making Tim’s book. It’s easy to forget the little things, like the night we got our hair cut together, or our first picnic of the year, but I thankfully had it all on record. 

I rounded up 12-15 photos from each month, and printed them on photo paper. 

For captions, I found quotes of different things Tim or I said or wrote during the year, explaining what was happening in the photo. This part probably took the longest, as I did a lot of searching through emails, love letters, and blog comments to find the perfect caption for each photo.

 

Timmy says so many hilarious things. I share lots of them, but for every one I share, there are ten other ones I don’t (or can’t) share. Every time he says something particularly funny, I jot it down somewhere and add it to my file of funny “conversations”. 

I started this when we first began dating, so I have a very extensive file by now. I took some of the best 2010 conversations and added them to Timmy’s book. (I think this was his favorite part.)

I tried to keep it simple (and it still took me forever to finish!), and bought a pretty binder at Target to house the pages. I started out doing it another way (more complicated) but then was inspired by Jamie's inspiration from this. I love the simplicity, and since I want to be able to continue this project into the coming years, simple is important.    

Timmy loved his present. We read it from start to finish together, and it was delightful for us to relive our year, remembering lost memories and realizing all over again how very blessed we are. I picture our children looking at this someday, and I hope they can catch a glimpse of who their parents were when they were young, just married, and blissfully in love.