My So-Called Life

Middle School No More

I've been wanting to write for weeks, but the end-of-the-school-year time warp totally sucked me in.  So here I am playing catch-up once again...

So...remember this little guy?  


He was just starting middle school as a 6th grader.  

Before I knew it, 3 years flew by, and I was taking his photo at his end-of-the-year honors assembly here:


What happened to my little boy?  It's as if I blinked, and he turned into a young man - a young man about to start high school, mind you!  Eeek!  

I created this layout to document this outrageous passage of time...


(All supplies used are from Designer Digitals.  For a full list of credits, please visit Middle School)

Roland and I are extremely proud of him.  Not only was he awarded MVP awards in both football and track, he received Academic Athlete of the Year, a truly great honor for him.  He also made A/B Honor Roll for the year and received a Presidential award.  Now, I can only pray that high school goes as well!

Emma ended the school year on a high note as well.  


Little Miss got all A Honor Roll for the year and was the top AR reader in her class.  Roland and I are extremely proud of her as well.  I feel very blessed to have two kiddos who try and do their very best each day at school.  

Another great note about Emma - can you believe she missed 16 days of school last year in Kindergarten?  This year, she only missed 6 days, and 3 of those were before she had her surgery (to remove her adenoids and insert PE tubes in her ears) in November, 2 were due to the surgery itself and 1 was due to a badly sprained wrist in the Spring.  Yay!!

Printing Digital Layouts

On the recommendation of several ladies at Designer Digitals, I recently tried Scrapping Simply to print several digital layouts.  In the past, I've either printed them myself with my wide-format printer (which my laptop and new desktop don't easily support anymore because of the newer operating systems), printed them as 8"x8" layouts or have used Shutterfly books to showcase my digital pages. 

Normally, Scrapping Simply charges $1.99 for a 12"x12" digital print, but a couple of times a year, they bring the price down to $1.50 a page.  No better time to try them out, right?  AND, I found out that you can also buy credits at this price so that if you happen to be all caught up in your printing (Bwwhahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!), you can purchase prints for the future at the sale price.  How cool is that?! 

So I uploaded my order of about 35 pages, and a couple of weeks later (I would have loved if the service would have been quicker, but they say they give special care and attention to each individual order, and that's a good thing, right?) I received this:
 

I was so excited to open it up!


They did come in a plastic sleeve which was adhered to the box so it couldn't bounce around during transit.



I chose the matte finish which is really, really nice - it's actually more of a lustre, I think.  The paper is fairly thin, though, so I had to be really careful in handling them out of page protectors. 



I was REALLY happy with the colors - definitely felt they were true to the images on my computer. 

Yay, I will definitely be using them again!  And I what I most love about printing them out as 12"x12" is that I will be able to slide them into books I've already started with paper layouts.  If you haven't noticed, I don't scrap in chronological order; I pretty much scrap what I'm in the mood for so I've still got baby pages of Emma to do, and she's already 7! 

In other news, Miss Mollie visited the beauty shop yesterday.  I forgot how white her coat is!


She's so fluffy, isn't she?  I mean, Mollie, not Emma - although Emma's hair if pretty fluffy, too!  Poor Em, her allergies started bothering her yesterday, can you tell? 

Speaking of Mollie AND scrapping out of order, here's a recent layout I created of the little pooch a couple of weeks after we'd gotten her.


For a full list of products used, visit Best Friends at Designer Digitals.
 
And I want to thank those of you who ended up visiting the Creating Keepsakes Readers' Pick Poll.  I think it's closed now, and I don't know the results, but I sure do appreciate your support.  :)

Creating Keepsakes Readers' Pick

I received some exciting news yesterday.  I found out that this layout



is one of the three layouts on the Creating Keepsakes Blog that the general public can vote on to be published in an upcoming issue of the magazine.  Kinda cool!  I posted that page last year at Club CK, and was very surprised that it was singled out for this honor.  I encourage you to take a look at the 3 candidates and vote for your fave.  If it's mine, that's great, if it's not, that's okay too because the other two layouts are wonderful!  I believe you can even vote multiple times (once daily), if you're so interested.... ;)  Not sure when the deadline is though.  They have it listed as being April 1st, and obviously that's not right.  They just posted it on the 11th, but I expect voting will be over in a couple of days. 

In other news, looks like my little critter really banged up her wrist pretty badly while on her scooter several days ago.  Her arm had been bothering her after she fell so we treated it with ice, bandages, ibuprofen, etc. for a few days.  She would seem to forget about it then remember it when she did something that aggravated it. It wasn't bruised or swollen that we could tell so we figured it would just take some time to heal.  Finally, this last weekend, she was really crying about it so I went ahead and took her in to the doctor Monday morning.  X-rays didn't show anything conclusive (possibly a hairline fracture), but the treatment would be the same either way.  So she was bandaged up with a splint and ordered to wear it for the next 3 weeks during her waking hours to let it heal.  Poor Emma!  Just when the weather is getting nice, and she wants to be outside, she has to take it easy.  Oh well, I'm sure this will just be a slight bump in the road in the scheme of things. 

For Humanity Kit: Japan

Our awesome designers at Designer Digitals have come together to create this beautiful For Humanity Kit: Japan digital kit in support of the relief efforts to Japan. 



One hundred percent of the proceeds will go to the American Red Cross for aid to the Japanese.  The kit is gorgeous, and your $10 will go to a very worthy cause.  The kit will only be available for a limited time so please act sooner rather than later if you are so inclined to help.  Thank you!

Spring Break

We had a great Spring Break a couple of weeks ago.  For the first time in 13 years at my current job, I took the whole week off to be with the kiddos.  Roland had to work so we couldn't travel anywhere, but the kids and I made the most of it.  We did manage to go to the beach.



Wouldn't you know that the day before the sun was shining and there was only a light breeze?  The day we went, it was very cloudy, VERY windy and a bit chilly.  We had to persuade Emma that the water was way too cold right now to actually get in.  She didn't believe us until she got her feet/legs wet. 

It was Mollie's first time to go to the beach.  She was just excited to be out and about and seeing the birds and kids, etc.  She did get a bit wet....brrrr!  Nothing like wet dog smell...ewww!



We also made a point to visit our local Botanical Gardens & Nature Center.  Emma and I did not realize that they have several birds there. 



I think this little guy was called Yum-Yum. 

Of course, there were beautiful flowers and plants everywhere.





This guy, Sarge, was Emma's favorite.



And of course, we loved visiting the Butterfly Conservatory.  Can you find the butterfly???  He was doing a pretty good job of blending in. 



Later that day, we watched our first Roller Derby match.  Match?  Game?  I'm not quite sure what you call it.  It was actually a Jr. Roller Derby match.  My cousin's daughters play as well as my best friend's niece so it was fun to see them in action. 

My friend's niece is on the left in purple and my cousin is directly on the right of the girl in pink. 



Here is Emma with both cousins. 



Now Emma wants to be a roller derby skater.  They had little girls about her age that kind of served as mascots.  They would skate around in tutus when there were breaks in the game, and Emma was quite excited.  We told her she had to actually learn to skate first! 

The rest of Spring Break was filled with shopping, car maintenance, housework, watching a LOT of movies and staying up WAY too late.  The kids and I were not happy about heading back to work and school.  We definitely have Spring Fever! 

I did manage to scrap a little.  Here is a page I completed with some of the other bird photos I took at the Botanical Gardens.



I used a template by Anna Aspnes.  Look for the full supply list here: Birds of the Botanical Gardens at Designer Digitals. 

Have a great Monday - it's good to be back! :)

Back from Hiatus

Well, without ever actually intending to, I took a long hiatus from blogging.  Between big projects at work, the kids' busy schedules, the dog, home life, etc., I just had to let some things go, and blogging was one of them. 

I've been itching to get blogging again in the past couple of months, and finally dedicated some time to do a few updates and actually post!  So here I am.... 

And so hurricane season begins...

Things have been exciting here down South.  Less than two weeks ago Hurricane Alex formed in the Gulf, and we began making preparations to protect the Museum.  We ended up getting a whole lot of wind and rain as well as a pretty nice storm surge.

Here's the view of the Barge Dock (where we normally park) from the 2nd floor of the museum.


These were taken with my phone so please excuse the quality (and the rain on the window).  Though I've seen it like this a few times before, it's still so weird to see the water coming up so high. 

It looked like this on the drive home about 12 hours before Alex hit the northern Mexican coast. 


And Thursday morning...on the way to work...it looked like this.


Because of Alex, we had a pretty low-key 4th of July.  The ground was still too wet, and there were way too many mosquitoes to spend much time outdoors.  We did manage to celebrate just a bit.


Haven't been able to do as much scrapbooking as I've wanted to lately.  Here's a page I created a few weeks ago that I haven't shared yet.  These photos were taken on Emma's first trip to a water park 4 summers ago.


All products are from Designer Digitals.  For a full list of credits, please see Swim Like a Fish.

Have a great Monday - I'm already looking forward to the weekend!  :)

Hot Summer

Summer began on June 21st, but we've been dealing with the heat and humidity for a couple of months now.  I think it's just getting worse now that summer has officially started.  Or it could be that I'm just running on a much higher temp all the way around since they are replacing the HVAC system on one of our buildings at work.  Unfortunately, that means erratic temps - mostly warm erratic temps that we have to deal with. 

The heat hasn't stopped us from enjoying summer activities, however.  We've been at the ball field a lot - even traveled to Houston for a tournament over Memorial Day. 









As usual, Emma wasn't too interested in the games, but she was definitely interested in keeping cool!



She also found adorable babies to entertain...



(this is the baby sister of Ryan's teammate)

...and creepy stinging insects to watch and run away from...



And of course, back at home, wherever you see Emma, you can be sure that Mollie is close by. 





I've also created a couple of new pages.  I managed to scrap some of those baseball pics. 



Doesn't that main photo look like a baseball bat ad?  Those photos are SOOC - the light was just gorgeous - right before sunset.  You can find the full list of credits at Best, Designer Digitals Digital Scrapbooking Ideas.  

And I found the perfect quick page by Lynn Grieveson for one of those snow cone photos of Emma. 



It was as if she made it just for ME!  LOL, love when things like that happen!  Check out the full supply list at My Sunshine on the Designer Digitals website. 

We've got more ball games ahead of us this weekend, but I'm hoping I can tackle some house projects.  I have to work on Saturday morning, but it shouldn't be too bad.  Definitely looking forward to the weekend...how 'bout you??  Happy Thursday!

Puppy Pages

Forgive my lack of new blog posts.  In addition to our regular crazy-life, taking care of little Miss Mollie has just added to the day-to-day neediness.  We have been enjoying her, Emma especially!  And she has grown by leaps and bounds in the 7 weeks that she has been with us.  I can't even believe that it's been 7 weeks already!

I've managed to create two puppy pages so far.  Wish I could scrap tons more but then I really wouldn't get any sleep!  Here's a page showcasing Mollie's first photos with us:



A full list of credits can be found at Puppy Love on the Designer Digitals website. 

And here is the other:


The full list of credits can also be found at Designer Digitals at Hugs & Kisses. 

I've got more new pages to post and lots of photos as well.  Will be back with more soon!

Busy as a Bee...or a Few Hundred

On Mother's Day, we drove over to my inlaws to pick them up for a celebratory lunch.  As we were sitting in the van, trying to decide whether to head inside to give my MIL her gift or give it to her at lunch, I heard Emma in the backseat say in a soft voice,

"I think Grandma has a hive."

Roland and I still kept on talking.  Though I had heard her, what she said didn't really register.  Then again,

"I think there's a big beehive in Grandma's tree." 

At this point, I had gotten out of the van and began to open Emma's door.  I followed her gaze, as she was transfixed on a tree in my inlaws yard. 

I saw this about 6 yards away:


We took a closer look - which was probably not the smartest move, but heck, when would we ever see a sight like this again?  I hope not anytime soon!



And then, because our self-preservation mode kicked in, we started edging for the safety of the house.  But not before I zoomed in for a closer look.


Can you see that one little bee I caught in flight?  And can you believe that other side of this limb was covered as heavily in bees as this side was?  YIKES!  We found out that my FIL had been working in the yard for a couple of hours the afternoon before.  He's so lucky he wasn't attacked!

And this is kind of awful, but we decided to forgo the call to Vector Control until AFTER we had lunch.  We knew all the restaurants would be packed for Mother's Day, and the whole bee cleanup would most likely take several hours to deal with. 

When my MIL actually did call Vector Control, their weekend recording said to call 911 if it was a bee incident.  So she called 911, and the fire department came out and assessed the situation.  They definitely thought that Vector Control needed to be involved, but because no one had actually been stung, they refused to come out on a Sunday!  They said to call them at 8am Monday morning, and they would send someone out. 

Can you believe that?  I mean, there are hundreds of bees in that hive.  If they decided to attack someone (the tree is just a couple of feet away from the sidewalk on a fairly busy street with lots of kids and pets on the block), that someone would be seriously hurt or even worse!  Thankfully, the firemen walked around the neighborhood and warned people to be cautious until Vector Control could come out.  And as far as we know, no one was hurt before VC came out the next morning and took care of the bees.

What an exciting Mother's Day, huh?

Alas, I was going to update with photos of Miss Mollie, but it is late, and I had promised myself I would be in bed by 11pm tonight.  I'm already 50 minutes late!  I'll leave you with one photo of our two little girlies taken on Mother's Day...



Happy Wednesday!  Yay, the work week is halfway over!