Things Keeping Me Busy:

Well, here is something else that is keeping me pretty busy. It is a lot more pleasant than H1N1 and Jake being sick, which he no longer is.

I've been taking another class over at Big Picture Scrapbooking taught by Ali Edwards called "Yesterday/Today". Ali is pretty well known in the scrapbooking world for her unique way of seeing life and capturing that vision. We aren't so much "scrapbookers" as we are "life artists". I'm comfortable with that.

This class is about the telling the stories of who we are. It is about how yesterday has created who we are today, and it is about what today is for us.

We are gathering the photos of our life and choosing which ones to use to tell our story. What has really been a challenge for me has been learning the digital component of this. I'm doing paper layouts, but she gives us text boxes and layers and digital things we can use so that our finished layouts can be either digital or hybrid.

This is a whole new world to me. I rarely type anything on the computer when I do a layout, just because I don't want to deal with making everything fit, etc etc. Now I am spending hours in PSE learning how to do layers and all sorts of other things that I don't even know what to call!

BUT, the fun part has been telling my story.

Below is my introduction page. On the left is a 5 picture photo strip that is all one piece. Yep. I learned how to do that and felt quite pleased with myself after HOURS in the learning curve. (I know, I know. Some of you are shaking your head in sad amusement on my behalf...

You can't see the middle paper with the title "Yesterday/Today" on it very well. The ink is a blue and the words are in outline form so they are hard to see in this photo. I chose 5 pictures representing the 5 decades of my yesterdays thus far, and the large photo on the right represents today, taken in France last month.

This layout is about 6 stories from my childhood. We were to choose 6 stories to tell, and if we had the photos great, but we didn't have to use photos. Another learning curve with me and the computer, again.

I had fun looking through old pictures with the intention of choosing a story to tell. I had a hard time narrowing it down to 6, and I certainly had a hard time keeping myself within the limit of the text boxes. I had emailed my Mom with a question about what year we moved to Nebraska and she wrote me back a HUGE email with all sorts of details and stories!! What a TREASURE! I'm going to write and ask more little questions, Mom, hoping for more packed-full-of-details answers!

This week's story is to be about a challenging time in our life and how we got through it. This one will bare our souls a little bit. The purpose of such a story is to give us perspective (this was hard but I did it) and perhaps to strengthen anyone who reads it. When I was in my 20's my great-aunt gave me her father's, my great-grandfather's, missionary journal to read. He had gone to England. I was soooooooo anxious and excited to read this, to learn about this man I came from, to feel connected through the years. It was the most boring thing I had ever read! I learned all about the weather in England (it rained...almost daily) and how many miles he walked (lots). NOTHING about how he felt or what he thought. Aunt Genevieve had warned me it would be like that.

I've always been a pretty honest writer in my journals. I don't necessarily write all the gory details of the hard times, because I do believe we should let go and move on. I write enough so that anyone who reads it will know something hard is happening, but I'm getting through it. I DO want any children or grandchildren or on down the line to be able to gain strength from things they might read from me.

I remember during a pretty hard time years ago, talking out-loud to one of my grandmothers in the mother-line and asking her, "How did you do it, Hannah? How did you keep going? How did you get through the hard stuff?"

So this is what I need to work on today. Besides learning the technical stuff for the layout, I need to also find the right balance with my written word so that I can tell a challenging story. We'll see how this turns out!