Thinking of Grandma

I am playing around over at Color Stories Inspiration again today. This website challenges my scrapbooking to levels hard to reach when you are scrapping on a budget like me, but I have always been a fan of its creator, Debbi Tehrani, for challenging me to do new things. Another challenge, which for probably seven or eight years she has been posting at Two Peas in A Bucket has taken so many of my scrapbook pages from hohum to something special. I just finished one like that, and I think I will share more about the topic of that one in a future blog post.

Color Stories Inspiration is going to be less likely to help me finish up a page for my regular album. (Although it too did once.) That's because Color Stories Inspiration is much more about one photo layouts than the usual multiple photos I use in mine. You have to leave room for some fancy work, in the case of mine the vintage cabbage rose paper, the butterfly and the torn edges. My pages are simple compared to most of what you see at Color Stories Inspiration. Also, a key part of this challenge is the journaling, on one of several topics recommended by Debbi. This week, she goes to one of her favorite topics - childhood memories.

This line of Graphic 45 (the cabbage rose paper) is one I initially purchased to scrap Grandma's 90th birthday. So it, and butterflies make me think of her. Also, with Easter coming around again, I knew that on my cousins' Facebook pages, I would see a photo of Grandma from two Easters ago holding great-grandsons Wesley or Wyatt. Sure enough, on Wendy's Facebook, I found this great photo of her and Wyatt, and an added bonus, she is wearing my Mom's red jacket. (Grandma was always cold the last few years of her life.) I needed more red on this page. If you are a scrapbooker, you understand. If not, just trust me.

Part of the journaling on the page focuses on how Wyatt is a special great-grandson. He is the youngest of her relatives that she ever met. Wyatt now has a younger cousin (and Wes a younger brother), but unfortunately, she was too sick to meet Bradley. My hope is that while Wyatt, Wes and Bradley are too young to remember, the rest of her great-grandchildren who have met her will remember the kindness and class she exhibited throughout her life.

If you want to know all about that, scroll all the way down to my first entry. Or just know that this woman loved people. I know all of her children and all of grandchildren know that. That's Uncle Don, Mom and Annie, and me, my cousin Debbie, Aaron and my "little" cousins Chad, Jodi and Wendy. This also includes Matt and Mandy, two grandchildren she acquired in 1981 when my Uncle Don married my Aunt Sandy. I am pretty sure Debbi's children, Chris and Katelyn, also know how much their great-grandma loved them.

My Grandma has several more stepchildren in her family besides Matt and Mandy. The rest are through my brother and me, as we both became stepparents instead of natural parents. It is my sincere hope that John, Pamela and T.J. experienced that love from her. They spent a good deal of time with her when Aaron was their stepfather, and I believe their lives were enriched from it.

Unfortunately, my stepchildren will be in the same situation as my little cousins' little children. Not because my stepchildren are little, of course. But it is because Josh only met my Grandmother one time, and Holly never did. It is my hope that Josh remembers enough from that one meeting to know I had a fantastic grandmother. It is sad that Holly will never know. Except that the premise of my blog has always been that I want to love my own granddaughter (Holly's daughter Abigail) the same way I was loved by my Grandma. That's a tall order, but I will do my best, always!