{Thirty Days of Thanks~Day 8}

Today's post may seem a bit silly to some of you, but I believe it was what God used to pull me out of the darker places I was in early in the year. Christmas had been especially hard for me and it wasn't long afterward that I saw this blog post by Becky Higgins. It was instructions on how to use her Project Life scrapbooking system. This is a system that ends the idea of the 12 hour scrapbook page---instead you get everything in a box to complete a scrapbook for an entire year except your pictures and words. WHAT? AND you don't just capture the "big events" in life---birthdays, holidays, graduations, etc. You document YOUR LIFE----you take a picture a day and document it. So, I purchased the entire kit for $54 (I think) and I began. For that money I received a binder, page protectors, journaling cards, a stamp for the day, month & year, truly everything I needed to get started except for pictures. I have actually kept up with this during the year and it really has been an amazing blessing. Many of the photos are just from my phone---a dated blackberry, but I let go of that perfectionism and realized that sometimes a memory is worth capturing even if the picture is bad!

With all of the sadness going on in my life this year, as I mentioned before, I began to change my perspective on my life and look for God's beauty in everyday. In a way, this system forced me to look at all the blessings in my life---the little ones and the big---and capture them for this book. I have been so encouraged as I've looked back through the pages and been able to smile at how great my life is ~even in 2011~

Below are just a few pictures of some of my pages--I really don't have a way to photograph them well to do them justice, but I think you'll be able to "get the picture". Becky has revamped her kits this year. I have a bunch of stuff already in my cart on Amazon----soon I'll hit the "Checkout" button and I'll be starting another year of remembering God's blessings in a tangible way. If you are a scrapbooker who feels like you can never get it done, why don't you check this out? It has changed my crafty life! Many great scrapbookers use this system now. For me, it was what it took to take my eyes off of myself and put them on the blessings from the Lord's hand. For this reason alone, it was worth every penny.

I have added pages in for special events---this is Joshua's class Valentine's Party this year.

I took just a FEW pictures of Eve's birth----I have enjoyed adding in extra pages as the event warrants. I ended up buying another binder and have almost filled it. So, for 2012, I'm going to purchase 2 binders from the beginning.

Here's an example of a more "everyday" page---not such a momentous occasion---even though it was my first ceiling to scrape!

One week in the summer---

random pictures from a week in April

another page with 5x7 inserts added~

That's it! Again, I'm sure some of you are thinking, "a scrapbook changed your life"---and I can truly say---YES---GOD used this crafty project to change my perspective on my life and for this I'm SO grateful~