Playing Catch Up

It's been a busy couple of weeks. Summer is winding down and the kids are heading back to school in a couple of days with Ellie starting kindergarten (I can't believe she is old enough!!) . I have to admit that I am sad summer is ending. I love having the kids home, not having a schedule, and running around finding fun field trips to go on. Time flies and I worry that there may not be many summers left that Sean and Ben will want to hang with us, so I feel a lot of pressure to make each day count. We have spent the last couple of weeks fitting in a few extra adventures, school shopping, and having play dates. It's been fun! Of course with school starting that does mean my favorite time of year is just around the corner...Fall and Halloween!!!

I have been challenged keeping up with my scrapping goals these last couple of weeks so I did take a bit of time this weekend to play catch up and got a few more sketches from the sketch class done.

Here is a look...

I love looking at the pile of pages I have done this summer so I think I will keep my goal of completing 3 pages a week for the school year and see what happens. It's nice to get the memories on paper before I forget the details!!

127 Sale and Some Scrapping

There has been a lot going on at the golf course so we have not had Sean Sr. around much this summer. It's been me and the kids and while I have loved having them home and all the fun outings we have had, its been a bit exhausting and coupled with some reoccuring health issues, I've been a bit worn out. So as a treat I signed up for Kelly Purkey's Sketchbook 2 class. I read some great things about the first one and thought this would be just the push I need to get my creativity flowing and to get some layouts done. So the first week just finished and I was able to get a layout done for each of the three sketches and they went so fast and I really like the way they turned out. (I don't know why the first layout keeps flipping on me but, oh well!!)

We all headed down 127 on Saturday and I have to say I was so disappointed. Mom and I went last year and had so much fun and found so many great items. This year it was more of your traditional yard sale and not as much an antique sale. I did find a couple of things...a great vintage clock and a cute little cash register bank (I loved the color). But the best find came at a barn that hosts craft sales as well as yard sales. The owners also happen to wholesale fruit and veggies to local farm stands and they had a shipment of bananas that had gotten a bit warm during shipping so they could not be sold. They were giving them away and while the kids each got one as a snack, they told Sean he could take a case if he wanted. When he mentioned this to me I told to go grab a case. So I have been slicing and freezing 40 pounds of bananas for the last two days. But it will be so worth it with all the banana muffins and smoothies we will use them for!!

I have a few other stories to get down from last week but Ellie wants to play Candy Land so they will have to wait!!

A Little About Me

One of the other ideas I had for this blog is to document some things about myself. The only people who will probably read this blog besides myself will be my mom and maybe my husband but hopefully one day my kids might read this and learn a little about thier mom. Since I'm horrible about doing scrap pages about myself this will be my version of an all about me page.

So I'm sitting here on a Wednesday night getting ready to watch a scrapping webshow and watching one of my favorite tv shows, Ghost Hunters. I got to thinking about the type of television I like to watch. I have a hard time getting into traditional serial tv. My schedule is so based on my kids that its hard for me to keep up with a weekly show and since we don't have a DVR (we aren't very techy) I just gave up a long time ago. So my guilty tv pleasures are anything by Bravo. I love Flipping Out, all the Top Chef shows, and even thier more obscure shows like Top Design and the hairstyling competition (I can't think of the name off the top of my head). But my absolute to die for shows are Pawn Stars, American Pickers (I really think that would be my dream job), Dirty Jobs and Ghost Hunters.

So my taste in tv is pretty strange but thats me and at least a couple of the shows are slightly educational!!

The Zoo, Aquarium and Some Scrapping

The theme of this past week was animals. We made a trip to the zoo and to the aqaurium. The highlight of the zoo was the cheetah encounter. They have updated it and this was the first time we saw it. I think the kids would agree that it was about the coolest thing we saw that day. The cheetahs run so fast that you really would miss them if you blinked. The older female, Sarah, was clocked as the fastest cheetah run in captivity. That of course impressed Sean Nick!!

Its been a bit of a crazy summer and we have not had a lot of family time. Sean Sr. was off on Sunday so we decided to take advantage of the aquarium's family fun hours and head on down. The kids were so much more into what was in the tanks rather than just looking and moving on. They really stopped and studied and used the guides to identify what they were seeing. I loved the seahorses, jellies and of course the shark tubes. They were so active and the kids just kept pointing at everything. Ellie was not thrilled with the see through floors we had to walk over and that did cause a bit of drama. And Jack walked almost the entire time. He seemed very taken with all the activity behind the glass!!

And I was very excited to get some scrapping time Sunday morning!! I really liked the idea of the Summer Scrapping series with Heidi Swapp and challenged myself to get three layouts done a week and so far I have done pretty well. I'm just excited to have the summer somewhat documented at the end. With all the babies in the house its been a long time since I have felt like I really got thru a season telling the stories I want to tell!! So I think I will track my progress here for the rest of the summer.


So Sunday I got a couple of layouts done and when I started feeling not so creative I tackled some summer tags. I bought the scale in the photo at a flea market earlier this spring with the idea of doing something like these tags for each season.