I {heart} Calendars

Yes, I'm kinda an organizational nerd like that (or I try to be organized anyway)! But I love calendars! I love that a new year brings a brand new, empty calendar for me to fill out. I have 4 calendars that I use regularly. Obsessed much? Yes.

So I have a desktop calendar, of course, which I keep on the computer desk in our office/craft room/guest room that's really just a calendar to use for reference when we're in there working. I also have a small planner that I keep in the diaper bag (or in my purse on the rare occasion that I carry one of those instead) so that I always know what we have going on when I'm not at home. Then there's a calendar I print out & stick on our fridge each that I use to write our appointments, etc. on so that the whole family (ok, mostly it's for my hubby) knows what we've got scheduled. Lastly, this one I just added to my calendar collection last year, is a large wall calendar. I make it in My Digital Studio & have it printed through Stampin' Up! I use my absolute favorite photos from each month of the previous year to create a scrapbook page at the top. Then the bottom, the actual calendar part, I fill in only with birthdays, anniversaries & holidays. This calendar I do not write on, but it hangs on the wall in our kitchen looking beautiful! And it's fun to look back each month on what we were doing last year at that time & it really shows how much our girls have grown. Plus, it adds a little bit of seasonal decor to our home. I love that the pages are 12 x 12 also so that at the end of the year I can just cut the scrapbook page at the top out & stick it in an album. (Just a note here: The calendar cover is printed on the back of the scrapbook page for January but it is upside down, so I just print out the calendar cover at Costco as a 12 x 12 photo print & stick it at the front of the new year.) So now I have a nice running album of our favorite memories for each month of the year. And I usually end up creating my calendar the week after Christmas when the craziness of the holidays has died down. It doesn't take long at all, especially since you can use a pre-designed calendar template if you want to. To make it really easy this year I just simply used a polka dot scrapbook paper for each month, just changing the colors to correspond to the season. I also just matted each photo in white & I used a simple font in black throughout the calendar. Saved me a lot of time & it looks really good!

I thought I would share some of my favorite pages from my new 2011 wall calendar with you. It was so hard to choose because I just love them all!

Here's the cover:

(I wrote 2010 because even though this is a calendar for 2011 it has photos & memories from 2010.)

Here's the page for April:

And the page for September:

And here's the page for December with the calendar page underneath it too so you have an idea of what it looks like all together:

Well, you may think I'm totally calendar crazy now, or maybe I've inspired you to get organized for the new year too! Hopefully the latter!