Monochrome Blonde!

My latest creation is now available for free download at http://www.oscraps.com .
Is it odd that the first layout I do with my Monochrome Blonde kit is of a brunette? ;P This my dear friend, Raina and her son, Ian on their recent visit here from Florida. Ian is growing so fast! We haven't seen him since our trip to Disney last October. What a brilliant boy he is turning into!!!

Oh Yeah.... forgot to mention oScraps is back up!

Sorry about that... its been up for hours now LOL.

UGH!!!! Popularity has a price....

The oScraps server is down. /sigh I'm not sure what we are going to have to do. We've already ordered a dedicated line for the server but apparently thats not going to cut it. I think we're going to have to investigate some other options.

Only problem with that is I'm not sure I can afford to keep the site up if I have to keep increasing my bandwidth every week. I suppose I could always start charging for some of the kits. I'd really like to keep the site free, but at this point, I don't know if I'll be able to.

Ah well, I'm going to go do some searching and see what my options are... and hope that Anthony calls at lunch so I can find out how to get the server back up. He's in a class this week so I can't just call him for tech support like I normally would LOL.

See you later, hopefully with better news!

Alyx's Award Winning Drawing!

We finally got to see the picture that Alyx had drawn for the Reflections Program! Nothing like him drawing a picture in September 2005, getting a letter in January 2006 about the award program, getting the award February 13, 2006 and getting the picture March 30, 2006! When he showed me, he said, "Oh yeah, I do remember drawing this now! The paper wasn't big enough for me to fit both dinosaurs on it, so I just had to put the head and neck of the other T-Rex. See, these T-Rex's were fighting... cuz that's what T-Rex's do ya know... but then the big meteor came and hit and the earth and the volcanoes started erupting and these dinos didn't notice because they were fighting. So, when the ash and dirt covered them they died both together and later a paleontologist can find their bones both together."


Woah! I was so excited to get the picture that I hurried up and digi-scrapped it. Now that I write this, I realize I need to re-work to include the above journaling LOL! Well, thankfully that's the beauty of digi-scrapping --its easy to change things!

Kids spell love M-O-M!

This layout is for my birthday pic with my munchkin. I used my new oscraps 'Fleur' kit. Fonts used were Country Blueprint and Dali downloaded from dafont.

The journaling reads

Kids spell love M-O-M

This quote originally read “Kids spell love T-I-M-E.” by John Crudele. But, in our world, Alyx spells love M-O-M! He tells everyone else, including his dad and grandparents, “I like you”. He saves all his I love you’s for me.

My new scrapbook site is finally up!

Ok, so it took longer than "about a week", but my new digital scrapbook designs site is finally up! I decided to quit trying to reinvent the wheel and just get it up and rolling before I rendered myself completely bald from frustration. Its not how I want it to ultimately be, but I'm happy with its current incarnation. So, without further blah, blah, blah'ing on my part, here's the link -

http://www.oscraps.com

Exciting things on the horizon.

I haven't updated in awhile because I've been busy, busy, busy working on a new project. Hopefully I'll have something to show off in about a week!

Hornets Game

Alyx and I got to go to our first NBA game tonight - the displaced New Orleans Hornets vs. Portland Trail Blazers. I have no idea who won as we left at halftime. We had a great time, but the noise and how late it was getting made it time to go... Here's the pics!

LOL! Yes, I am a red head now...

Boy, you are an observant lot! Yes, I colored my hair on my birthday. It was starting to get pretty dried out from the highlighting, so I put a temp color on it so I could go longer without bleaching it again.


It was supposed to be "light golden brown" but ended up red. Ah, well, so many of you noticed it in Alyx's award pics and seemed to like it so well, I may keep it. What do you think? A lot of you first met me as a redhead, maybe it just brings back fond memories LOL...

{these pics were taken on my birthday last week}

Alyx's Reflections Award Ceremony

We went to Alyx's PTA Reflections Award Ceremony last night. He won 3rd place in the Kindergarten - 2nd grade division for his school in Visual Arts. That's 4 classes of Kindergarten and 4 classes of 1st and 2nd graders!!!

We have no idea (well, we know it was a dinosaur, of course) what he drew and have not gotten to see the picture. I hope we get it back! When we do, I'll post it here as well!

He was such a big boy, walking to and across the stage all by himself!!! We are just so proud of him and he is so very proud of his trophy!!!

Here's the Pictures.

Its My Birthday!

Wow! I'm 37 years old today. Scary.

I've got a ton of stuff on the ol' to do list today. One of those things is updating this page since I haven't done it in 2 weeks or so, so here are the pics from the last few weeks. {Click the titles to go to the albums.}


Incredible Pizza
We went to Incredible Pizza for Alyx's 6th birthday. I picked Alyx and Ethan up from school and my mom picked up Lauren and Andrew and met us there. That was the absolute best time to go there because there were maybe 20 other people there and there was no waiting anywhere! We had the best time!!!

Alyx's Birthday Party
We had Alyx's birthday party at Burger King. The kids had such a great time playing! When we were done there, we all came back over to our house to bust the pinata. That was a riot!!!

Jessie got a new camera
Mark & Pam showed up at Thai food with a surprise! An 8 month old baby... None of us realized how long it had been since we had seen them since only Anthony knew they were even expecting LOL! When we got back to our house, we were going to have margerita's but we were out of sweet and sour. I got a couple of recipes off the net and tried concocting my own but that didn't work out so well. I ended up making Val and Jessie some Bailey's Shakes and Jessie introduced me to a new drink - Sunny D and Amaretto! YUM!

Lilla {the new puppy and a bunch of humans}
Doug and Neely got a new puppy. Her name is Lilla and she's adorable! Since Jessie brought her camera again, we had a bunch of pics!

Jessie poses
We have really been getting on to Jessie lately for refusing to pose for pictures. I have threatened her with posting all the bad angle/full mouth/etc. pics if she doesn't start posing. Laura and I decided to teach her how to pose for the camera and she finally got it! It was quite an amusing process though...

Phew... I think that's it for the new pics. Anthony and I are going out to dinner tonight at a very swanky restaurant {Thanks Dawn & Jason for the gift cert!} and we have to dress up a bit. If we get a picture, I'll post that tomorrow!

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