Our first stop on our DC trip was to walk from our hotel down to the White House and have the kids get their first look at the White House! On the way we walked through Lafayette Square and approached the White House directly from the front for the best view!
After viewing the White House from the front, we walked around to the back side to see the back lawn and also the Ellipse, where we saw the National Christmas Tree. The Ellipse was blocked off with barriers due to the 4th of July, so we were unable to walk through but could still see across.
Since we were unable to get a White House tour, we did the next best thing and went to the White House Visitor Center. This very impressive visitor center had tons of history on the White House, a great interactive model with a virtual tour, and lots of artifacts from the presidents who lived in the White House. We all really enjoyed this visitor center and I would definitely recommend it.
The visitor center offers a Junior Ranger badge, so the boys both got busy on working on their booklets, and after completing a few pages, watching a short movie, and talking to the Ranger, they received their badges.
The supplies that I used for these pages were a combination of several different kits and paper collections that I had been collecting and discussed here. The color scheme for the entire DC album was based off of grey, white, tan, and black, with different accent colors mixed in on various pages. The only memorabilia included on these pages is the White House brochure and the Passport Stamps we picked up at the Visitor Center. I also included a photo of the Junior Ranger Badge.
Here are the final four layouts:
Thanks for looking! Our next stop iss the Washington Monument.
I thought it would be fun to go back and take a look at the very first "real" scrapbook page I ever made. I say "real" because I did do some decorated photo albums before this, but I don't really consider those scrapbooks in the real sense.
I really started scrapbooking after my first son was born in 2003, and almost the entire first album is baby pictures, of course. For my first layout, I took the easy way out...I used a premade kit! And here it is:
The paper was pre-printed and the kit came with some cut out tags and die cuts, so everything coordinated and all I had to do was add the photos. And that's really about all I did, or knew how to do at that time.
This first set of photos were taken while we were still in the hospital. Since our son was in the NICU for the first 5 days (he was a preemie), all of the photos we have in the hospital are from the visitation room there - he was never in the regular nursery or my room. We don't have any of the usual photos that most people would have of their first child in the hospital - visitation was quite limited in the NICU, and we only got to spend about 30 minutes with him for feeding every 3 hours. With the limited time I didn't take a lot of photos, I do wish I would have taken more.
The layouts are really quite simple, but I was new to this and didn't really have any supplies other than the scrapbook kit. Over time I would accumulate much more.
I took a look at the second layout I made and was surprised to see that I did a little better job - added some decorative metal frames and accent photos in them.
These early pages are a good reminder that we all start somewhere, and over time things change and hopefully become better. I do see how these early layouts resemble what I still do now...everyone really does have their own style that kind of sticks with them. But we all start somewhere, and it really doesn't matter where, as long as you keep going.
