You may have noticed over the years I’ve been writing here that I’m a big believer in personal projects. You’ve seen my work with my Gratitude Project. You’ve seen me explore painting. I’ve shared our own family albums and Christmas cards. I’ve shared my fine art series with you too. I think having these little areas of creative expression or personal projects is hugely beneficial for everyone. It allows us an opportunity to express ourselves and do something just for fun.

Well SIX YEARS ago I started a personal project… I wanted to create an album that captured images relating to our house fire. I started the album and I was super thrilled with the pages I managed to complete. But somewhere along the way, I let this project slide and I failed to complete it. It’s been sitting on my hard drive ever since… taking up space (and a lot of space too).

I think it can be super easy for us to let things like this happen. Life is so full of things that NEED to get done. Work, house work, activities with family and friends, places to take your kids, etc. And then there are the unexpected projects that crop up – repairing a broken car or a leaky faucet. Realizing you really need another piece of storage furniture and going on a hunt to find the right one for the right price. There are always going to be things that crop up that make it super easy to put our personal projects… our wants… to the side.

And maybe it’s not about the completion. Maybe it’s about the journey. Maybe it’s about the moment and just taking the opportunity to create. Maybe it doesn’t need to be finished to have meaning and purpose. That’s really ebautiful if you think about it.

But for me – I do have these couple projects that I REALLY want to finish. They’re meaningful to me and something that I know in the future I’ll be glad to have. So this year is going to be the year I complete the fire album I’ve put off for so long and finally get it printed out.  If for no other reason than to restore some space on my hard drive. And that’s not the only project I have on my list of things I want to do. I want to write out Marlee’s full adoption story. I have a huge portion of it tucked away in a writing program on my computer… but I need to finish it. I want to print my fine art pieces and put together a show… And we have tons of projects around the house we need to get done too.

But I know there are always going to be other things that NEED to get done. So how am I going to make sure this happens. Well… there are tons of brief periods of time during the day when I play a game on my phone or waste time on social media… Instead of doing that – I can slowly start to add in time to work on these projects. 10-20 minutes here and there can add up and before you know it – the whole project is done. So that’s my goal! I’m starting small with just the fire album and we’ll go from there. I’m sharing partly so I’m a little accountable to you guys and partly so if there’s anyone out there like me – they feel the motivation to work on their projects too!

What unfinished projects do you want to finish in 2018?