Yeah, Write

I Love You, Awesome Nerds

That was the title of today's Paperclipping Roundtable episode, where Noell Hyman, Izzy, Shimelle Laine, and I chatted about ideas for scrapbooking our significant others—either the individual or the relationship. I walked away with a whole list I want to tackle about my hubby, and I'm pretty sure you will as well. 

I also shared some fun ideas of my own. Here's one layout I referenced in the episode. I am sporadically good at saving meaningful quotes that I overhear in my day-to-day life. In a time period when I was VERY good at it, I noticed that in the months prior, both of my in-laws had said something nice about me and both of my parents had said something lovely about Travis. So I simply collected that list on a layout with pictures of all of us.

I think it's kind of fun to read the photos as a formula. If you look at the photos on the left, you see that Don + Bev = Trav. And if you follow the formula from the right, you'll see that Janet + Jeff = Angie. (One thing I've noticed about my dad is that it is impossible to find a photo of him that does not include a grandchild on his lap. It's the only way he'll consent to having his picture taken.)

This is definitely a quick and easy way to scrapbook about a relationship. As far as journaling, it really doesn't get easier than including quotes from people you love.

Incidentally, my product pick of the week was also used on this episode, but you'll have to listen to it to find out what it was!

Last Chance!
Also mentioned in the episode was my Grammar Free Journaling workshop, and today (Wednesday, 2/20/13)  is the absolute last chance to register! We're having SO much fun in class, and time is running out if you want to join a few hundred of the coolest people on the planet as we try out a dozen awesome, stress-free writing strategies.

The countdown is ON!

My very first online workshop begins in just TWO DAYS.

I'll admit I'm a bit nervous to be in the spotlight like this, all by myself.

I spend so much time developing, editing, and shaping other people's content that I rarely have the opportunity to create and share intensive educational content that's 100% mine.

As you may have noticed, both of my eBooks were co-authored, so I could share the workload and make it more manageable. I co-authored Quick & Creative Quizzes with Wendy Smedley and Journaling that Matters with Kelly Jeppson.

But this one is going to be ALL me. No buffer. No co-teacher to hide behind.

I'm not sure what I was thinking, taking on this project (thousands of words of text, 34 layouts of which lots are brand new, 12 emails, 6 videos, promotional content, banners, and all the related accoutrements) while I was in the midst of packing up my whole house and moving 10.3 miles the weekend before Thanksgiving, then hosting my husband's family for Thanksgiving, then trying to survive the holidays while we Lucases experienced a round-robin of illnesses. (Poor Keira was so sick on Christmas Day that she didn't even want to open her presents.) All this while I was also learning my new job at Big Picture Classes!

My husband deserves an award for surviving it all with me.

And now that it's all done, I'm super excited to be sharing it live with my 312 students (and counting) starting this Thursday! The payoff for all that work is the chance to interact live with my students, see the projects they create based on my challenges, host live chats, offer cool giveaways, and make some fun new friends.

I can't WAIT for that part!

So, if you've been on the fence about trying out Grammar-Free Journaling for yourself, now's the time to act.

I'm happy to give away one FREE spot in my class to someone who leaves me a comment by Thursday—if there's still anyone reading this blog, that is! (This will be an interesting experiment, since I've been known to go 6 weeks between blog posts in the last few months, a situation that can easily be explained by paragraph 6 above.) It doesn't matter if you're my mother, my neighbor, or a friend I haven't met yet who lives in Australia, you can still enter to win. :)

Even if you don't win, you can get a free copy of my eBook, Journaling That Matters: Simple strategies for finding the right words (a value of $7.99) if you register for the Grammar-Free Journaling workshop by Thursday.

Here's how:
Click here to register for Grammar Free Journaling. Then in a separate transaction, click here to purchase Journaling That Matters and enter code GRAMMARFREE at checkout. Offer expires February 14, 2013. Cannot be combined with any other coupon, discount, or special offer. Must use specific links in this paragraph.

(Note: For an extra chance to win a FREE spot in my class, visit Rebecca Cooper's blog today! She's also offering a coupon for $7 off if you'd rather save some cash than get a free eBook. Your choice!)

UPDATE 2/14: And the winner, as chosen by Random.org, is commenter #14, Rebecca! Congrats and see you in class!

Grammar-Free Sneak Peek

Check out one of the 34 layouts (and a free tip) from my upcoming Grammar-Free Journaling workshop, featured today in a guest post at Club CK (the online community for Creating Keepsakes magazine)! 

You can enter to win a free spot in my class and grab a $5 coupon! There weren't many entries yet at the time of this post, so your odds are good! Winner will be picked Friday.

Check it out here.

Grammar-Free Journaling: A Poem

CHA* was great, CHA was fun,

Now I'm home, the fun is done.

It's time for me to promote my class,

Which will help you write with style and sass.

There are 12 great strategies to learn,

And unless you have money to burn,

You best sign up by the end of today

Because the $7 savings is going away!

Don't worry. There will only be a teeny tiny bit of poetry in the class. You'll barely even notice it!

Only $28 if you sign up today! Regularly $35.

*CHA = Craft & Hobby Association Winter tradeshow in Anaheim, California, where I've been for the last week and which wasn't warm OR sunny. But it was better than the 2-degree weather in Utah!

Unleashing the Power of School Lunch

It turns out that the topic of school lunch has an almost magical ability to draw out of people authentic memories and stories from their childhood. It certainly did for me. Who knew?

And that's the topic of the "big idea" that I'm sharing inside the FREE Big Idea Festival over at bigpictureclasses.com today. (Join in on the fun here. Today's the last day!)

I've got an 8-minute video that's all about writing for the sake of writing (and also school lunch), a memory dump for you to read (brought to you by Southland Elementary School, circa 1984), a challenge for you to try, and the rest of the scrapbook page you see below. Yes, that's me in the 2nd grade. Aren't you just dying to pinch my cheeks?

My big idea was inspired by Anne Lamott, author of the book Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, which I originally borrowed from the library but then had to purchase because it's that good. 

Here's a portion of the lengthy quote that I shared in my video. This is Lamott's quick memory dump, an exercise she frequently has her writing students try, and it's focused solely on the sandwiches from her elementary school years:

"Your sandwich was the centerpiece, and there were strict guidelines. It almost goes without saying that store-bought white bread was the only acceptable bread. There were no exceptions. If your mother made the white bread for your sandwich, you could only hope that no one would notice. You certainly did not brag about it, any more than you would brag that she also made headcheese. And there were only a few things that your parents could put in between the two pieces of bread. Bologna was fine, salami and unaggressive cheese were fine, peanut butter and jelly were fine if your parents understood the jelly/jam issue.”

“Grape jelly was best, by far, a nice slippery comforting sugary petroleum-product grape. Strawberry jam was second; everything else was iffy. Take raspberry, for instance—...It felt like there were all these tiny little pod people in it. It was Body-Snatcher jam.”

When you're overwhelmed by what to say or where to start, Lamott suggests starting by describing solely what you can see through a 1-inch picture frame. So she started with the sandwich.

When I delved into my own childhood memories from the Southland Elementary cafeteria, images of "hot lunch" surfaced the strongest for me, although I think I brought "cold lunch" from home in my blue Smurfs lunch box just as often.

In my own memory dump, which you'll find inside the Big Idea Festival classroom today, I share a little bit of everything, including the dramatic story of a classmate who choked on a hot dog and was saved from certain death by Mr. Wright the Janitor and his knowledge of the Heimlich manuever.

Does anyone else remember these lunchtrays? And did you know you can purchase them on etsy.com and even Amazon?

This is the lunchbox I had as a child. I can remember exactly how it smelled at the end of the day when my mom opened it to empty out the crumpled plastic baggies filled with remnants and crumbs.

Today's the last day you can register for the festival, and once you register, you're free to go back and watch all previous 13 big ideas shared so far—and you'll have eternal access to everything! I'd love to see you share your own school-lunch memories inside the Big Idea Festival for your chance to win something cool.

 

Group Gift Album for Dad's 60th Birthday

Today on Books & Crafts, my weekly web show with Wendy Smedley, I share tips for creating a group gift album for a milestone event. In this case, it was for my dad's 60th birthday. Watch the video to see just how you can recruit up to 23 relatives (crafters and non-crafters alike) to work together on a gift album like mine, titled, "60 Things We Love About You."

I wish I had the album in hand so I could take better pictures, but alas it is not in my possession. (Did I mention it was a gift album? :) So we'll settle for screenshots from the video. And I'll share a few additional tips not mentioned in the video.

Here's the title page. This entire 62-page album (which is housed in an 8.5 x 5.5 album from We R Memory Keepers, currently available on Overstock.com) was created with just 31 sheets of kraft cardstock (8.5x11), six single sheets of patterned paper, and one sheet of letter and label stickers from the Simple Stories Awesome collection.

On the reverse side of the title page, we included a list of everyone who contributed to the album, plus their ages at the time it was created.

We arranged the pages in a random order, rather than slipping in the photos chronologically or grouping the memories by person. We find it's more fun to flip through this way.

There will be a picture from the '90s right next to a picture from the '70s...

...or a memory about a baby right next to a memory about a horse.

There will be a picture of my dad fishing with his kids, and then just a few pages later, there he is fishing with a grandchild. Some things never change.

 

Tips

1. If you're aiming for a certain number of memories, like 60 for a 60th birthday, creatively divide the number of memories by the number of people. We had my mom and each of my siblings submit 4 memories each, daughters- and sons-in-law submit 2 memories each, and grandchildren submit 2 memories each. If the number doesn't matter, just have each relative submit one memory and an accompanying photo.

2. Have your relatives submit not only memories to the album, but pictures as well. To make the sharing easy, I set up a free private shared album on Dropbox.com and invited all my relatives to it. Everyone dragged their chosen pictures into this shared album, which made the photos available to everyone.

3. If you're the organizer, send everyone clear expectations up front and make it easy for them to participate. I gave everyone a comfortable deadline, told them what to do, and tried to make it sound as unintimidating as possible. I included tips like the following: "Type out the thing you love about dad/grandpa in just a sentence or two. Think of things from throughout dad's life. Just write the way you speak and don't stress about grammar or punctuation; I can fix those things for you later if needed." and "The picture does not have to exactly depict the memory. It can just be a picture of grandpa, a picture of the person sharing the memory, or a picture of both together."

I invited everyone to a Google Doc, which is like a private shared word-processing document that everyone can contribute to. I set it up with clear column headings, and labelled each person's contributions, so they could see at a glance where they needed to type in their memories. I also included a place for them to include the filename of the image they were submitting to go with each memory, so I wouldn't have to guess as I was putting the album together. Click on this image to view my Google Doc larger:

4. Write your memories first so your relatives can see a model of what to do. It's less scary for them this way. Also include brief writing prompts to get their ideas flowing, like these:

I always loved when...
I'll never forget the time that...
I'm grateful to Dad/Grandpa for...
He taught me how to...
Dad/grandpa is a wonderful example of...

5. For children who are too young to write, ask them what they'd like to say about grandpa, giving them hints as needed. For children who are too young to speak, write what you've observed about their relationship with the recipient. For example, if grandpa always gives your baby popsicles, or if grandma's the best at getting your baby to go to sleep, or if there's a particularly meaningful gift this person gave your baby—any of these will work.

6. Don't spend much time editing people's memories, apart from glaring spelling errors. It's okay to let each person speak for himself or herself. And it's okay if more than one person submitted the same general memory. It will just reinforce that it was important to more than one person in the family.

7. Streamline your design. As described in the video, we kept the page design very simple and repeated the same basic look from page to page. To make the journaling blocks easy, I formatted them all in Microsoft Word using text boxes. During our assembly, I had my mom measuring pictures and telling me how much space was left over for the journaling, and then I sat and formatted the journaling blocks accordingly. As soon as I had enough to fill the page, I printed a sheet of journaling boxes on smooth cardstock, and then my sister trimmed them out and adhered them to the page. Click on this image for a larger view:

Bonus Tip: To make trimming out the text boxes simple, I nested two text boxes inside one another. The outer text box has a thin grey border and it's larger by 1/4 inch all the way around, while the inner text box has no border. All my sister had to do is trim just inside the grey boxes, and there would be even white margins all the way around the text. Note that text goes edge-to-edge in a text box, so it's difficult to guess where to trim without the cushion of the extra text box.  

More Like This

To see other Group Gift Albums I've done, check out:

In-Laws' 50th Wedding Anniversary (also featured in today's video)

Grandpa's 80th Birthday

Grandma's 80th Birthday

 

The ABC's of Keira: B

Until the last few months, when Keira really started experimenting with sounds and language, I didn't realize how important the letter B is to a baby. And since it's such a simple sound to make, I wonder if that's how babies came to be called babies in the first place.

Our blond and blue-eyed darling now says a handful of words, that all sound the same ("buh-buh" or "bah-bah"), but I can distinguish between them fairly easily by context.

She says:

baby (referring to herself, to her Baby Stella doll, and to random babies she sees in pictures)
bye-bye
bellybutton (sounds a bit more like "bey-buhhh")
bottle
binkie (sounds like bi-bi)
booby*

*Being a bottle-fed baby from the start, Keira never had a real need to be fully acquainted with this word, but one day a bit of mom's cleavage was escaping the confines of her clothing, and Keira poked it and made her signature inquiring "uh?" sound. Since we spend all day pointing at and identifying things, mom (aka me) replied "booby," quite absentmindedly. She plucked out her binkie and repeated "buh-buh." And, unlike the many other words we say all day long, this one has stuck. It's time to be careful what I say around the little sponge. She now also pokes other people's boobies and says "buh-buh" without prompting. I just grin and shrug.

In other B news, Keira's adoring grandma Beverly keeps her dressed beautifully in fashionable duds. Keira has an aunt Becky, who adores her too, and cousins named Breanna and Brock. And she has a favorite bear that she cuddles during naptime. Her birthmom, Anneliese, has a larger bear just like this one, and we took pictures of Keira with her baby bear every month until her first birthday.

The ABC's of Keira: A

A is a very important letter in Keira's little life.

First of all, she was adopted at just 2 days old. The gift of adoption has blessed more lives than she, or her birth parents, may ever know.

Her mother's name is Angie and her birthmom (or "tummy mommy" which might be the term we'll use until she's old enough to understand this in more depth) is Anneliese. She has seven aunts who love her more than words can say.

And of course the word adorable has to make it onto my list. Her perfect little features, so unique to my little girl, strike me daily with wonder. And yes, I even think it's cute when she screeches like a baby pterodactyl all day long. Annoying? Yes, but adorable too.

All in all, I am in awe at the blessings and challenges of motherhood. Perhaps it is because I had to wait for so long, but this journey, though difficult, has been immensely rewarding. And I look forward to what the future brings.

 

Tiny baby Keira, with her aunt Alli, wearing a little knit hat from her aunt Karste.

About the A illustration
A while back, I found a cool old children's book at a thrift store (D.I. for you locals) called Peppermint Fence, which I promptly tore apart to make a notebook. But I had to save this cute alphabet section, "Nonsense Alphabet," in the back of the book for some future project. When I recently stumbled across the torn-out pages, I had the idea to write about Keira's life, one letter at a time.

I'll post a few new letters per month until I complete all 26. Feel free to join me in this journaling project, and post links to your own letter-by-letter ruminations in the comments section!

The Truth About Babies

I have 10 nieces and nephews, ranging in age from 12 years to 2 months, so I knew this before, as everyone does and mentions a million times a day, all over the world.

But now that I have a 14-month-old toddling around my house (who is, at the moment, emptying my purse onto the floor and exploring every compartment, object, and zipper), I know this personally, viscerally, completely.

The truth is, babies grow SO fast.

Yeah, I knew that. Everyone knows that. But then I see a picture like this one, taken just a year ago, and I'm halted in my tracks.

This photo captures my every sense. I'm stunned at the sight of her tiny fist next to my grandpa's thumb—how his massive welder's hands cradle her little pajama-clad body.

I look at this picture, and I am instantly enveloped (as Keira must have been) in that familiar, musky scent that always clings to grandpa's plaid cowboy shirts: a combination of Old Spice, horses, and that sandpaper-like soap he keeps in his downstairs bathroom. He smells like love and comfort and dependability.

At the same time, I'm drinking in the fresh newness of Keira, all slathered in baby lotion, with her whisper-soft cotton clothes carrying traces of Dreft baby detergent. She smells like hope and miracles and the future.

I want to live in this picture, basking in the light from the window that is filtered through the branches of my mom's Christmas tree, newly in love with my new baby daughter, remembering the hours I spent cocooned on grandpa's lap when I was little.

This is nostalgia. This is the power of a photo.

Journaling Prompt
Find a photo that causes an emotional response in you and write about what you see or hear or smell as you imagine yourself inside that photo. Describing what something smells like is not an easy thing to do, and almost whatever you write will feel inadequate to you, but it is a wonderful exercise for helping you connect very deeply to a memory. Try it! And share it on your blog, in your journal, or on a scrapbook page.

Note: as you try to describe what something or someone smells like, you are bound to discover the woeful lack of adequate synonyms for the word "smell." After checking my favorite online Thesaurus, I even Googled the phrase "other words for smell" and came across a new-to-me website, the "Super Thesaurus," that clearly does NOT know what a verb is. Here's a screen capture:

Watch Me on Internet TV

MyCraftChannel.com launched yesterday, and my new show with Wendy Smedley, Books & Crafts, debuts today. Exciting!

Check us out as we talk about journaling in lists and share the List It! products from Ella Publishing Co. Oh, and we'll also tell you exactly how to solve all your communication problems with your teen (wink).

To celebrate, visit the Ella blog today, too, for a 10 percent coupon code off of any of our seven List It! products.

Also, in every week's episode, we share our book pick of the week. Here are this week's picks, conveniently linked up just for you.