Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a new year filled with wonder and blessings.

Christmas card design by Pink Ink Studios.  

As I've mentioned before I have a wonderful friend who always gifts me with homemade chocolate peanut butter balls for Christmas each year. It is probably my most favorite gift each year. I love them.

A couple of years ago I tried to make them myself. Total disaster.  The recipe was her mother-in-law's and not being an avid baker I never realized there was a difference in stick butter vs. tub butter.

So this year I decided to try again. This time they turned out much better. Mine still aren't quite as pretty as my friend's, but they tasted good and I don't think they were too bad for only my second attempt.  I'm definitely going to hit the exercise pretty hard after the holidays. But for now I think I'll just enjoy the deliciousness and share with family and friends.

Today I received the last email for the 13 week workshop by Ali Edwards I've been taking at Big Picture Scrapbooking. The workshop was called Yesterday & Today. Throughout the workshop we worked with old photos & stories as well as new photos & stories.

I've taken a few online classes before. A few from Jessica Sprague and a few at Big Picture. I managed to get through most I took at Jessica Sprague, but for some reason the timing or life just got in the way of the ones I took from Big Picture. I saved all the downloads so I hope to go back and complete them. All that to say my goal when I started this one was to complete it on time. I don't scrapbook with the philosophy that I have to be caught up so that wasn't what drove me. I just wanted to be able to complete it.

And I am so excited to say I have. The one thing I really like about this workshop was how it has helped me come up with a system for getting old photos scrapped.

Anyway, here are the last two pages. Thanks for all the sweet comments left about my previous pages. The designs for all these are Ali Edwards's designs and I loved how simple they were to use and how the focus stayed on the journaling and photos.

With this first one we were to use a divided page protector to scrap all those bits and pieces of our lives. I decided to put our ticket stubs from the two plays we saw at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival and the promo cards for them. Along with an itunes gift card and an article from the member magazine from the High Museum. I left one pocket open to add something later.

For the last week we were supposed to go back and make a page using a design from a previous week. I have always loved these photos of my grandfather. Even though I wasn't born when these photos were taken they remind me of my early childhood memories of him before he became sick. My dad looks so much like him now. So much so the kiddo saw a photo of him and asked if it was his Pop.

Most mornings now I wake up before my alarm would normally go off. I suppose having to get up so early to get squirt readyfor school for several years now has made it a habit for my body. A few mornings this month I've peeked out the window and seen the most beautiful sunrise. Of course I grab the camera and run outside to get some photos.

Yesterday the sunrise didn't disappoint. These photos are straight out of camera. The colors were just amazing.

What about you? Do you ever wake up early to find a beautiful sunrise awaiting you?

So Gretchen had to go and post this video on her blog. And well...the song is now being downloaded to my itunes library. I may not completely agree with some of the ending on the video, but it is still such a great song.  Unfortunately I could only find the one with an advertisement so you might have to be a bit patient for a few seconds.

Disclaimer: I purchased it myself. It was not provided to me for review.

In A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, Donald Miller documents his journey of rewriting his first successful memoir for screen. He realizes along the way that he had the power to rewrite his own journey into a story. Not just a mundane story, but a story with purpose.  As he learns what makes a great story for a movie he begins to rewrite his own story, the story he's living. Living a pretty ordinary life, Miller decides to take himself out of his comfort zone.

From hiking in a foreign country to riding his bike across the U.S. he changes his own story. Thankfully for us he shares his thoughts about that journey. I’ve shared my favorite passage before, but let me share it again. I highly recommend A Million Miles in a Thousand Years.

"We get robbed of the glory of life because we aren't capable of remembering how we got here. When you are born, you wake slowly to everything. Your brain doesn't stop growing until you turn twenty-six, so from birth to twenty-six, God is slowly turning the lights on......The experience is so slow you could easily come to believe life isn't that big of a deal, that life isn't staggering. What I'm saying is I think life is staggering and we're just used to it.......

When Steve, Ben and I wrote our characters into the screenplay, I felt the way I hope God feels as he writes the world, sitting over the planets and placing tiny people in tiny wombs. If I have a hope, it's that God sat over the dark nothing and wrote you and me, specifically into the story, and put us in with the sunset and the rainstorm as though to say, Enjoy your place in my story. The beautfy of it means you matter, and you can create within it even as I have created you......

I've wondered, though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don't want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgement. We don't want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage. And if life isn't remarkable, then we don't have to do any of that; we can be unwilling victims rather than grateful participants." -- exerted from pg. 58 -59 of A Millions Miles in a Thousand Years.