Team Member Since June 2012
Our blog editor and creative team member, Shilo, is a busy mom to four boys and two girls. She and her family currently live in Eagle Mountain, Utah, but they long to move about an hour away, closer to Shilo’s hometown of West Valley City, Utah. Shilo loves being with her family and they spend most Sunday afternoons at her mother-in-law’s house, visiting with her and enjoying Sunday dinner together. It is a tradition her mother-in-law established before Shilo and her husband were married in 1998. Shilo feels it is nice to spend that time together as a family without any other pressing plans or matters to take care of.
Shilo loves all kinds of music from the 50’s up to the music of today. She spends many hours a day listening and tends to really enjoy pop songs, songs with awesome lyrics or even a cool beat. She also loves to write, which was a passion she discovered in high school, when she’d write a poem or two a month. Now she spends her writing time mostly blogging – she gets to exercise her love of writing while also keeping a journal. In her spare time, Shilo also enjoys crafting of all kinds. Her favorite TV shows are Castle, The Big Bang Theory, Dance Moms and Teen Mom. Her favorite author is Jodi Picoult and she loves the color purple. Shilo’s favorite holidays are Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas – she says she is “pretty much happy from October to January.”
Shilo’s faith is important to her and she appreciates all the opportunities her religion affords her to serve others. She especially loves working with the youth in her church and is constantly amazed at the strength of the young people trying to live in this world without compromising their values. She has also recently become much more passionate about causes that are searching for a cure and those that are helping other families dealing with cancer, after losing her father-in-law in 2013 to pancreatic cancer.
Shilo’s mom always kept a photo album and that inspired Shilo’s love of scrapbooking. While her mom’s albums were simple with just pictures and some information about the photos, Shilo discovered the more “cutesy” way of keeping a photo album after her first child was born in 2000, and her love affair with scrapbooking began. Shilo jokes that she has “perfected the art of scraplifting,” but her journaling is her true strength. She likes for her pages to tell a story, and I love that about her pages! Among her favorite things about digital scrapbooking, she counts the fact that she doesn’t have a mess to clean up when she is done, that it’s super simple to fix a mistake, and that she can save her page and leave it in progress, if necessary, without worrying about a little person getting into it and destroying it all.
Shilo would love to be remembered as a Mom who did all she could for her kids and that for her, family is everything. She wants people to remember that she tried to be a kind person, that she always sought the best in everyone, that she forgave easily and knew how to apologize for any hurts she caused, intentional or not. These are just a few of the beautiful layouts Shilo has completed as a member of my Creative Team:
