52 weeks. 260 lists. 1 year of gratitude.

I want to introduce a project that I started with my sisters yesterday. A Year of Gratitude is a blog that I created yesterday, on which four of my sisters and I will be writing at least once a week until June 24, 2011. I was talking to my mom yesterday about how my sisters and I are growing apart. It makes sense. We are all a very different stages of our life right now. Abby and Linzie are in junior high, working with the challenges that Carley and I faced four years ago. Emily, while only a year younger than Carley and I, is facing very different challenges than the ones we are facing as we are heading into our senior year of high school. It's not like when we were little and we all walked to school together, not like when we all hung out with the same group of neighborhood kids and found the most entertainment in making up games with each other (which we still do, just not as often.) It makes sense that we don't spend as much time talking and hanging out with each other (though, since it is summer, we are spending most of our time together at the moment) as we did when our age differences seemed so much smaller.

So my mom suggested that we start this project. It is a blog that serves as a place for us to list or show what we find ourselves thinking we are grateful for. The challenging part of it is that we have to write one of these lists once a week. Each of us has to post something on that blog every week for a year. It'll probably feel very similar to how having to write here at least once a week in 9th grade felt. I would spend all week brainstorming topics and then when I finally sat down to write I could never remember any of them and would usually end up ranting about whatever I had on my mind at that very moment. I usually wrote those posts at the last minute or while I was in the computer lab for a class (usually Mr. T's) and not doing the work I was supposed to be doing.

This blog is going to force all of us to pay more attention to what is going on around us in our lives. It is going to make us look for the things that make us feel happy or lucky every day. It is also going to inspire the creativity that I know each of my sisters has so much of. I'm more excited about reading and seeing what they are going to have to say every week than I am about what I am going to be putting together. It's going to be a fun thing that all of us are going to be doing together. I can just hear the comments that are going to be going around every week. "Have you posted your list yet?" "No, I have no idea what to do." or "Yeah, I posted it last night. You should go look at it." 

I posted the first list yesterday and it is probably the easiest list that I will post all year. I am already thinking about what I am going to write next week, though. Most of my week is already planned out and so I know the things that I am excited about and that I will be grateful for. However, I know there will probably be a lot of things that are going to take me by surprise. So we'll see what happens.

The other day I posted this on Facebook: I just thought I would inform you all that Wendy Randquist, Carley Randquist, Emily Nicole Randquist, Ashley Turek, Linzie Randquist and Abby Randquist (in order of age) are the most amazing girls, the best sisters and THE best friends that any girl could ask for. I ♥ you guys. I guess that in itself could be a post of what I am grateful for. My sisters are sometimes the only thing that keeps me sane and are at other times the very things pushing me toward insanity. I am so grateful for them, though.

There are 52 weeks in a year. Each week there will be at least 5 lists added to our blog. That means that by the end of the year we should have at least 260 lists of things that we are grateful for. Pretty cool, huh? I think it will be. Our plan, once we finish, is to use a website like this to publish a hardback copy of the blog for each of us. They do that, now. Isn't that awesome? I think it will probably be the coolest book I own once we finish it. I'm excited. There are so many big things that are going to happen in the next 52 weeks and that blog is going to be a record of sorts of all of that.