Hello! Welcome! I'll be your guide for the week. My name is Carolyn Jolley and I'm grateful to be the proud momma of three sons, one daughter and one angel son.
To kick off the week I'm going to focus on gratitude. After all, this is the month traditionally known for celebrating gratitude. According to Dictionary.com, gratitude is "the quality or feeling of being grateful or thankful," and being grateful is to be "warmly or deeply appreciative of kindness or benefits received."
To begin, let me give you a few ideas of ways you can scrapbook your gratitude.
I have a friend who is determined to find something to be grateful for every single day during November and she is following through by updating her Facebook status with a statement of gratitude every single time she updates. When she's finished, she'll have a whole month's worth of gratitude statements that she can put in a scrapbook. Our own Elizabeth Dillow did something similar for Simple Scrapbooks magazine last year where she listed her FB status updates for a whole week on one 12 x 12 page.
A year ago, a friend (thanks, Wendy!) gave me this sweet journal with room to write one thing I was grateful for every single day of the year. She used cute little tags, beautiful scraps of paper and chipboard or cardstock and bound these altogether. It was fun and easy to write one sentence each day.
See how cute this is? She layered each piece and used a Zutter Bind It All to keep it together. Wouldn't this make a nice Christmas gift this year? I bet most of you have spare tags, paper and other odds n' ends laying around that would work very nicely for this project. A lot of scrapbook stores allow you to use their tools if you go to a crop. Or you might find a store near you that allows you to use their crop room and tools free during certain hours. I did this a lot at the beginning of the year. It's a great way to figure out which tools you like and if you might be willing to spend money on pricier items.
Another scrapbooker (I'm pretty sure it was one of our WCS Collective members - sorry, I don't remember which one) asked each family member at Thanksgiving dinner to write down what they were thankful for and then she took their picture. She paired these next to each other in a small album. Now every year, they can look back and see what they were thankful for at that time in their life. (This is still one of my favorites. Maybe she'll read this and leave a comment telling us where this idea was published and who she is. ;)
This year, I'm grateful that I'm able to stay home with our brand new daughter. What a HUGE blessing in my life.
What are you grateful for? I asked my fellow WCS members to share a few things that they are grateful for. Here is what they said:
I am thankful for community...the people in my life! ~Sara Winnick
I am thankful for the easy transition to our new home in Boston. All the kids are in schools they love, sports they love, and church youth groups they love. Life is good! ~Lain Ehmann
I’m so thankful for my husband’s steady job in this unsteady economy, that he is able to adequately supply for myself and my little family. ~Elisha Snow
I'm thankful for my health. I had a biopsy a couple weeks ago and it came back normal. ~Celeste Smith
Last year at this time my daughter Ryan was battling cancer, so this year I am very thankful she is healthy and cancer-free! ~Jody Wenke
I'm so grateful our baby arrived safe and sound! ~Aly Dosdall
I am grateful that I have the chance to spend one on one time with my kids this year. It’s been a sweet thing, getting to know them as they enter their teen years. I'm also grateful for my siblings. ~Emily Pitts
I am grateful for dedicated people with a vision to build something as cool as the Paul Smith Children's Village (like a big outdoor children's museum) to Cheyenne. This is just one little corner of it, the brick puppet theater. ~Elizabeth Dillow
I am grateful for happy little girls who think jumping in leaf piles is fun, and even more grateful that I am here to watch them do it. ~Elizabeth Dillow
I'm thankful to be a mother. ~Rebecca Cooper
This is a photo of my grandmother, who recently celebrated her 84th birthday. She is mother of 6, grandmother to 13, and great-grandma to 5. There are not enough words to describe all the ways in which she has blessed our entire family or that could possibly convey just how amazing she is. I am so thankful for her strong family values and unwavering faith, and I am so grateful for her selflessness and generosity. She is and always has been the glue that has held this family together. ~Tina Cockburn
What are you thankful for? If you've created something that shows your gratitude for something or someone, share it with us on our Flickr gallery. Just click the link at the top of the page. Or, if you haven't created anything yet, why not take this opportunity before the holidays get into full swing and capture something that will remind you what you are grateful for right now? In time, you'll be "grateful" you did!
