Week 5 - The Family Tree

I am so relieved that the pitch is finally over!  It felt like a rain cloud was following me for the past three weeks leading up to the pitch.  Although I thought I would be really nervous while presenting, to my pleasant surprise, I managed to stay calm and tell everyone about my project.  I am so excited for everyone’s project – some of my favorites were Natalie’s idea of crocheting blankets for animals in shelters and Stephen and Ann’s idea of creating an organic skincare line. 

I have successfully been journaling for one week using the app “My Wonderful Days” on my iPhone.  While this doesn't seem like a huge accomplishment, I’m so proud that I've managed to stick with it.  I am hoping to journal at least five times a week to preserve my memories, so that one day, my great-great-great-grandchildren can know how cool their great-great-great-grandma was.  My blog also got a face lift!  I changed the background, layout, and colors to make it more appealing.  I made the background a piece of lined paper to inspire me to continue writing about my day. 

I started making the family tree with the help of my mom and dad.  I never realized how big my family was and how many people I haven’t met.  It was a lot harder than I anticipated.  I started to write it down on a piece of paper… but as you guys can see, that wasn't too successful.  After a quick Google search, I was able to find an awesome website called Family Echo where you make a family tree for free.  I will use this website to keep track of all of the names so that I can easily transfer them to paper for the scrapbook.  The picture on the left shows my struggle making the tree and the picture at the bottom shows a part of the tree I have created on www.familyecho.com.

My grandma is arriving in exactly one week from today – on the 24^th!  I haven’t seen her in over a year.  She lives in Canada, and she is one of the sweetest/sassiest/coolest people I know.  I am excited to have her help me with the family tree.  When I spoke to her on the phone she was thrilled for this project and eager to tell me about her life growing up.  Plus, now I can finally learn how to make her delicious Easter cookies!

I've also started to digitalize some pictures… well, I've digitalized ten if that counts for anything.  As pathetic as that sounds, it is so much harder than I anticipated.  I have to scan them one at a time onto a USB drive, crop them, center them, and save them into a document.  I am hoping to find an easier way to do this, like perhaps just taking a picture of the photo with my phone.  Although the quality won’t be as good, I feel like in this case quantity is better than quality.  As long as I find the perfect lighting to photograph the pictures, I don’t think it should be a problem.

I can’t believe it has been five weeks since Mr. Z introduced this project.  I’m so happy with everything that I have learned so far and I can’t wait for everything that I am going to learn throughout this journey.