Welcome to the Grow With Love project!  Crystal and I are thrilled to dive into this adventure with you and we hope that you will find this process meaningful, reflective, heartfelt and fun!  We had such a wonderful experience working through the Grow With Love: Marriage project together.  At different times we felt challenged, inspired, accomplished, pooped, and then inspired some more.  We hope the Kids edition will be just as fruitful!  Well, minus the “pooped” part.  I think you’ll find this version, while still encouraging and challenging at times, is “lighter” and probably a little easier to flow because in many ways, as scrappers and parents, our children are our muses.

If you’re just joining us, welcome!  Let me share a bit of the backstory of Grow With Love…

Crystal and I had it on our hearts for a long time to collaborate on a project that was something more than “just” templates…we hope it can be something fresh and different; we hope it can be so much more..a kind of fresh storytelling adventure for those who want to take it.  We hope this project not only helps us to create beautiful pages from the heart that we and our families can treasure, but reaches out beyond the page to have a tangible touch on our real lives too.

And so emerged Grow With Love, a series of 20 journaling prompts that we hope will encourage you to step out of your comfort zone a little bit, reflect on your relationships and loves, and love a little more deeply and truly.  This is not only a scrap project. This is about changing yourself and your relationships for the better.  Along with the prompts, we have set up 20 templates that you can use to document this process as we “grow with love” together.

We feel so deeply about our hopes for Grow With Love that while we are digital scrapbooking template designers, we hope that anyone and everyone who wants to play along does…be it paper scrapping, digiscrapping, with the templates, or without.  Let your creativity guide you along the way, using any products and any medium.  In the end it is our hope that you will have created a series of pages (that can become an album) that you will have poured your hearts into and that you will be proud of.  Whether you’ll be using the templates (you can snag them here and here) or not, we hope that you’ll be inspired to share your heart and stories and delve in to new creative territory along side us!

So let’s get started!

The format will be the same as last time.  Crystal and I will take turns gabbing about the day’s prompt.  So you will hop back and forth from my blog to hers, to soak up the prompt and and inspiration to get you started.  This time, though, we’ve slowed the pace a little bit, so it will be easier to “keep up” because even if you’re superspeedy 20 prompts in as many days is ummm…heavy.  lol!  Instead of sharing every day, we will share and blog a prompt twice a week, over the course of 10 weeks.  I will blog Grow With Love on Mondays and Crystal on Thursdays.

Week One: Monday 8 November (Sara) and Thursday 11 November (Crystal)

Week Two: Monday 15 November (Sara) and Thursday 18 November (Crystal)

Week Three: Monday 22 Novembe (Sara) and Wednesday 24 November (Crystal)

Week Four: Monday 29 November (Sara) and Thursday 2 December (Crystal)

Week Five: Monday 6 December (Sara) and Thursday 9 December (Crystal)

Week Six: Monday 13 December (Sara) and Thursday 16 December (Crystal)

Week Seven: Monday 20 December (Sara) and Thursday 23 December (Crystal)

Week Eight: Monday 27 December (Sara) and Thursday 30 December (Crystal)

Week Nine: Monday 3 January (Sara) and Thursday 6 January (Crystal)

Week Ten: Monday 10 January (Sara) and Thursday 13 January (Crystal)

*This is just an outline.  You can scrap at your own pace.  We will keep these prompts and posts on our blogs indefinitely for anyone to peek at and join in.*

But if you’d like to scrap along with us, please do!  Those of you who do will automatically be entered into our {giveaway} at the end of the process, eligible to win gift certificates and your pages printed in your very own 20 pages photo book!

Ok, whew!  Shall we dive in to Day One?

Today’s prompt is:

This is a good place to start getting ourselves into the frame of mind of reflection about our parenting, and about our kids.  While this prompt is pretty self explanatory, some things to consider as you take yourself back to the days before you had kids: how did you view children when you weren’t yet a parent?  Were you longing for them as long as you can remember?  Or maybe did the idea of parenthood freak you out a little?  Were you the kind of person who couldn’t resist interacting with children when you saw them or spent time with them?  Or did you cringe a little sometimes when you went out to eat and were seated next to a table with a family and a loud little one or three? (not that anyone writing this post ever had those feelings before).  Think about how your own family life shaped your ideas and feeling about having children?  How did your faith or career or friends shape your view?  How did your hopes and expectations for the future impact your idea of parenthood?  Was being a parent always in your picture when you thought of the future?

Scrap and share.

Here’s Crystal’s take on the prompt:

And here’s mine:

We can’t wait to see all your beautiful pages!  Don’t forget to share them with us in the comments.  And don’t forget to head over to Crystal’s blog on Thursday for Day Two (or right now for that matter as she’s having an amazing! contest right now).

Happy Scrapping and Happy Growing!!