Blessed

I loved this week's sketch at Scrapbook Steals and decided to break out a recent family photo and some terrific new paper I picked up over our Thanksgiving trip.  Here's the sketch I started with:

And here's my take on it:

We recently made a trip "home" over Thanksgiving week and I had to pay a visit to the Doodlebug, the local scrapbook store, since I no longer have any local scrapbook stores where I live.  The first display I saw was the Autumn Splendor line by WRMK and I knew the papers would go perfectly with our recent family photos. 

Up until recently, the only family photos we had were those taken for the church directory.  I hated the thought of spending lots of money trying to get professional photos and the pressure of getting four people coordinated and smiling, etc.  But when my good friend Stacey offered to take some casual family photos for us at a local park I jumped at the chance.  I figured we could walk around and give it a shot and even if we looked terrible the boys would still have a good time at the park.  It was so much better than trying to do studio photos and Stacey got some great shots of us.  She took over 400 photos, and Jacob closed his eyes in at least half of them.  The kids were goofballs and grew tired of posing by the end.  But I was able to go through the weed out all of the ones that I deemed unflattering and still managed to find several photos that I fell in love with.  This was one of the first ones Stacey took and is one of my favorites.  I edited the photo for free at Picnik.com and printed it out at Walmart.  The fall colors matched perfectly with these papers and made for a pretty nice layout if I do say so myself.