{grow with love: kids} day eighteen

Well, here we are.  A mere three prompts from completing this round of Grow With Love.  The Kids edition has inspired me to create some of my most favorite pages and I hope it has you as well!

And if you happen to be finding us for the first time, we hope you will be encouraged by all the posts and prompts so far (you can find them here) to dive in at any time.  There is never a “wrong time” or “too late” for telling your story.

So let’s take a peek at the Day Eighteen.  We have journeyed into some heavier hope and “big picture” centered pages as well as some little moment and everyday pages.  And today we will let ourselves relish the moments across the years.  We will allow ourselves to get nostalgic and compare the yesterday and today:

I have a couple different pages for this brewing in my brain…and that’s what I think I love most about this prompt.  There are so many different creative avenues to take as we get retrospective.  Oodles of photos?  A handful of “key” photos and oodles of journaling?  A mix of both? A compare and contrast kind of page?  A then and now?  Graphic in style? Traditional paper in style? Clustery and whimsical in style?  I found myself going in all these different directions and that was exciting!  I love when inspiration fills me to the brim, so to speak.  And so I started in one place and I look forward to going in others as well.

I think many of us have pages of our children that capture them in the moment in time…or even in a “summary of the time” kind of page where we reflect on them generally at a certain age or in a certain month.  We have done both in this project alone.  This page encourages us to reflect on the whole story.  The then and now, the across time, the yesterday and today kind of goodness. It has us whipping out the old photos AND the new ones.  Thinking about the bygone memories AND the one’s we just planted yesterday. And that’s storytelling on a different dimension.

And you’ve probably noticed by now that I’m a BIG fan of “and” not “or” so this makes my creative heart happy.

So here’s a page that captures the spirit of the prompt.  And I am eager to explore the other avenues I feel tugging on me.

journaling: Every now and then I am struck with a flood of nostalgia and sentimentality, thinking about how blessed I have been over the years and how quickly time passes by.  I remember my grandma telling me that every year time passes faster, and I was so young at the time that it didn’t resonate with me.  But now I see exactly what she meant.  It seems only a blink ago and I was holding you in my arms for the first time.  There are days I wish everything would slow down so I could savor you a little longer.

We so hope you have fun with this one!  You will be hopping over to Crystal on Thursday for Day 19 of GWL:Kids and I will be posting the first prompt for GWL: Letters {february} on Wednesday!