Scrapbooking | January & February 2020 By The Numbers

This year, as I process each month's photos, I'm creating a digital layout featuring six photos and journaling "by the numbers." I'm using a digital template and various papers from my stash. My plan is to include a photo of me and Robbie and a photo of my mantel display as the top line of photos each month.

Here's how the numbers add up for January and February.

* 1 quiet New Year's Day at home.
* 2 business trips for Robbie:
     8 days - New Delhi, India
     3 days - New York & Boston
* 1 pan of fudge made by Mama while Melissa was there for a visit.
* 3 family members here for a quick overnight visit (Trey, Christina & Andrew).
* 1 get-together for Melissa to scrap with a friend.
* 3 pairs of of shoes donated after closet cleaning/decluttering.
* 4 happy mail packages filled with socks (& books) mailed.
* 1 hour of snow flurries.
* 5 movies watched: War Room, Tall Girl, Dumplin', The Addams Family, Tolkien.
* 10  layouts completed & 1 art journal page created.

I've decided to use this monthly layout to track the movies we watch as well as my creative output each month.

We thoroughly enjoyed each of the movies we watched in January. War Room is a wonderful portrayal of the power of prayer that I can't recommend enough. This was Priscilla Shirer's first movie with the Kendrick brothers, and her portrayal of Elizabeth Jordan is perfect. Tall Girl and Dumplin' are both on Netflix and depict the anxiety of being "different" as a teenage girl. They are funny and heart-rending and genuine - I recommend watching them with your tweens and teens for entertainment and discussion. The Addams Family movie came out last year, but we missed it at the theaters. It's an animated comedy that is well-done and just plain FUN to watch. I learned of the Tolkien movie through a post on the Patio Postcards blog. Robbie and I both enjoyed learning more about the life of J.R.R. Tolkien as a young man.

* 3 birthdays celebrated -Paige (15), Laurie (15) & Daddy (73).
* 2 day road trip to Southeast Texas.
* 1 new table & 6 chairs purchased for breakfast nook.
* 5 day visit from Pun'kin.
* 1 ingrown toenail surgically removed on Valentine's Day.
* 54 years of  marriage celebrated with Mama & Daddy.
* 1 hall closet emptied, cleaned, and reorganized.
* 8 lb 5 oz great-niece born on 2-20-20.
* 203 rolls of washi tape organized in an old cassette tape holder.
* 10 movies watched: Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Mockingjay Parts 1 & 2, Divergent, Insurgent, Allegiant, Mr. Holland's Opus, The Horse Whisperer, The Caine Mutiny Court Martial.
* 16 layouts completed, 3 cards created, 1 mini-album finished up, 3 vision board pages collaged & 4 blog posts published.

We have a large movie collection and are watching (or re-watching) many of those this year. The Hunger Games and Divergent series are based on young adult sci-fi novels. We've both enjoyed the books and the movies. We first discovered Mr. Holland's Opus when a friend used excerpts from it for a presentation many years ago. It's a beautiful story of one teacher's influence on several generations of students. When we upgraded our VHS copy last year, the new DVD came with The Horse Whisperer movie. We'd never heard of it, but it turned out to be a wonderful story of healing for a young girl and her horse after a terrible accident. Robert Redford plays a rugged, down-to-earth rancher who has a special way with horses. We watched The Caine Mutiny Court Martial on Amazon Prime Video.  Some of you may remember, we both read the Fiction Pulitzer Prize Winner, The Caine Mutiny, and enjoyed the original movie with Humphrey Bogart several years ago. This movie condenses the story down to the final drama of the court martial of Captain Queeg. It's extremely well-done!

There you have it - our first two months of 2020 "by the numbers."