Creating A 2009 Birthday Calendar

We are a blended family. We have eight children between us (5 his and 3 mine - but they are ALL MINE), some have added spouses to their households and we have grandchildren - three I don't see for reasons out of my control and one brand new one I will get to spend the next two weeks (or more) with. I am so excited.

Every child (not children anymore) gets a call on their birthday where ever we are and we sing Happy Birthday to them. We do such a bad job of being off key and out of sync but they love it - Thank God. At some point through out the year I get asked "When is ------'s birthday?". Most of the time I remember, but not always. I especially have a hard time with the spouses, but I have my trusty iPhone with the calendar feature and I think I have them all now.

Okay, watch. This will be the very first time that all the kids come to read my blog. Money is pretty tight this year for us. After my husbands prostate surgery last year, and the resultant bouts of terrible infections he spent December and January in the hospital and he was not recuperated enough to get back out on the road until mid March. We have been playing catch up with our bills.

I had picked up a thing or two in our travels, but mostly this will be a hand crafted Christmas.

At the end of August we all got together in Denver for four days and all the kids got to see each other for the first time in about 10 years. It was awesome. Photos taken at every opportunity. Like most every other family, we have spoken about a spouse to the members, and the time we all spent together was a time to put faces with names. Thankfully there are no divorces in the offing after having met and spent time with this brood.

I am so blessed.

Well, anyway, one of the things I'm making from my humongous stash of scrapbooking paper is a Birthday Calendar for 2009. I only have one finished. The rest I will tackle when we get back from being Grandma and Grandpa. I only have two pages as a sampling, but I'm pretty proud of the way they turned out.


This is the September page. It is like a scrapbook and a calendar in one. Not my original idea, I sort of stole it from seeing the calendars you can purchase at Office Depot. The papers on this page are all from Club Scrap (www.clubscrap.com), well except for the white pieces.

The calendar part was printed onto thin cardstock from my stash. I used a program called The Print Shop (www.broderbund.com)to create the calendar months.

The one for July, since there are so many of us with birthdays in this month, I had to make a flip page. There are more photos under me (the red part).





I thought I would be really smart and punch the hole to hang it with as I went. Somehow I got it off kilter and had to repunch the holes when I was finally done. Man was I upset over that. All that work and time I put into it. My fix for it was to put strips of ribbon in the bad hole. Now there are pull tabs for each month. I can say I planned it that way if someone asks. Don't tell them different.

I have many ideas floating around in my head of what to do for Christmas. I will have time later to get at it and have little bits of paper tracked throughout my house from all of my creative genius.