Write. Click. Scrapbook.

Hi, again. You made it to the weekend! Thanks for coming around this week and listening to my stories of feeling overwhelmed,  of working to make time and space to do the things I love, and of trying new things. I just wanted to close the week saying to keep on telling all those stories (I know I am preaching to the choir here). 

Here are a couple of mine that I made this week. Just words, pictures, and some pretty paper. Ahh. It soothes the soul.

When I wasn't scrapping this week, I have been watching an absurd amount of Olympics, and I have loved every minute of it. Those gymnasts have made me cry on several occasions. If you love the Olympics too, stay tuned for next week....

Hi, all. It's Aliza here again today. Yesterday, I mentioned that this past year has been all about managing time, energy, and commitments. I was feeling like I had too much of the third, and not enough of the first two. So I found the things that I enjoyed the least (and those things for which I had a choice in the matter), and deleted them. It felt like hitting the reset button, so I could rebuild a more manageable schedule.  

One of the things I have been trying to make more space for in my life, is dance. Dance is something I loved as a child, all the way through my teen years. I just never studied it in depth. I had assumed that I totally missed the boat on this, and to be honest, it was the one thing in life I regretted. (I figured one regret is not a bad number.) But, then I started going to class.  At the time, I wasn't sure if I would be committed enough to keep on going week after week. As I mentioned, time and energy are limited, so I just wasn't sure I'd manage to keep up with it. But, I did. And, I've even had some opportunities to perform. 

I actually have a scrapbooked record of this whole process, which is pretty cool.I didn't intend to make a collection of dance layouts, I simply scrapped what was going on in my life at the time. But all together they create a pretty complete narrative; from not dancing, to starting out, to struggling, and to performing. 

So what is the takeaway from my little tale?

Get yourself in your pages. Tell your own stories, even if your story right now is, "I am tired," (as mine were yesterday). What you are doing, how you are filling your days, those are all important, especially when all those little moments are added together. 

Hi, everyone. Long time, no see! It's Aliza here, and like Marnie did last week, I am jumping back into blogging here. We all disappeared for a little while, because life just got in the way. There were no major life events that got in my way, really. Life has been graciously ordinary. But, I thought this might be a good time to share my little journey of how life suddenly felt too full of commitments. The to-do lists never seemed to get any shorter, and there was simply no breathing room.  So, over the course of this last year, I realized I was going to have to let some things go.  

The beauty of scrapbooking, is that I documented some of this journey. I made this layout way back in November, when I realized that something felt "off." I love the quote that I found for this layout,"The key to keeping your balance is knowing when you've lost it." (I don't love that I had to hand write the quote in this layout. I was having some printer issues at the time.) 

The following layout is from May of this year. See, it took much of this year to shed some of my commitments. Now that summer is here, some of my commitments have ended, and as a teacher I have a complete month of vacation. So it is the perfect time to hit the reset button; to let myself do nothing, and to fill my days with the things I want or need the most,

So here's to making some breathing room in our lives. 

As you can see, scrapbooking is not one of things I plan on giving up.