Meet Contributor Jennifer Wise

Well, Hello!

Welcome to Between the Bookends!  I’m thrilled to be a contributor here and share my passions and experience with you in several ways.  Let me introduce myself!  I’ll start with the basics and then talk about All Things Books.

I’m Jennifer Wise.  I currently live in Colorado with my husband, but I’ve lived in a total of seven states and three countries in my lifetime, which—I believe—is largely responsible for my addiction to traveling.  (a-hem)  Our three fantastic children are in the twenty-something stages of life.  This is us last year on vacation in the Rocky Mountains.

I was a stay-at-home mom for most of their growing up years, but when my youngest was in high school, I decided it was time to spend more time on a couple of my talents.  Way back just before that youngest child turned one year old in 2005, I was invited to become a memory-keeping consultant with a small but growing company focused on making personalized storybooks with photos, which soon grew to include many digital scrapbooking offerings.  It was a great job for a SAHM with three littles under 7 because I set my own hours and just worked whenever it fit into my life.  Plus, I got to make some amazing books of my own, like this one:

Fast forward now to 2019-2022.  In those years, I decided I needed to focus on other talents and passions, too—I decided to get a Master’s degree in Teaching American Sign Language and pursue becoming a certified sign language interpreter.  And, just so you know, they are two completely different skills with two completely different trainings and professional requirements!  By way of background, I took my first ASL (American Sign Language) class in 1990 as a freshman in college, “just for fun.”  I have been involved in the Deaf Community ever since, through friends, volunteering, and work.  I enjoy interpreting, and I absolutely love teaching, so I wanted to be able to do more through enhanced credentials.

In those same years, too, the personalized book company I’d been with went through some unexpected changes and lost a few capabilities that I felt were very important.  I struggled at that point about what to do about my personal memory-keeping, but I also worried about my clients since my memory-keeping business was taking a huge hit.  Literally 6 weeks before I graduated with my Master’s degree, a dear friend with the same company told me she’d been looking at other companies and that she had found one that is the whole package for memories, from personalized books to private photo and video storage and much more. 

I looked into it and thought for 3 days about joining the company, knowing that while I was finishing my research paper for my Master’s program and completing my portfolio to submit to the university for graduation was probably not the best time to make a big change in the memory-keeping business aspect of my life.  And then I couldn’t stop thinking about the new company, and then I couldn’t help myself!  I joined the company both as a business and for my personal use at an incredibly busy and stressful time of my life, but I have never looked back. 

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And so, here I am!  I have a BA degree from Brigham Young University in Humanities-English Literature, I have a MA degree from the University of Northern Colorado in Teaching American Sign Language, I am a freelance certified ASL/PSE interpreter, and I am an Associate Lead Ambassador for FOREVER, my favorite memory-keeping company.  I teach ASL at a community college and a university, I work for two interpreting agencies in my local area, and I help people with memory-keeping and photo solutions–I work all these as part-time jobs (two with a great degree of flexibility) so that I have time for everything I love!   Including writing blog posts.  🙂

Reading

Let’s finish up now, talking All Things Books.

I learned to read quite literally at my dad’s knee.  Both of my parents have degrees in English, and I remember sitting on my dad’s lap reading books as a child.  “The Cat in the Hat” will probably always be my favorite book of all time because of that.  I could read at 2 ½ years old, so when I was in kindergarten, I was reading books while my peers were learning letters and sounds.  They would ask me to read books to them, and it got to the point where they wanted to stay in from recess for storytime with me! 

After several weeks of this, my teacher recommended to the school counselor that kindergarten might not be the place for me.  The counselor tested me and gave me the reading textbook and workbook that the first graders used, with no instructions about what I was supposed to do with it.  So, I just took it home and completed the entire textbook and workbook in a few weeks, not knowing that it was a year-long curriculum.  The school and my parents decided to move me to first grade mid-year.

And it wasn’t because I was smarter than my peers.  It was because I could read.  And it was because reading opened up everything else to me—math story problems, science, everything.

(So, of course, I had to get a picture with The Cat in the Hat and Dr. Seuss outside the Geisel library on the UCSD campus on a recent trip to San Diego!)

Teaching My Children To Read

I am sure that these experiences from my young life created the fire that made me absolutely determined to teach my own children to read and to know that they could do so well before they started school.  Sure enough, each one of them learned to read at 3 years old, and I felt like I had given them a gift like nothing else.  Yes, reading opens up the world, but I knew that this also meant that they would enter school with confidence, believing in their ability to learn, which I think cannot be overstated. 

When my oldest was in kindergarten, his teacher let him go to the library and read while the class worked on “This is an M.  It sounds like mmmmm.”  Throughout their school years, each of my children read well above grade level, reading at high school levels before they left elementary school. 

Making Books My Business

When I learned about DIY books, creating my own personalized books for professional publishing, in 2005, I was an automatic fan.  I had always been a scrapbooker, but this idea of bringing a family story or a love story or an ancestor story or an adoption story to life was amazing!  Since making books my business, I have done a lot of reading on the effects of stories, particularly family stories, on children, and the effects are astounding.

Since then, I’ve created life storybooks about my mom and about my dad (best Christmas gifts to the family ever, particularly as my mom had already passed away), ancestor stories, travel books, family yearbooks, and more.  A book is a treasure, and a personalized book is an heirloom.

My Third Thursday Contributions to Between the Bookends

I am both honored and thrilled to be a contributor here at Between the Bookends.  I’ll mostly share tips, ideas, and information (sometimes with video tutorials) about personalized books, DIY books, and digital scrapbooks, but I’ll also sometimes share book reviews with recipes for “cuppa”s, and other reading-related goodies, too.  Look for my posts here on the Third Thursdays of each month. (Yes, I somehow require alliteration for my posts—I post on my own blog on the First Fridays.)

You can always join me on Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter for more frequent posts about personalized books, DIY books, digital scrapbooks, and general memory-keeping, too.  Either way, I’ll see you back here on the Third Thursday next month where we’ll talk about how personalized and DIY books make great gifts, with some fantastic ideas included.  I look forward to having you join the conversation through your comments, too!  See you then.