chicken soup weather

It's dreary out. No sun. The hubby's sick. Yep, it's chicken soup weather! I have chicken soup simmering on the stove (homemade of course!). And after, we're gonna make some treats in my daughter's Easy Bake oven. Mmmmm!!

Last weekend I worked on reorganizing my scrapbook pages into new albums. You may (or may not) remember quite a while back (like about 9 mos ago) I bought some new Making Memories albums from www.joann.com. These are what they look like:
Now, I *really* like these albums. But at $30 a pop that's just not in the budget. I like the Making Memories albums because they're leather, have a nice stitching around the edge, and the price is very nice ($12 each plus free shipping on www.joann.com). I changed over all of our family albums to the chocolate, my daughter's albums are meadow and my son's are navy. All matchy matchy!

I added the Snaploads to each album so I wouldn't have to mess with the posts (such a pain!). I found them on sale at Joann's this week for $3 each. I really would prefer the D-ring albums but I couldn't find any I really liked that were in the price I could afford (I had to buy10 albums).

I may at some point get a few of the red for family history albums, layouts of my hubby and me as kids, etc but I haven't gotten that far yet. And one other side note, I found that the Paper Studio page refills at Hobby Lobby fit my albums perfectly and they're $10 for 25. Or, if you're like me, you buy them when they're on sale like last week. I got them for $5 a pack!

By the way, you can find D-ring albums that are in a lower price range. But none of them are the nice leather (that I've found anyway). I knew I didn't want corduroy, linen or any similar material like that because my albums are used. My kids are always looking through them (which is exactly how I like it) so they need to hold up. I've found that the material albums tend to get marks on them...or crayon, marker, you name it!

So I started with arranging the layouts in piles by year. Then I took out the layouts that needed to go in my kids' albums (previously everything was in the family albums).

Don't you just love a big stack of layouts?? Makes me feel like I've accomplished a lot! That is, til I start putting them in the albums and realize there's months with no layouts. *sigh*

I put my layouts in chronological order, each album is a full year. And as I was going through my albums I came across some layouts that just made me laugh. Not cause the photos were funny, but I laughed at the layouts themselves. Boy, I sure have come a long way in the last 7 years!! Maybe I'll share some of those with you guys. Hey, I betcha you'd laugh just as hard at that as you did at my 80's hair!!!

But for now, I'll just share a couple more layouts I did last week

BTW, to everyone that has commented, emailed or called over the last few days ~ thank you! It's amazing what a few good thoughts can really do!!! They're MUCH appreciated :)