This was one of my favorite gifts to give this year. It is a magnetic board with two clips that I made for my best friend's mom, Carol. Carol loves to get homemade gifts, especially ones that include pics of her granddaughters. This was a pizza pan from Dollar Tree, and the clips are from Dollar Tree as well.

Made this project for my sister-in-law's baby shower. The little baby face is a photo of my grandmother that I copied. I altered a clementine box and layered it with tissue for the wrapping.

It's been a difficult couple of weeks around here. Family member in and out of the hospital, others not well, car trying to die, friend evacuated first for carbon monoxide, then for flooding, problems at school that in my mind shouldn't be, awkwardness other places, more family problems, a burned up toaster oven, my scanner bulb burned out and can't be replaced, etc. My stress level has been building up and every little thing makes me want to cry!

However, at the same time, I have many things to be grateful for. Tonight is Ethan's last night of double shifts, and the extra money should enable us to pay off our new water tank. A good friend offered to make sure that we get a good new used car. My family and friends have generously said they will watch Esme so that I can work this week. And in a few short days, I will be on vacation with my sweet husband for twelve whole days! Hooray! Plus I will be able to have my family over for Christmas dinner, always a delight and I am soooo grateful that I get to do this.

Yes things have seemed not quite right around here since sometime in September, but perhaps that means things are about to get better. I am preparing a list of resolutions and goals for the New Year. I am challenging myself to be more creative and more focused on what I really want to do. I am planning on more time at home with my family - I realized last week how much they need me, and was reminded that the reason I took this job was to have the flexibility to be here for them. I want more time for my friends too, especially the ones who support homeschooling and who encourage me to be creative. I feel like I am about to burst with ideas, in 2009 I plan to express more of them!

I hope everyone is happy and well, and that everyone and anyone reading has a wonderful holiday!

We have a winner! I let Esme choose a random number on her chart and IamDerby is the winner! Thanks everyone for the wonderful comments and compliments - they were so appreciated! Hope everyone is having a wonderful December!

You've seen my projects, now win a kit to do some of your own!! I received the complete line of Love Letters products from Little Yellow Bicycle and would like to share the love. Leave a comment about the line or any of my projects to be entered into a drawing to win the page kit (shown here) and a little extra surprise from me. I will let Esme draw a winner Friday evening.

Mini Album and Fold-Up Folio from the Love Letters line by Little Yellow Bicycle

I love our church. Growing up and for the last few years I've gone to churches that held Sunday School during the service. Our new church has played with the schedule several times during their search for a new rector, but I think they've finally got it right. We start every week with a Sing. There are tons of musicians - people playing guitars, usually someone on flute and someone on piano, plus lots of kids playing percussion, etc. We usually sing a variety of songs, ranging from kids songs to traditional hymns. We do rounds and sing antiphons. It is so fun! It is in a smaller space so just a few people make it feel full. Next we move on to Sunday School, and while my daughter is learning Bible stories and church traditions, I get to go to adult classes. So far I've learned about the history of Christianity in our area, Religion and Politics, and much more. Then I grab my daughter and we head over to the service, which since our new Rector arrived, has been fairly traditional, which I also like. I have also been lucky enough to meet several very creative, likable people there, and feel very included and appreciated. The new rector is wonderful too, and that seems like the icing on the cake. I feel home.

Got the photos from my brother's wedding last year and couldn't wait to start scrapping them! Almost everything here is LYB Love Letters!

This is my next project using the Little Yellow Bicycle Love Letters line - a special album for my husband for Christmas!

My next project using the LYB Love Letters line - making plaques is one of my new favorite things to do - I love this line and had to combine the two.

This is my second layout with products from Little Yellow Bicycle's Love Letters line. I am hooked on date stamps and other "date" materials so this is the perfect line for me. These pics of Esme are from a summer afternoon together in the yard. To see this complete line please click here.

I was sooo lucky to receive a huge box of Yellow Bicycle products from the Love Letters line! This line has EVERYTHING - patterned papers, shaped and flocked papers, mini albums, rubons, epoxy stickers, tons of journaling and date blocks, fabric stickers, borders, transparencies, brads, ribbons, and more. I love this line! Below is my first creation with these new products - a mini book of Mother Theresa quotes.

Having creative friends makes me HAPPY!!

My very favorite Halloween pic from this year.

These awesome signs were posted by a family in our neighborhood for Halloween!

Why is Christianity now associated with Republicans? This is so unfair. I am a Christian, and because of my beliefs, I'm also a Democrat. Which party thinks that if we have enough to spare, we should give it up to help others? Which party fights for social programs to make sure that every American has basic needs met? Which party champions education and health care? These are all issues of the Democratic party. Doesn't it seem that Christians should support these issues? I am tired of Republicans trying to co-opt Christianity and I for one am not going to put up with it anymore. I am a Christian and a Liberal and proud of it!

My new favorite quote from this election season:

"There will be an election, followed by rioting, the complete unraveling of society, and, I assume, a zombie problem. And everyone will agree it’s an improvement." -Scott Adams

I just got accepted to take part in this:

Job Description Position Qualifications: Interested participants should have good written and oral communication skills; be willing to work with digital audio equipment; be comfortable working with different ages and ethnicities; be open to group discussion and seminar participation; be willing to share personal experiences throughout the oral history process; have a desire to educate local teachers in classrooms; be interested in local history. Oral historians will be trained on several methodologies of collecting oral histories; will go out into the field and interview residents; will meet monthly to discuss and review relevant texts; will learn from each other’s field experience; and will become the tools for local educators who are interested in bringing oral history techniques into their classrooms.

Commitments

• Attend a panel discussion on Oral History November 8, 2008 from 2 – 4pm
• Attend monthly meetings for an 8-month period
  
• Learn oral history techniques and theory
• Interview residents at various locations
• Use digital voice recorders
• Transcribe full interviews using word processing software
• Read relevant excerpts and full texts
• Collect three interviews and transcribe
• Be a resource for local educators to use oral history techniques in their classrooms

Sooooo excited to be part of this! I think this will be a great resource for homeschooling, and a very interesting project!

This is our new kitty Cosmo! He is such a sweetie! He wasn't big on having his photo taken! He has certainly livened up our house with all his playing, but he also loves to cuddle and spends lots of his time purring loudly.

When we couldn't find Pekoe we hung up signs all over the neighborhood, and someone from a cat rescue shelter called us to say she might have our cat. By then we had found Pekoe, but we got to talking and she said she had a kitten waiting to be adopted, and that she wouldn't even charge us the normal fee if we wanted to come get him. We talked it over (Ethan had to be convinced) and picked him up the next day. Of course after he explored the house a bit he sat down on Ethan's lap and put his little head down on Ethan's hand and fell asleep, so now he is pretty much Ethan's kitty.

One reason I am looking forward to the Christmas season: stores open longer. I am having trouble being confined to the normal schedules - if I want a craft item at 8 am or 1 am - I want to get it then!!

I looovve Columbus Day weekend! Every year half the citizens of a neighboring town hold yard sales. We're still paying for our new water tank and don't have much money to spare, but we were able to get many good deals for not very much money. I got a sewing machine, leg warmers for Esme, Polly Pockets, dancewear, a microscope, and a couple building sets great for fine motor development!

Yesterday was a horrible day. Our family's cat disappeared around 10:30 Sunday night, not to be found til about 2:30 Monday afternoon. Pekoe is a member of our family and we were all distraught, thinking we would never see her again. She's an indoor cat and very gentle, so I don't think living outside would be easy for her, and I am not quite sure she would have the skills to find her way home again.

My brother Charles was doing some work on our house and we were both going in and out. Charles is very considerate about shutting doors because he knows we have a cat, but he didn't notice and I forgot that the windows were open on our sun porch. When she disappeared in an unfurnished apartment, we assumed she had jumped out one of them. Esme and I searched for a long time last night. Ethan searched when he got home from work. I woke up early and searched again, and hung up flyers all over our neighborhood. Charles, Ethan, and I all searched the empty apartment for her mulitiple times. There literally nothing in the apartment, so it should be difficult for a kitty to hide.

A long time ago I remember a discussion on the NSBR board at 2 Peas where someone said, after you have kids, your pets are no longer members of your family. I can say for us, this is not true. I spent many hours crying and walking and calling her name - if she was not a member of our family that wouldn't have happened.

Yesterday afternoon Ethan went over there to do some cleaning, and out walked Pekoe!! She was disgustingly dirty and had obviously been trapped somewhere for a long time. I suspect she had climbed into the back of a dryer that's not in use right now, and couldn't get out. We were all so happy to see her we didn't care. We hugged and kissed her anyway! We are sooo happy she is back!!

My mom wanted me to help her with some decorations for her office. She wrote these poems, I decorated for her.

I am trying to figure out what this says about me: A scrapper posted on my blog that she is moving to the area and I emailed her back telling her about how much I love the local coffee shop that makes their chocolate milk with real chocolate instead of syrup.

Two of my favorite Haikus from second grade last year:

I am tired of Math
I do not like it one bit
I lay on my desk

I saw a tiger
It was about to attack
So I ran away

more animals

Anyone going to CKC in Hartford this year? I'll be working at the Dollar Scrapbooking booth on Friday - come by and visit me! I'll be shopping on Saturday.

When I was a child, I was obsessed with the musical "Annie," and tonight I got to take Esme to see it. It was her first play and this production was paced very s l o w l y but I think she still enjoyed it. Now that she's seen the play we're going to watch the movie together on DVD.

Being Esme's mother has been wearing me out lately! She is involved in many activities, some of which I have to coordinate and run, like Girl Scouts and some homeschooling events. Speaking of homeschooling, that takes quite a bit of effort too. We love it though, and are definitely glad we made the decision to go forward with it.

I recently discovered Hulu.com and have had fun watching Arrested Development with Ethan, and a show that seems so old now, Chicago Hope. When Chicago Hope and ER debuted the same year, I was a die-hard Hope fan. No ER for me. Now that I've watched 9 seasons of ER and I'm revisiting Hope, I am wondering what the heck my problem was. Not that I'm not enjoying Chicago Hope, ER is just so much faster paced and exciting. Plus come on, George Clooney! And Noah Wylie too!

It's not exactly "breaking the CK barrier," but I was very excited to have a little something in the In Your Words column in Creating Keepsakes this month. I wrote about my substitute teaching experience from October to January this past school year. Now I just have to make sure everyone at school sees it so I get all the good gigs!!

I can take one class for free every semester at an Ivy League college. I am super bummed that yet again this semester, I cannot find a class to take. Classes are geared toward people who live on campus which is understandable, but I am bummed that there is nothing that I could remotely apply to my life offered in the evening that isn't filled immediately. It seems like such a waste not to take advantage of this opportunity, but at this moment the only thing I could take would be Riding I. Not sure this is the perfect time in my life to start horseback riding with no prior experience. I so want to go back to school, and there are many things I would like to take including environmental science, sociology, education, religion, etc. It's sad that I can't make this work!

This layout is soooo old! I'm not even sure which summer these photos were taken. I remember it being a super fun day, and that I was so excited to scrap it right away. Then when I got home I printed the pics, got the layout about half done, and put it in a drawer. Over time I have slowly added additional elements, making it a strange mix of my old and more developed styles. It's finally done! (Except I still have to go back and look for that date!)

I can't wait to go camping!! We have only been on one trip this year but we have a couple more trips planned. Esme and I are pretty much obsessed with Mexican food so we made a new breakfast burrito recipe to eat a camp. We make it for her sans egg. We start with marinated chicken the night before, and use the leftovers. You need:

1 medium flour tortilla per person
1 egg per person
the leftover chicken
shredded cheese of your choice
rice (we like to use boil in a bag while we're camping)
taco sauce or salsa (optional)

Wrap the tortillas in foil and heat til they're warm. Heat up the chicken in the skillet, and boil the rice. Scramble the eggs, and they layer all ingredients in the tortilla, folding up the sides and wrapping the whole thing together. Serve with fruit. This is a hearty breakfast without too much cleanup.

The Project Learning Tree workshop was amazing!! I am so thankful that I got to go! If you haven't heard of this program, check it out here. I highly recommend that anyone who works with children and is interested in nature and the environment try to find a class.

One of the things I learned was how to teach children to classify trees. In the beginning, the names of the trees aren't even important. It's important that they observe what makes each tree unique and different from the others. I never realized how many important features of leaves there are! I learned to identify 2 new kinds of trees myself.

Another thing I learned about was observing changes in a natural setting. The instructor talked about finding a "sitspot" - a place you return to over and over and observe the changes from season to season, year to year, and make your own special place in the world.

My mom requested an altered monogram for her birthday - I made another version but I wasn't happy with it so I decided to give it another go.

Did this page as part of tonight's cyber crop with Lisa - it's a scraplift of a Vicki Boutin layout you can see here. I love doing layouts with blocks like this.

I am WICKED excited. I just found out about some ultra cool educator workshops through Project Wild and Project Learning Tree. Theoretically I am going to learn so I can teach Esme and perhaps a group of homeschoolers or my Girl Scouts, but I am just excited that **I** get to go learn new stuff!!

I am suffering from a bit of apathy when it comes to my MMM entry. I really want to enter but I'm having trouble finding the motivation when my scrap area is such a mess. I want totally rearrange my entire house.

We rarely have the opportunity to go to the movies, and we were so glad we went to see "The Fall" this past Sunday. We hadn't heard much about it until we read what was playing at Amherst Cinema, but we watched the trailer and decided to give it a try. This was one of the most visually beautiful movies I have ever seen. The scenery and the costumes were unbelievable! I don't know why she isn't pictured on the poster, but the true lead in this movie was a little girl around 5 years old. Ethan and I were so impressed with her acting abilities. The movie has two stories intertwined, one about the little girl and a stunt man who meet in a hospital, and the other story he tells the little girl, filmed as she imagines it. We would highly recommend this movie!