A Different Kind of Family History

Some of my friends and family are really into family history and lineage. My cousin's wife in Minnesota has been working hard with ancestry lately, and has gotten back a couple hundred years. Another friend of mine knows someone who has their family history traced back to the 800's (if you can believe it.)

I have to be honest that family lineage doesn't interest me much. While of course I'd love to know whether or not I was related to Marie Antoinette, I'm just not interested in doing the time and research required to find out these stories. I am however, interested in preserving a piece of my and Paul's life for my children, grandchildren, and so on.

I posted a few months ago on Facebook about my Recipe Scrapbook I've been working on. My mother-in-law gave me a scrapbooking kit she'd found on Amazon, and I've LOVED working on it. The biggest challenge has been finding stickers and decals that go along with recipe/kitchen scrapbooking, since it isn't, surprisingly, a very popular topic. After months of searching (even online and at a scrapbooking store in MN), I finally found some cute recipe stickers at Michaels! Yay! Back on track!

I've already done 28 recipes in the book and have come across a new challenge -- what to scrapbook next? I'm running out of ideas because I don't want to scrapbook something unless I know it's something we like well enough to make again; I'm not scrapbooking things I've never tried. I am, however, putting in simple meal ideas as well as tips for quicker healthy eating (such as my fruity tip article posted on A Healthy Wait) because I know even those things will be (and already are!) valuable to me later on when I can't think of what to cook in a pinch.

I think what I love most about scrapbooking these recipes is it's such a window into our life. As the years go by, it's a journal of our favorite foods and tastes. I'm able to add little tidbits and tips from me, but also from my sister, my grandma, my mom, and many of my friends, that my children can someday pass on to their own children, hopefully after having added their own input and recipes.

One tip I'd like to share with scrapbooking is that you MUST have cute fonts (unless you're planning on handwriting everything, but if you're like me, you probably don't like your own handwriting enough to look at it for years to come!) I get free, adorable fonts here, and they are easy to download and install. Just find your favorite one, click download, then unzip the file and drag it into your font book. (Of course, these are instructions for a Mac, so it might be slightly different on a PC, although I'm sure it is explained at the site.) The cute fonts are a must because... well, Times New Roman just gets boring sometimes, and I am sick of the common fonts on Microsoft Word! Also, you can make your own cute decals and sayings by looking up the quote and printing them out in cute colors!

I thought I would share a few of my favorite pages and the basic look of it (The non-recipe pages that denote the following type of recipe came with the scrapbooking kit, as did the blank page in the front: about 15 kitchen/recipe pages as well as 2-3 pages of stickers/decals come with the kit. Please note I only posted one picture of the separator pages and no pictures of any of the stickers that came with the kit) as well as post the link to where you can get your own recipe scrapbook kit. Enjoy!

(**Note: Please click on pictures to view full-size)

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The Hard Part

Blogging is fun; it's easy. I like designing the templates and figuring out the fonts. I like picking new colors, I like picking new gadgets. I like the writing part too, as an outlet, if I can think of a topic.

The hard part is picking a name. I easily spent fifteen minutes thinking of cheesy things I could call the blog.

Just a Few Thoughts From Me

Thoughts of a Lonely Girl

My New Adventure

Alternatives to Facebook

Random Thoughts

Meandering Thoughts

I could go on. But let's be honest. Some of these sound like they're thought up by a fourteen year old!

I decided on Thought Renaissance for a few reasons. First of all, as I explained in my original post, Unfriending Facebook, I'm taking some time to reevaluate the time and energy I spend on social networks. (As a sidenote, I actually don't consider this a 'social network' because, though the same people can read what I'm writing, I happen to know from experience that people generally don't care what you have to say if it's more than a few sentences long.) In that reevaluation, I'm doing a Renaissance of sorts to help me a) remember what it was like to write non-school essays with capital letters and full sentences, b) to help me be interested in other outlets, creative and otherwise, that are not necessarily self-esteem driven (I rarely if ever, get comments on my blogs), and c) writing in short random thoughts have not helped me really define, interpret, and enumerate my goals as well as I have done in the past. 

The second reason has to do with the fact that I am a history major and the definition of Renaissance is

A revival or renewed interest in something. 

Rebirth, reawakening, renewal, resurrection.

Renaissance has long meant a time of creativity and intelligence that surged in the people to allow new interest in arts, education, politics, and religion. All of these things are things we all could use more of in our lives. Besides that, I like the idea of starting over, of fresh beginnings.

Anyway, though this certainly may have been another pointless post, at least I took the time to write creatively with a little more thought than a one line status on Facebook:

I need to spend more time figuring out my goals.

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What can you do to be creative today?