This will be my thirteenth year of documenting my life through scrapbooking.

It’s taken a lot of forms: traditional 12×12 layouts, kraft chipboard albums, 8.5×11″ binders. I have this weird thing where I want to keep things structured, but at the same time I need to shake things up every few years to keep things fresh. So this year, I’m finally (after years of thinking about it) trying out 6×12″ pocket pages.

And I. Am. Loving it.

So here’s my current approach. Each month begins with a spread showcasing an overview of the month for our little family. These are the everyday moments: meals, weather, hobbies. Then, on the following pages, I go into detail about any “bigger” memories from the month, like a trip or a day-long activity, which gets its own spread.

When I can, I like to start each year’s scrapbook with our New Year’s Eve festivities, even if it’s nothing extravagant. I like to document those first few moments entering the year, ya know? We’ve been keeping New Year’s Eve low-key these days. This year we got together with some friends and watched Godzilla as the clock struck 12, so that’s really the only picture I have of our little celebration. Throughout the night I was getting Happy New Year texts from friends in different time zones, which I thought would be fun to screenshot and include, especially with the iPhone’s celebration animations.

An overview of our month. We got absolutely no snow in December, so this spread heavily features the excitement of snowfall (followed by intense below-zero temperatures). Another big part of our month was video games. Carson got several games for Christmas, so a lot of our free time has been spent playing together or watching each other play games. We also kept our Christmas decorations up for an extra long time, so I felt like it was important to document that, as the decorations characterized our month. And, of course, food. We’re sort of food hobbyists, so it feels important to include some of our meals and snacks. On this spread, I included a piece cut out from a Panera takeout bag and a photo of some donuts.

I had one “big” event this month: a trip to the zoo with my sister. I had far too many photos to fit on one spread, so I added a 6×8 insert with a little flip tab. I also had some old postcards laying around, which I thought would be super fun to use for some journaling!

To watch these spreads come together, you can check out this process video:

I am having so much fun filling up this album, and I’m really looking forward to all of the memories we’re going to make this year.