Scrapbook layouts

Here are a few layouts that I have done the past few months.

These are some layout I did of my nephews. Up until a few years ago I only had nieces and then the last 3 babies on one side of the family have been boys and the last four on the other side have been boys also. BOYS ARE COOL. It gives me something new to scrapbook.

This was of our day trip to the cool ghost town in Idaho called Silver City. Not really what my kids expected. Emma was thinking a bit more along the lines of Scooby Doo and his ghosts. Heidi was just plain car sick from the windy dirt road drive there.

Our summer vacation was to the Oregon Coast and Portland area. Here are two layouts one for Emma and one for Heidi of our trip. We had a great vacation and really enjoyed spending time at the ocean.

Christmas Gifts

Here are the Christmas gifts I made with my cricut for my daycare kids for their Christmas gifts. I didn't have a lot of money this year for gifts so these were great. I didn't need to buy anything for them I just used the scraps I had. They weren't a surprise because they have taken so much time to make and the kids have enjoyed picking out which character they wanted and then watching me make it.

2011 Bring it on!

Well we made it one week into the new year before taking someone to the Dr. So much for not aquiring medical bills this year. I took Emma in Thursday night after I could not get her fever down. She has strep again. We may be looking at removing those nasty tonsils. She keeps getting strep over and over. She is on meds and today she feels much like her old self.

For Christmas Greg surprised me with a Barnes and Noble NookColor. I love it. Right now I am reading The Lost Hero by Rick Riordan. It is a new series but it follows Percy Jackson and his pal in a new adventure dealing with the Greek Gods. So far it is great. I love the nook because I can adjust the print size so I can read in large print. It is easier on the eyes.

I don't think I mentioned on here that I am back in school. I am going to University of Phoenix through their on line program. I am going to get a degree in Business and Finance. So far I am loving the Home Loans, Mortgage Finances and Escrow stuff the best. I also like the tax stuff but it gets frustrating because they word everything so weird. I love school and it is like a little break from my stressful world to be alone and improve myself. I love the nook because I can down load my textbooks onto it and read them anywhere.

Anyway I figured out that this year's resolution is just to make it through and do it with a smile. I have such a large amount of stress in my life right now and no way to remove it so I am hoping to just deal with it. I still struggle with the whole "let go and let God" concept. I am working on it.

Why I haven't been posting on here

For Christmas the year I was 12 I recieved a journal. It was a great one filled with poems and thoughts and topics to write about in it. I dilegently kept a journal from that day forward. I wrote in a journal my entire teenage years, in to my young adult life and even after I was married. As I had kids the entries became less often. Then blogging came along and I used my blog as a sort of journal.

So why haven't I been writing on here? Because it can all get used against you...that is why.

We are in a lawsuit over Heidi's accident. The attorneys for the church now have acess to everything I have posted and do post on here. They have my personal calendars for the past 3 year and all the enteries from my old blog at the time of the accident. Nothing at all is private from them, and it angers me. The same church I was raised in, the same church I was told to keep a journal in is the same church that has taken it all away from me and made it exhibits in a lawsuit.

I have also encouraged my children to keep journals and to write in them. It angers me and frustrated the hell out of me that the attorneys have taken my blog, and my writing about Heidi's accident. More maddening and heartbreaking is that they took her journal also. If a thirteen year old's journal can not be a safe place for her private thoughts, a place to write her frustrations and her dreams, then no where is.

Friday I sat in a room and watched the church attorneys grill my child about things she wrote in her journal three years ago. They picked it apart piece by piece and not just about the time of the accident, they went through entries clear up to this year. The poor gal has no privacy left at all. You can not begin to understand the anger I feel right now. I could do nothing there, I could say nothing there. I had to sit quietly by and listen to them question my child for hours. It is highly frustrating.

My favorite author Richard Paul Evans has a new book coming out this week. He posted this quote from the new book Promise Me on his face book.

"Hate, resentment and anger, are parasites that feed off the heart, until there is nothing left for love to live on" Richard Paul Evans.

He really nailed this on the head. I have so much anger and bitterness eating away inside of me. I can't wait to read the book when it comes out Tuesday. Maybe in the book he will tell me how to get rid of this cancer of anger, that is eating away at me. Then I can work on the next big issue in my life, which is figuring out what is true. How can all the things I was raised to believe be so jumbled and messed up? What if any of them are true?

This is why I haven't written on here in months.

Last Night's Dream

In my dream:

I had just moved out of my crappy apartment and everything I owed was in a backpack on my back, and I had my son in a baby carrier on my front. I rode my bike this way and went to work, where I got fired because I was late and I couldn't bring my baby to work with me. I left the horrible job feeling overwhelmed and hopeless.

Then I was at a band competition. Back in high school, back on the bleachers, and back in maroon and gold with my high school friends. We were sitting on the bleachers listening to a famous preacher/motivational speaker. He told us to link arms with the person on our right and to link arms with the person on our left. "Lean on them, depend on them" he said," because some hard times are coming" "You will need each other, and you will need their strength to get you through."

One person, was not linked together, she was lying flat on her back on the football field. We thought she was hurt or something so we ran to her and the preacher asked her if she was okay.


"You tell us to link arms, to rely on each other," she said calmly, "but that is not what my grand dad would say." "He would say to look to God and ask God for his help to get us through tough times." She confronted the preacher, "you say you are a man of God and yet you don't acknowledge him or lean on him for understanding."


The preacher asked her, "and you know him? You know that he is real. How can you know this? How do you know that God exist and he will help you?"



She laid back down on the field and looked up stating, "I looked up at the Heavens and I asked him if he was real....and he answered me, " she said.


So then we all laid down on the football field and looked up at Heaven asking God if he was there. As we looked up we saw the most beautiful sunset. She said "look at that and tell me that God does not exist"


I woke up to my alarm at this point. But her words hung in the air around me. "God does exist and he is here to help us through the hard times"



I don't have a son, I haven't been fired or removed from my home. I have a wonderful family and good friends, but I think that as much as I rely on them, I need to acknowledge and rely on God more.



I have prayed long and hard about the choices I have made the past few years. Choices that have affected my children, my relationship with family members and friends around me. Choices that have caused others to dislike me and think badly about me. I stand by my choices and I won't back down from them. I believe in God and I believe that he is still here with me, I have not chosen against him or his teachings. I think the dream is a way of saying, yes God is still with me. Friends come and go, families have falling outs, but God, he is always there.

Emma Layouts

Just thought I would share a few more layouts that I finished this week. The first one is Emma's 7th birthday. I found the photos in with some other stuff, so I made the layout saturday night with my friends. I added a pocket page to hold her birthday cards, and I got to play around with my cricut machine.

The other layout is of swimming lessons a year ago. I found the paper and I loved it so I thought it would work great for these photos. Swimming lessons were really hard for Emma, first off she is tall for her age, so the teachers always expected her to act older than she is. She also has ADHD and the hyperactivity issue is something that causes problems in swimming class. The first time we tried lessons she was asked to leave the class. So I gave up for a year and then my friend told me of this wonderful place where she took her boys. Cathy's Lil'Fish is an amazing place to learn to swim. It was so relaxed and the teachers are so easy going that Emma just fell in love with them. She learned how to swim and bob and float almost instantly. They were so patient with her, when she threw a fit she was asked to sit out until she could join them again. This worked for her. Emma is not one to sit on the side and watch for long so she learned really fast. We have gone there two summers in a row and we are going back this summer also. Emma's favorite game.. Sharky Sharky What Time Is It? Check out Cathy's School for Lil' Fish on her site, summer is just around the corner and this is a great place for lessons.

Layouts with amazing photos

Last fall we had family photos taken by Heather Hillman. She is an amazing photographer and a great friend. She has a wonderful way of capturing my kids personalities and we were very lucky to get photos with her. I made a few layouts with those photos here are a few of them.


To bad the photos of the layouts are not the best. They don't do the pictures justice. They are so much better in real life.

My two favorite shots of Emma are the big one where she was hanging down from a tree branch and the little one above it where she was full on pouting. They totally capture the true Emma. Heather is great with working with children and getting them to pose naturally for the camera.

More Layouts

I was able to get a way for the weekend and scrapbook with my friends. Here are a few of the

layouts I did.

This is of a concert in the park that Heidi went to with her friends. She was able to get photos with the band members. She loves to listen to Reel Big Fish.

This is another layout of my vacation with Greg. I wanted it to be clean and simple like the photos and I wanted it to refect the time we spent together. I used paint chips for the color accents along the edges and some embellishments that have been in my stash forever.

This was a fun day at the zoo with friends last summer. I used stickers on this layout that I bought about 5 years ago. I bought them because I thought they were cute, and I finally had a chance to use them. using items from my stash makes me feel like I am acomplishing something very worthwhile.

More scrapbook pages

I figure it has been a month since the office scraproom was cleaned and organized, I better post a layout or two that I have done this month so you can see that it was well worth it.

The first layout is of our trip to California last Nov. This is the first layout I used my cricut on and cut out the title. I love seeing Greg so excited about something. It was like he was a little boy, he was thrilled to get to take a tour of the missile base.

The next layout was just finished a few weeks ago, but the photos are from last Easter. We are lucky to have any photos of Easter at all, with my surgery on my knee the week before. Thank you to who ever invented the DonJoy Iceman, what a life saver. Emma felt a little cheated out of a great Easter, but she got over it. Easter Bunny brought her a new bike. This was at the egg hunt over at our local Albertsons. Thankfully they still do it, even When "they paved paradise and put in a parking lot" Both my girls have loved it. Sadly Emma only has a few more years of Egg hunting and then she will be to old.

More layouts to come in the next few days and I get them uploaded from my camera.

My new office/scraproom

Here is the finished office, I still want to add a few homey touches but I love it and wanted to post photos.

Here is the floor and walls before we put the stuff back. The walls are Butterscotch sauce color in Kilz brand paint. That makes for easy scrubbing later on. I love the color most when the morning sun is shining in on it. The floor is by Konecto and is called rosewood. This is the window seat that I don't use to sit on. I still want to do some curtains. I painted the window seat the same color (Chocolate Indulgence) as the living room wall, to try the rooms together. The drawers hold all the glues, Stickles, and stuff I don't want kids into and the office supplies. The Iris cart drawers hold stickers, rub-ons and embellishments.
This is the office side of the room. The roll top desk is my new scrapbook area. The key board drawer makes for a perfect place to put layouts that I am working on in. The blue hippo is named Winston Belvadear and he is there to make me smile.

This is the scrapbook side of the room and it is all organized and ready for some serious scrapping. The ink pad case was made by my dad a few years ago and holds all my Stampin' Up pads. Everything else is all organized and labeled for easy access. With the new floors I just roll across the room in my chair, get what I need and roll back.

I love it. I'll have to post the dinning area later this week. That is where we moved all the games and preschool stuff to and it is working out great.