Project Life 2013 Week 31

For this week's Project Life Tuesday, I'm sharing a catch-up week from 2013. Week 31 was a pretty rough week for me, and because of that I had been avoiding it. I would start working on it, get overwhelmed once again by all of the drama from that week, then put it down and walk away. But last weekend I was determined to finally get it finished. After all, it's just as important to document the bad weeks as it is the good ones - it's real life, and that's what this project is all about.

Not that week 31 was all bad. We had a really fun weekend with friends, grilling out and seeing our local Shakespeare in the Park production (I had friends in the production as well). But it was also the week J totaled his car and the week I went in for a pretty scary doctor's appointment. In the end, both of these things turned out okay, but while they were happening, I was an emotional wreck. So my goal for documenting the week was to create balance. I didn't want to gloss over how stressful the bad parts were, but I didn't want to focus too much on them either. 

When going through my pictures from that week, I noticed that I took a lot of photos of the little things around me that made me happy: a butterfly on the flowers I had just planted, a sleepy puppy with funny ears, and my favorite latte mug. I wanted to capture those parts of my week as well as the stressful ones.

I also did a lot of big projects around the house that week. I knew the best way to not let myself obsess over a whole lot of "maybes" was to keep moving and stay busy. 

When deciding what products to use for the week, I knew I wanted to keep it pretty light. Dark, saturated colors seemed to add to the doom & gloom I was trying to avoid. Since I had just been working with Here & There by Studio Calico, I decided to pull some of the lighter patterns from that collection. And they just happened to work perfectly with the free printables from ChicTags that I had been dying to use, along with some ChicTags labels I had just picked up. I used my standard Becky Higgins Design A page protector for the left side, but switched it up a bit with a We R Memory Keepers page protector for the opposite side.

Here are few close-ups:

It feels so good to have this week documented and put behind me!