I'm the coolest mom ever...

Or so Alyx tells me :D

Here are the birthday party invites I designed for his birthday party.
As always, you can click on the images for a larger version.

Cover:














Inside:

friends on the side...

In case you hadn't noticed. I've started putting links in the sidebar to some friend's sites. If you have a site you want me to link to, just let me know! Doesn't mean I'll link to it but.... ;P Check them out if you have a chance.


Raina's 8 hours sleep blog: Raina is worth travellng half way around the world to visit (I'll dig up the link to our european vactaion to visit john and raina pages one of these days

Brandon's myspace: Brandon is my neighbor and the guy who turned me on to Jack Johnson. He's also a mac daddy so check out his friends list on myspace lol.

Liz's E-Squared Blog: Liz is an online scrapbooking friend of mine. Shee is recenly married and has some great wedding stuff on her site as well as scrapping stuff.

Scrapbooking

In a past life I did marketing for an industrial holdings company. I did all the artwork, design, and maintenance for 5 company websites and sales materials. When I became a stay at home mom, I didn't know how or where to find an outlet for my creative side. I tried my hand at painting - thought I could make money doing fantasy art but never ended up finishing the paintings. For one thing, in researching it, I found that pictures of women sold the best. I discovered that while I could paint them and do it well, I didn't have a 'passion' for it (how I had passion about industrial machinery and concrete stuff I have no idea LOL).

So, I floundered around until my friend Dawn invited me to a scrapbooking party. Wow! There was something I was passionate about - pictures (my first job was a fotomat booth lol) and my family and pictures of my family! So, many years and, I'm sure, many thousands of dollars later, I've decided to try my hand at digital scrapping and designing my own materials. I've been talking with a couple of people about joining forces and creating an online business of digital scrapping stuff. I'm really excited about that! One of the women I have been talking to is an amazingly talented scrapper named, Liz. I admire her work so much and she is such a beautiful person - both personality and looks. You can see some of her work and read her blog here: E-Squared

Anywho, all that to explain the above picture :) I've also found scrapbooking to be healing as well. There's something about the act of creating a layout - the careful consideration of pictures, the journaling or telling the story, the transformation of memory into reality, I guess... The above layout was very therapeutic for me. I originally did it just to test out my new paper designs and it doesn't have the detail I normally put in my paper layouts (I haven't quite mastered that digitally yet). but, I do like the simplicity of it.

Here's a link to my gallery at scrapbook.com if you are interested.

Mom's Birthday

Last Monday was mom's birthday. Libby, Lauren and mom met us at Bahama Breeze restaurant for dinner. We didn't think Shawn and Andrew were going to be able to make it as they had the first volleyball game where they were playing together on a competitive team for the first time. Shawn says his lifelong dream was coming true - to play competitively with his son. Anywho... they did end up coming by and eating on their way. After dinner, Anthony & I came home and everyone else went to the volleyball game.


We gave mom the group pics we had taken back in december as her gift. There was a 5 x7 of all of us together and a tri-photo frame with a shot of Libby's family, my family, and the three 'grands' in seperate mats. She loved them. :) Alyx thought it was wierd we were just giving her pictures for her birthday. He thought that was boring but I explained that old people like grandma and mommy like getting pictures as gifts. :-/

Here are

Mom's Birthday pics

Saying goodbye

We said goodbye to Kitty last Thursday afternoon. She lived a long, long life - 13 or 14 years, we can't remember exactly - and she was the best dog ever. She was friendly and loving and so, so funny.

Kitty was my dog before I met Anthony, but she quickly became his too after we got together. For several years, she and Bookmark were our kids and we spoiled them like crazy. Then we had Alyx and everyone's life changed.

Kitty was just incredible with Alyx. She was so patient and loving to him - even when he sat on her and played horse, piled pillows on her, and generally made a nuisance of himself. She watched out for him and followed him wherever he went.

This pic was taken about an hour before she passed. I admit, I edited the heck out of the picture. I wanted a much softer, dreamy look to it rather than the harsh reality of my splotchy, red, tear streaked face.

Christmas is finally over...

We finally finished Christmas. Since this was our year for Thanksgiving in Texas and Christmas at home, Anthony's parents brought all the gifts from the family down there, up here. Had a great time opening gifts and watching Alyx drive his new car! Then, we went to dinner at one of Alyx and Grandpa Eddie's favorite places - Pancho's All you can eat Mexican Buffet. Yum.

Final 2005 Christmas pics

Links added to the sidebar --------->

I added some Warcraft links on the sidebar. The first batch is primarily tradeskill info. I'm putting them there so I can find them easily on the mac. I hate the way the mac handles bookmarks and its a PITA when I want to go somewhere quickly on the mac while playing on my regular puter. So, if you play warcraft, hey you might find something useful over there. If you don't, well, then you should ;p

I'll probably be adding other links as time and motivation allow. Hopefully, I'll get some of my scrapbooking stuff put over there so that people don't have to keep asking me what it is LOL. And, who knows, maybe some of my scrapper friends will find something new as well.

Happy New Year!

New years eve was verra, verra fun this year. This was the first year since Alyx was born that Anthony and I got to go out! He stayed the night at his Grandma Lena's house and we went to a party at Laura's house. I don't have the pics from that night yet, so I'll have to post those later - when certain people share them with me *hint, hint*.

The next morning, I woke up early (insane after getting home so late!) and started taking down all the Christmas decorations. It was such a gorgeous morning that I didn't want to come inside so I cleaned the garage and rearranged the attic! I put all the leftover wood from my building projects out under the eaves in the attic and moved almost everything out along the edges. Its so wonderful to have it all neat and organized... all the Halloween stuff in one section, Christmas in another with indoor all together and outdoor all together, all the travel gear together, you get the idea. I should probably go take a picture now because its not likely to stay that organized and empty ;-p

Christmas Day 2005

What a great day we had this year. I woke up too freaking early, but I was worrying about finishing my sis' gift and picking up the house, etc. So, I guess it was inevitable. Alyx and Anthony didn't wake up for hours. You would think, with all that 'free' time, I would have gotten ready before the official gift/photo extravaganza began. Every year I say I'm going to get up early and get ready next year so there won't be any more awful morning-look pics of me. And, every year there are the usual awful pics. Ah well.

Alyx got up around 5:45 am and came looking for me to let me know that Santa had "really brought me some stuff". I told him yep, but its still early, go back to sleep. And, for once he did!!! He ended up sleeping until around 10 am and immediately headed for the loot!

After he had made his second round through all the new toys/books it was time to see if Ethan was up. He was, so they had their gift exchange with much hoopla and yelling. What a great time they had playing!

Mom came down for lunch around 1pm. I had put a pot roast in the crock pot at midnight Christmas Eve and it was divine by lunch time! Getting Alyx to stop playing long enough to eat was a joke, so he basically didn't.

After lunch, I worked on my sister's scrapbook. Anthony played Warcraft and slept. Mom knitted and slept and watched something about UFOs on the Discovery Channel. Alyx played and played and woke up his dad and played and woke up his grandma and played...

My sister and her family arrived for dinner (roast beef sandwiches) and, yet again, more gifts. Lauren got a dance mat (where you step on the light) and said, "I don't dance." So, Andrew and I gave it a whirl - holy crap that takes energy, coordination, and stamina. Yeah, I don't got that LOL! Lauren and Alyx played like crazy people and Andrew played his new guitar for us. We had such a wonderful time, they stayed for hours!

After they left, mom and I went to check out the winners in the town Christmas light contest. The winners are based on shear volume of lights... not aesthetic appeal, layout, scheme, etc. Its insane the amount of lights/decorations at these houses. These people must have atleast 10 storage units to store all that crap. Insane.

Christmas Day 2005 pics