Snow, snow, and more snow!

I felt a bit like a kid yesterday when I saw that it was snowing. Caleb had his Valentine's Day party at school yesterday so we headed for his school yesterday morning. All the way to school he kept saying, "It's snowing! Hooray!" I'm glad he shares my enthusiasm for snow. I hung out at his school so that I could be there for his class party. There are only 5 kids in his class, so it didn't take long to pass out the their Valentines. I headed out after the party to get a few things done and then got the call that they were going to do an early release because of all of the snow.

On our way home I told him that when we got home that we would play out in the snow. I got another rendition of "It's snowing and we get to play in it. Hooray!" So, we got home and the search began for all of our snow clothes. Luckily we had just been skiing so they were fairly easy to find. We got all bundled up and headed out. Several of our neighbors were out too, and Caleb was excited that his buddy Matthew was outside playing. Caleb had said that he wanted to make a snowman, so I started building one. I've never had the experience of just rolling a snowball and rolling it around to make a big ball, but this snow worked that way. In fact, when I was making the middle ball for my snowman, it got so big that I ended up making it the base of a second snowman. John got home and he helped me get the snowman put together. We started our search to outfit the snowman. We used rocks for his face, and sticks for his arms. Caleb started getting excited at that point and said that our snowman looked like Frosty. John found the snowman a hat, and when he put the hat on our snowman Caleb asked if the snowman was going to come to life! Too funny. He really got into the Frosty the Snowman song this Christmas.

Here's Caleb just as we got outside!

And here he is perched on the makings of our snowman.

And here we are with "Frosty"!


Then in true Jones family tradition, John hooked up a sled to the four wheeler and took Caleb and the neighborhood kids sledding. When I was a kid, my Dad would do the same for us. Caleb had a blast with the sledding. If we had done it all night, I don't think that he would have gotten bored with it.

We did finally come in for a while to warm up. I got dinner started and after some hot cocoa and marshmallows John and Caleb headed out for another round of snow fun. This time they headed out to the back yard where Caleb discovered that his fort was covered in snow. What do you do when your slide is covered in snow? Well, you slide down it, of course. Caleb was fascinated with sliding down and landing in the snow. Then Caleb and John decided it would be funny to come knock at the door and try to peg me with a snowball when I opened it. Caleb would get so tickled that he could hardly stand. Then I'd shut the door and open it again and he'd have another giggling fit. After being out for quite a while John told him that they probably needed to come in. Caleb said, "I'm sorry Dad, but I'm having too much fun to go inside."

This morning when we got up Caleb was very anxious to go out again. We actually have received record snowfall amounts and got more than a foot of snow. Caleb played on the slide some more and then I put him on the trampoline that was covered in snow. He was just amazed at it all. He got to play some more with Jacob and Matthew and he and Jacob had a snow ball fight. Caleb was cool with that until some snow went under his shirt. I didn't see it happen and he started saying, "My tummy hurts!" Then I realized it was the snow that was just freezing him. He also ate plenty of snow. Every time he fell down he would lay in the snow and lick it. He kept saying that it tasted like ice cream. He is so funny. After we were out for a while we came inside to warm up and to get some lunch. I asked Caleb what he wanted to eat and he said "marshmallow lasagna." I told him that I didn't know how to make marshmallow lasanga, and asked him how to make it. He said that you get some marshmallows, put some cheese on them, stir it in a circle and then add some chocolate. Sounds like a lovely combo, but those are three of his favorites.

Check out how deep it was.

My little snow eater

John made it home from work and helped Caleb make a snow fort. Then of course they had to have a snowball fight. Caleb can't ever get anyone because he's laughing so hard when you get him.

We have definitely enjoyed the snow, and I know Caleb will be sad to see it go.

A few layouts

Well, this is some sort of record for me. I don't think I've ever finished scrapping a trip so quickly. I don't get much of an opportunity to scrapbook snow pages, so I pulled out all the snow themed embellishments I've collected over the years and my Aspen paper packet from Close To My Heart and went to town. I ended up using a lot of old stuff from my stash and that felt good too. The metal letters on this first layout I bought at Joann's years ago on clearance and finally used some of them. The journaling on all the layouts are basically the blog entries
I made about the trip, just tweaked a little. While my new hero may be the queen of simple scrapping, I don't know if I can make that leap. I like adding a bit of bling to keep things interesting, but that's the great thing about scrapping. They are your pages and you can make them any way you like.

The layout below is from Christmas 2008. I used the It's a Guy Thing paper packet from CTMH. This layout took forever, but I like the way it turned out.

I have a new hero

On the very long drive back from New Mexico (10 hours) I was actually able to read a book that I've been wanting to read for several months now. This was cool on several levels because I normally can't read in the car without getting a huge headache and I got to read a great book. It's called Clean and Simple Scrapbooking - The Sequel by Cathy Zielske. So, if you haven't figured it out Cathy Zielske is my new hero. I just loved this book. Most of it was stuff that you've heard before if you've delved into the hobby that is scrapbooking, but the way it was presented was both humorous and inspiring.

But after reading the book, I was ready to go scrap. I've kind of been in a weird in between place with my scrapping. I've started devling into the digital realm, but I still love the hands on aspect of paper scrapping-so I've ended up doing neither because I'm terrible at making decisions. I also finally "get" the layouts devoted to your favorite cup of coffee or how much you love paper towels(Cathy has one on paper towels in the book). I don't know that I'll be scrapping a 2 page spread on my love for diet dr. pepper, but I did finally realize that I need to start putting a little more of ME in my scrapbooks. I've concentrated on recording Caleb's life to the exculsion of everything else. I need to remember to take the time to focus on other aspects of my life. Caleb might be interested to know what his mom was into in 2010. He might think it's interesting that I love 80s music, time to myself, and Mexican food.

I liked the fact that her book was real and showed us a glimpse into her life. I like that she scraps very specific things about people at that particular moment. The little things are the things that we forget ,5, 10 years down the road, but a lot of the time the little things are what makes life fun, interesting, and humorous.

I also really liked her chapter on journaling. One of the reasons I started a blog in the first place was so that I could write about life events as they happened and then be able to go back and use that post as my journaling for my scrapping. In that vein I'm hoping that this blog becomes a much more interesting place in the next year. I'm going to try to get better at giving my thoughts a concrete home. I will still post layouts, but I'm also going to post about life in general.

Gotta go now. Life is calling.

The rest of the NM trip

Our third and last day in New Mexico started with Caleb's ski lesson. We saw one of the instructors, Josh, working with a 4 year old the previous day so we requested that he teach Caleb's lesson because he worked really well with the other little boy. Plus, Josh can ski backwards in front of his students. John and I don't quite have that trick down. John and I really talked the lesson up so that Caleb would listen and do what he was asked. John told him that he was going to have a ski partner show him how to be a better skier. I think the partner bit comes from the Buzz Lightyear movie because Caleb's always talking about Buzz's partner from that movie. Anyway, the lesson started and off go Caleb and Josh. It was really cute watching Caleb take his lesson. They worked together for a while. Josh showed him how to put on his skis and then they skied down to get on the rope. Caleb was already a pro with the tow rope. They would ski down with Josh giving Caleb pointers and then they'd get back on the rope. This went on for a while and then I noticed that they'd taken off their skis and were walking back up to the building. Apparently Caleb told Josh that he needed a little break and that he needed to talk to his mom and dad. So, we took a little break, got Caleb some blue Gatorade, and then Josh came over and said that he had to take over another lesson at 10 so that if we wanted to get the lesson in before noon that it had to be then. So, we sent Caleb off again with his partner and they continued their lesson.




After Caleb's lesson, we decided to go tubing for a while. They have a little tow rope that takes you to the top of the mountain. This was much better than having to hoof it up the mountain with your sled in tow. Everyone has to sled down on their on tube, or tuba, as Caleb was calling it. So, after Caleb had a couple of run ins with the cable, he decided to climb onto our tube with us and we would hang on to his empty one as we went up the mountain. I got lots of hugs and kisses on our way to the top. The tubing was a lot of fun, but it was a bit cold. The snow was pretty hard and as a result you had to dig your toes into it to slow down and eventually stop. Well, let me rephrase, if you didn't want to end up with any broken bones that's what you did. There were 2 broken bones that day of folks that were more into speed than sense. One had a broken collar bone and one a broken leg. Believe me, we made sure that we slowed down. So much so that in fact, my trusty hiking boots of about 13 years bit the dirt. The soles started coming apart from the shoes because of the snow being forced into them. Before the end of the day, I had one shoe that was completely without a sole. My feet never did get wet though. Anyway, tubing was fun, but did make for some chilly rides as the snow tends to get in your pant legs and the spray from digging your toes in covers your back with snow. At the end of the day, I had icicles for hair. Caleb really enjoyed himself and one little boy of about 10 remarked on how brave Caleb was for tubing. I think our little dare devil takes after me and my dad who are both dare devils. I'm not quite the dare devil that I was when I was a kid. I think motherhood tends to bring out the caution/common sense in a person. We tubed for about 2 hours then headed to the cabin for lunch. When we got back there was a huge youth group that showed up to tube, so we decided to go practice skiing with Caleb again.









This time, both me and John stayed in our regular shoes and just let Caleb ski. I think his lesson really paid off because he finally seemed to get the hang of the snow plow a bit. Then after practicing for quite a bit more, he finally figured out how to stop. And it wasn't any safe snow plow stop, oh no, it was more of a bad ass skid to the side kind of stop. Oh how I wish we could have had one more day on the mountain because we definitely would have taken our boy to the top of that mountain and skied all the way down. Ah well. Next year. Finally the youth group left at 3 so we headed over to the tubes to get another hour in. John went down once and opted to sit out for the rest of the time. Caleb and I went down quite a few times, and I got to experience tubing without waterproof pants as I'd changed clothes at lunch since my pants had gotten snow in them. Let me just say that my nether region has not been so cold in quite some time. We closed the place down though and got the last run of the day. Our little trip was fun. I wish we'd known that the whole school came to ski on Friday and that the tubing was only on the weekends, but all in all it was a good time.

Our Little Snow Bunny/Kamakazi Skier

Caleb's been dying to see the snow so we decided to take a little trip to Cloudcroft, NM for a little tubing and skiing. Yesterday we got in around noon so we decided to just go do a little sledding. John and I definitely got a workout going up and down the hill. I had never really been downhill sledding so it was a new experience for me too. John took Caleb down the first time on a tube and Caleb enjoyed that. Then I got a little ambitious on our first run down and went all the way to the top and ended up scaring Caleb a bit (and me too). But, we finally got him going down on his little saucer and he liked that. We weren't able to take a ton of pics because we took our small camera and it ran out of batteries, of course, not long after we got there. When we were through sledding I took a few pics of Caleb with the good camera. I wanted some shots of him with the snow coming down. It was so cute because he normally doesn't really want to pose, but I told him we were going to take a few pics and he just started hamming it up. He smiled, and tried to catch the snowflakes on his tongue and said "I love this place!" Now that's some great justification for driving 10 hours one way to play in the snow!

Today we decided to hit the slopes. Unfortunately for us, the entire elementary and middle school from Cloudcroft were there too. Really. We got a bunny slope pass for me and Caleb but the line was so long to go up the little tow rope that John ended up pulling Caleb up the slope so that he could ski down to me. Our little kamikaze skier wanted to go FAST, but never figured out to stop, so me or John would have to intercept him on the way down. Luckily the kids left at 2 so we pretty much had the bunny slope to ourselves after that. Caleb had great balance and seldom fell, but he just never figured out how to stop. He's going to have a lesson tomorrow so hopefully they can help him learn to stop so that we can do something other than the bunny slope tomorrow.

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Jingle layout with glitter rub-ons

The pictures that I used on this layout are really not that great. These are from Christmas

Eve 2008. Caleb was and is still at the stage where he's just not that into posing, especially when it isn't his idea. The picture of my mom isn't that great, but she and Caleb are snuggling and I wanted to use a pic of her in the layout. My parents came in last year and spent the night with us so that they could see Caleb get all of his goodies from Santa on Christmas morning so I wanted to do a layout just of Christmas Eve night because it was a break in tradition for us.

List of items used-all items are from Close to My Heart:

Jingle Level 2 Paper Packet X7115B

Jingle Level 2 Stickease X7115c

Clear Sparkles Z1104

Glitter Rub-Ons Z1222

Dimensional Elements simple alphabet Z1048

Liquid glass Z679-used this to coat the j and the y to make them shiny

White daisy organdy ribbon

The Sale You've Been Waiting For......

We've been watching and waiting for it and now it is almost here! That's right. Close To My Heart's buy 2 stamp sets, get 1 free sale is back. Starting November 3-30th when you buy 2 stamp sets (sizes A, B, C, D, and/or E only) at full retail price you will receive a third stamp set of your choice for FREE (of equal or lesser value)—a savings of up to $22.95 US.

Here are the answers to your FAQs:
What are the campaign details?
Dates: November 3–30, 2009
Featured Product(s): My Acrylix® Stamp Sets
For Customers: Purchase any two stamp sets (sizes A, B, C, D, and/or E only) at full retail price and receive a third stamp set of your choice for FREE (of equal or lesser value)—a savings of up to $22.95 US
What stamp sets are included in Stampaganza 2009?
Customers may choose their FREE set from any current stamp set we sell (excluding E-size, customizable (K), Art & Soul®, Workshops on the Go™ and Stamp of the Month) that is of equal or lesser value than the lowest price set the customer purchases.
Where can I see the stamps sets available in Stampaganza 2009?
Customers may select stamp sets that are included in any 2009 Idea Book and the current Product Review.
Will tax and shipping/handling be charged on this promotion?
No tax is charged on FREE stamp sets. For Gathering and Individual orders, shipping/handling (for US and CAN) is always charged based on the full retail value of the item. For EZ Invite and MyCTMH orders, shipping/handling is charged based on the weight of the item.