A Fall Layout and an update

We are back from Disney World. Our trip was great, but I'm still recovering from it and not quite ready to post about it yet. I do want to post a layout that I did yesterday from last Halloween. Yep, I'm never going to be caught up and that's ok. Yesterday we were supposed to attend my friend Melissa's annual Halloween party, but she had to reschedule due to the horrible weather we had yesterday. So, since I was thinking about her party and Halloween, I decided to do a layout from her party last year. Nobody throws a party like Melissa. She is uber organized, creative, and energetic. I don't know how she does it all, oh wait, yes I do, she doesn't sleep!

Anyway, I got my newsletter from Crystal Wilkerson, a fabulous scrapbook designer, and she had a free template and a contest on her blog. Use her template and her digital kits to enter a contest. I was in the mood, so I did it. I used her template #4 inspired by Susan Weinroth and used Crystal Wilkerson's October Sweet and October Spooky collections to do this layout. Check out Crystal's blog at http://www.creativitybycrystal.blogspot.com/

Four Years Old

My baby turned 4 last month. It's a little hard to believe. Everyone always says that they grow up fast, but until you are a mom I don't think you truly realize how fast the time flies. I took Caleb out at the end of July to do his 4 year portraits. I told him that we were going to go down to the old train tracks to play. We got down there and he kept asking where Thomas was. Oops. I tried to explain that theses train tracks were old and that there weren't any trains around those tracks anymore, but he didn't seem to quite get it. We had a good time poking around and I got some really cute pictures. I finally had time to sit down today and edit them. Photoshop and I don't always get along, but I'm learning.

Obsessed

I have an obsessive personality. I come by it honestly as most of the women in my family have this same trait. What this means is that when we get something on our minds we kind of beat it to death until we've either solved the problem, researched the dilemma or trip or thing we want to do to death, or bought whatever it was we were obsessed about. Currently I am obsessing about our upcoming trip to Disney World. I have bought travel guides, subscribed to the touring plans website, stalked the Disney message boards, bought a new backpack (of course, after obsessively evaluating my options and making a trip to North Dallas to try some on)and even started scrapbooking our 2009 trip (and yes I also found a Disney related message board to support that habit.) I've printed off calendars, made dining reservations and made packing lists. I've evaluated refillable water containers, bought glow sticks (for the parks at night), and searched for and bought a small, travel size "noisemaker" (ie. a white noise machine for those of you not used to my terminology) for the hotel room. I'm obsessing about what Caleb and I are going to wear to the Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party that we will be attending one of the nights that we are there. I know it will be warm so the costume can't be too hot. We'll be riding rides so it can't be too constricting, and I'd like it to be Disney themed. I've even started dreaming about all of these obsessions. I dreamt the other night that we got there and I hadn't packed anything that was on the list-Oh the horror!

So, I will share with you a few of the scrapbook pages I've done. My original idea was to do a pretty basic digital album just to get everything documented and the album done. However, after finding the Disney scrapbooking message board all that changed and now I want it to be more elaborate. Why can't I ever be satisfied with easy?

An Uninterrupted Conversation

I find myself craving an uninterrupted conversation. I've discovered that when you are a mom that you never get to a have a full, uninterrupted conversation and I've been craving that. It doesn't matter if I'm talking to my husband or a girlfriend, our conversation is inevitably interrupted. Obviously when I'm with my husband, our son is the culprit. When I'm with my girlfriends it can be any number of culprits-my kid, their kids, or other random kids. When I leave a playdate that's as much for the moms as it is for the kids I'll remember when I get home several conversations that were started and never finished. I find myself getting more and more annoyed by these interruptions. Yes, I realize your child is bleeding profusely, but can we please finish our conversation. Maybe it's time for a Moms night out!

A layout and some blathering

I haven't done a very good job of posting this summer, but it seems that the only people that even look at this blog sometimes are those that write comments in Chinese. I'm not sure what the point of their comments are, but I find them rather annoying.

We've been staying really busy this summer. I had enrolled Caleb in a 2 day a week preschool program but it didn't work out so I haven't had much time to scrapbook or blog. I took him to a friends house today and instead of coming home and cleaning like I normally do, I took the time to make a layout about our July 4th. I'm still trying to figure out how I want to scrapbook and how I want to document and print the pictures that don't make my scrapbook pages. I'm not ok with my pictures just living on my hard drive. I want them to be assessible to us to look at and enjoy. I had thought about doing shutterfly books with all of my pictures and my scrapbook pages. However, when I thought about going back and doing that for all of my photos I think it would be insanely time consuming, especially trying to get it all in order for the book to be printed. Instead I think that I'm going to use the 12x12 albums with page protectors. I will print my scrapbook pages and then do very simple digital pages for the rest of the pictures. I have some easy peasy templates that I can use for the majority of the pictures. That way everything will be in one book and if I do decide to do a paper layout every once in a while that can go in the mix too. The beauty of this system is that I can print and put them in protectors and then rearrange as needed whereas a shutterfly book would have to be in order from the beginning. I've kind of been in a non creative state lately because I haven't been able to figure out how I wanted to do all of this. Now that I've finally got that straight in my head I'm hoping i can get going and make some progress. I know that sounds silly, but sometimes I really have to ponder things before I can figure out how to proceed. Without further ado here is the layout I made today:







The journaling reads:
I always loved the 4th of July as a kid. Chris, my neighbor across the street, and I would ride our bikes to the fireworks stand several times a week before the 4th to stock up on fireworks. I don’t know why we didn’t get all of our stuff in one shot, but I guess part of the fun was going, looking at all the fireworks displayed and figuring out what we would buy that day. I’m sure the people that worked the stand loved us! Then we normally didn’t shoot them all off on the 4th. I know I for one would sort of stockpile them, and dig them out of the closet to just look at them every once in a while. Then normally at the end of the summer, we would have a big firework show on the empty lot next to our house. Chris and I would take turns lighting the fireworks and digging through our stash to figure out what we’d light next. The adults would hang out in their chairs and visit and watch our show. We had lots of fun on that empty lot and every 4th of July I remember the good ole days when riding my bike to the fireworks stand was the highlight of my day.

I still get a kick out of going to the fireworks store. We have huge firework warehouses near us so it’s a little different than the mom and pop stands I frequented in my youth. This year when we set out to do our fireworks shopping I brought along the camera to document my love for fireworks and my love of seeing all those brightly colored packages just lined up and waiting to be lit. I think the employees thought I was nuts when I broke the camera out, but they just don’t understand scrapbooking and the need to have some pictures to go with the story. We picked out our goodies and Caleb got his chance to play with fireworks. So far his favorites seem to be the sparklers. I think he also appreciates the bright colors and the packages themselves. On the 4th I decided to take all the fireworks out of their packaging to make it easier to light that night. I also sorted them by category just because it made me happy (weird, I know). Caleb got a package he called his “bucket fireworks” (I’m guessing because they looked like buckets) and played with them all afternoon like army men or something. I think he may just end up being a firebug like his Mom.

Summer!

It's summertime! It's been hot, humid, and busy! I thought that when we hit summer we would be a little less busy, but so far that hasn't been the case. Caleb just finished with 6 days of swim lessons and thanks to Ms. Amy, Caleb is doing so much better. We started with lots of tears, pleas, and whining. When we headed out to our second day of lessons, Caleb told me that Ms. Amy said that swimming lessons were closed forever. He was that nervous about them, but after about the 4th day, he did a turnaround and is now all about going under the water and "swimming like a shark." We've also been hitting Hawaiian Falls quite a bit and we've really enjoyed that. John went with us today and we were finally able to talk Caleb into going on some of the bigger slides, of course he loved them when he finally went down them.

We've also visited Dinosaur World in Glenrose, visited the arboretum with my niece Abby, and had a visit from Caleb's Aunt Debbie who lives in St. Louis. I wanted to surprise John with some pictures of Caleb and Morgan for Father's Day, but ended up telling him about it. He helped me coordinate times with Morgan and after two photo shoots, a bout with centipedes, Caleb being Caleb, Morgan being sick, and some really hot, humid weather managed to get some cute pictures. I got them just in time for Father's day. One of these days I'm actually going to be able to pull off a good surprise for John. Here are a few pictures of our summer:

Caleb at Dinosaur World

Abby and Caleb at the arboretum

Abby-Love this picture!

The littlest lawn boy-John got Caleb to help him run the blower

Morgan and Caleb

I had the opportunity to take some pictures of my neighbor's boys the other day. It was supposed to be a surprise for Mother's Day, but we ended up having to reshoot it. The first shoot we did was in the middle of the afternoon and the lighting just didn't work, so we reshot and the pics turned out much better. My husband came along and was the "smile getter". I thought we got some really cute shots.

2nd 5K

This year has been the year of becoming more fit and seeing what this 37 year old body can do. Last year I was pretty consistent with working out, but this year I wanted to step it up a bit. I was inspired by my niece and sister in law. They both ran a half marathon in February and that's when I decided to start running again. I ran track in junior high and high school. I did the mile and my best time ever was 6 min 16 seconds. I don't know that I'll see that time again. I also played soccer and was always known as being fast. So, I decided to dust off my running shoes and see where it took me.

I do most of my running on a treadmill. I just find it easier. I can set my water there and get to it whenever I want. I can run with the fan blowing right on me in an air conditioned environment and still manage to sweat like a pig. I started out running at a 6 on the treadmill, then 6.5, now I go between a 6.8 and a 7 and take it up to a 9 when I sprint at the end. I was really proud the other day when I ran 3.1 miles without walking at all. I'd been working toward that since I started running in February.

So back to the 5k today, it was not nearly as packed out as the dash down greenville. It was also a much more hilly course and the thing that threw me was that there were no mile markers so I felt like I was running blind. I had my stopwatch, but didn't really have anything to compare it to so I had no idea how I was doing or how far I'd gone. I really had some defeated thinking going during the race-it was really humid and I was going on about 5 hours sleep. I walked several times and was really disappointed in myself. I finally realized that I was close to the finish line and picked it up a bit. I thought I still had maybe half a block to go or so but when I turned the corner the finish line was much closer than I thought it was so I turned it up and sprinted to the end. I ended up with a time of 29 minutes and 9 seconds. I had a much better time than I thought I did. I was really tickled because my two goals for this race were to finish with a better time than I had in my first 5k, and to finish in less than 30 minutes. I accomplished both of those goals. I beat my first 5k time by about 4 minutes. I think I'm definitely making progress. However, I stayed for the awards presentations today and in my age group the top finishers had times of about 26 minutes so there is room for improvement.
Unfortunately I don't have any pics from today because I was solo at the event. Maybe I'll get some pics at my next one.

Pics of the girls

I saw Brenda at church today and she gave me the go ahead to post the girls' pictures. I was really surprised at how well these turned out-mainly because it was so incredibly windy the day we did these. I guess we were in areas that helped block the wind. So without further ado here are a few of the favorites. I ramped up the color and contrast in photoshop a bit. I'm loving that I'm finally able to do some cool stuff with photoshop.

A busy month

May has been a really busy month for us. Even at 3 Caleb has a lot of end of the year school stuff going on. I was in charge of the teacher appreciation luncheon at his school this year so I had that to deal with as well as a myriad of Mother's Day projects. I made this for my mom for Mother's Day. I thought it would be something that would be really useful for her as she keeps a lot of cards on hand for various occasions. Each page is a pocket page that she can store her cards in. I sewed the pockets on the paper so that the cards wouldn't get stuck in the glue-I learned that the hard way ;0) I thought that this would allow her to keep them organized as well as give her a place to write down all the dates she needs to remember. The papers are all from Close To My Heart and are from the Key To My Heart set from last year. I love this paper. All the elements and stamps are also CTMH.














This has also been an enlightening month. I've learned a lot this month-some good, some bad, but enlightening nonetheless. I'll be making some changes based on these revelations and we'll see what we see. Speaking of learning, my photography class, "Oh Shoot", ended last week and was a great experience. I learned a lot and hope to continue to improve my photography. I took my friend's daughters out and did a surprise photo shoot of them for her for Mother's Day. The pictures turned out great and she was thrilled. I need to see if I can get her permission to post them, because I'd love to show them off. It was nice to do a photo shoot where I didn't have to coax and cajole the subjects to do what I'd like. But, I would hope that teenagers would be a bit more cooperative than a fiesty 3 year old....

That's all for now. I have lots more to say, but it will have to wait for another day.

Sweet Summertime

My favorite digi designer has an all new paper and digi line coming out May 1st called Sweet Summertime. If you leave her a comment on her blog by April 27th you have the chance to win this adorable kit in either digi or paper. This line is too cute. I love it. You can visit her blog at http://www.creativitybycrystal.blogspot.com/ and be sure to look for the layout by yours truly on her blog.

Obsession

For those of you who know me this will not come as a surprise, but once I find something that I want or something that I want to do I become obsessed with it until I have done it, or purchased it. I found the coolest camera bags on Etsy this week and obsessed about it until I had ordered a custom bag. I want a bag that will hold my camera stuff and enough stuff for when Caleb and I go to the zoo for the day or the park or whatever. Plus these bags are super cute. I ordered a bag similar to this one, but I got the Ultimate Snugglens. I'm so excited to get it. If you want to visit this seller's site it is http://www.etsy.com/shop/gypsyrosehandbags

Texas Bluebonnets & Oh Shoot!

I always have such good intentions to post and then I seem to run out of time. The last month has been really busy. I'm taking a photography class called Oh Shoot! at Jessica Sprague's website. It is taught by Candice Stringham and has been really great. I've done another class and read some books about my camera, but it never seemed to click for me. Well, I finally seem to be getting it. I've supplemented her lessons with a few books about my camera to really get this stuff into my head. I also bought a new 35 mm fixed focal length lens for doing portraits. It's got a lower aperture on it than my kit lens so I'm able to get that lovely blur that looks so good in portraits. We are on kind of a break this week from the class. Last week was our lesson on Manual Mode. I'm happy to report that I've managed to get some good shots using manual. The shots below were either taken in Manual or in Aperture priority.

Caleb pointed out that this cactus looks like Mickey Mouse, and I must say that he is correct!

By the end of the bluebonnet shoot, this is how Caleb felt about my picture taking.



At the end of the day, Caleb decided he needed to take a few pictures of me and since he'd indulged me all day I decided why not. He took quite a few interesting shots, but got some pretty good shots in too.

Gotta go get the boy from MDO. Enjoy!