A Frozen Halloween

Like thousands of other little girls (though not so many as last year, I imagine!) our kids wanted to dress as their favorite Scandinavian sisters for Halloween: Anna and Elsa, naturally.

Kate and Claire both got Elsa dress-up dresses and shoes for Christmas last year, so for a while, both were planning to be Elsa for Halloween, which I was planning to roll with, but I'm glad Claire decided she wanted to be Anna instead. So, with Mommy, Daddy, and a new sibling arriving mere weeks before Halloween, we planned our Frozen family ensemble.

 

Daddy was Kristoff, Mommy was Sven, and Jonah was Olaf. Our costumes were pretty simple: Matt with black pants, shirt, toboggan, and fleece vest from his own closet, plus a scarf from mine around his waist. I just wore brown and added $5 reindeer antlers I bought on Amazon. For Jonah, I bought a secondhand white fleece sleeper on ebay and sewed black felt on for buttons, and bought the crocheted Olaf hat on Etsy. Jonah actually won first prize in the costume contest at our neighborhood Halloween party. (It's hard to compete with an 8-day-old newborn, though!)



 

My personal favorite was Claire's costume, though. I made her cape and cap out of fuchsia fleece and it just made the ensemble. I couldn't get enough of her little braids sticking out from under her bonnet!

Halloween night itself was rainy and a bit chilly after dark, but between the neighborhood party, church trunk-or-treat, and braving the rain for at least a few streets on the 31st, our candy bowl is full and our Frozen fever sated for the time being!

Project Life: June and July

I'm in a quandry: I need (and want!) to share all about Claire's birthday party from going-on two weeks ago, especially since a dear friend took tons of photos of the party FOR me, which was such a gift. But, I only have five minutes, and since said friend also mentioned how much she loves my scrapbooking posts, I won't feel too bad about sharing some scrapbook pages instead. (Especially since I only catch every other monthly Project Life linkup with The Mom Creative, and she missed last month herself, I better take advantage of the linky motivation :0)

Soooo . . . here's my June and July!

The week of Memorial Day, we had our little vacation-staycation, including some fun at-home things like swimming, the zoo, and a baseball game, plus three days at Wilderness at the Smokies.

In June, I finally got to use some fun boyish papers I'd had in my stash for a while for a traditional 12 x 12 page. Our brother- and sister-in-law came to visit, and we got some sweet pics with our nephews and of the girls with their cousins. They are more private about social media stuff than we are, so I'll just share a little snip of the page. It was too cute.

And Matt's parents took the kids to a Frozen-themed event, which made for a fun "Let It Go" page, another 12 x 12. Sometimes, if I don't have the embellishments or fancy paper the page seems to need, I'll just paint the paper. They're not the best swirls ever, but they fit the bill to round out the page.

 Some more summer fun made for a mashup page with just a pic or two for each event.

 I love embellishing my month divider cards with extra papers and photos. I used packing tape to "laminate" this whole card-photo combo to keep it all together.

 Gotta get those extra words and pics in wherever you can!

I really love the Becky Higgins Design F pages, with just one 4 x 6 and a bunch of 3 x 4 slots. You can make such a montage of photos from one event, and all these red, white, and blue pics from our Fourth of July were perfect.

Also in July were a few things about Kate making the transition from preschool to kindergarten, but maybe I'll share all that in a school-themed post soon. Have a great day!

Day in the Life

Link-ups around the blogosphere give me the motivation I need to get a post up! Today it's a "Day in the Life," a special edition of A Blonde Ambition's weekly "Confessional Friday" link-up, to which I have never contributed!

I'm glad for the motivation not just to blog but to document a typical day in the life of our family right now. I haven't done one for the blog or scrapbook in a couple years, so it's about time!

We've got a pretty laid-back morning schedule these days, given that my husband and I both have flexible jobs (I work from home and he's a pastor) and the kids aren't in "real" school yet. Even if they were, it's summer, so there. Unless somebody has an early meeting or doctor appointment, we wake when the kids start invading our bed, generally around 7 am, give or take a half hour.  (That will all be over in a few weeks! Kindergarten will mean we're out the door by 7:30. Yikes!)

Cereal and yogurt for breakfast, and since the girls got dressed quickly and early, they got to watch some Netflix (some Tinkerbell movie, or as Claire calls her, "Teen-ter-bell")

Our foster baby, (blog nicknamed) BGC, is a late sleeper, so we wake and dress her just before it's time to go. I haven't talked much about her lately, so to update: she's been with us almost eleven months now—more than half of her life (21 months today). Parents are still working their plan, it's just taking longer than expected. She does four therapies a week (hoping she'll be able to pull up and stand soon!) and is starting the process to get cochlear implants.

Once Matt and the kids are out the door for church and day care, I refresh my coffee and maybe try to tidy up a little bit. I laughed at myself this morning, pouring coffee with one hand while I had a laundry basket of random things-that-don't-belong-downstairs under my other arm. Unfortunately, I didn't have a third hand to capture that photo, but here's the scene on my kitchen counter. (Sink full of dirty dishes barely visible behind the laundry basket.)

Then it's upstairs to my office, where I'll settle in for the next 7-8 hours (if BGC doesn't have any therapies or other appointments I need to take her to—Matt and I divide and conquer the weekly appointments—none for me today!)

A plumber came to install a new toilet in the girls' bathroom. Such a nice perk of working from home—just let the guy in and go back to work in the next room!

Lunch: toss leftover couscous, pork, and cabbage into a frying pan with some teriyaki sauce. It was edible. I would have rather had a panini and soup from Panera, but alas.

I had a very productive day editing a manuscript that I need to get back to the author next week—a forthcoming book called Permission Granted: Take the Bible into Your Own Hands, by Jennifer Grace Bird. (Not available for preorder yet, but you can check it out on the author's site here!)

Dinner: another night of random let's-use-up-what-we-have-before-shopping-again. So, the rest of that cabbage became cole slaw, alongside some barbecue chicken and mac & cheese. Nothing fancy, but we did all fight over who got thirds of the mac & cheese. Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

Everybody got home when dinner was almost ready. Claire was in borrowed day care clothes, a sure sign of a potty accident. Oh well. She's making good progress. She then spilled a bowl of dry cereal Kate had abandoned on the counter at breakfast, so I made her (try to) sweep it up. Note Anna and Elsa strewn on the floor in the background.

After dinner, Matt headed back to church for a meeting, and the big girls and I got to work painting pots! Kate and I were preparing gifts for her teachers, since next week will be her last week at day care/preschool. (Two weeks off, then kindergarten starts!) I've got begonias to plant in each pot and we'll stick a card in there saying "Thank you for helping me bloom!"

To keep Claire occupied, I found a bigger pot in the garage and let her paint that "for Mommy" so she wouldn't try to mess with Kate's painting for her teachers. (See the red ribbon at Claire's neck? That's from the red riding hood cape she's wearing underneath her smock. She had a tutu on as well.)

 After putting on jammies and getting BGC to bed, the big girls and I watched "Prince of Egypt" (in a tutu and witch's hat, of course!)

 I painted my fingernails and toenails while we watched, which meant Claire wanted to, too.

When she wanted me to paint other body parts, including her lips, I suggested she find her sparkly princess lip glosses. So she did, and after Daddy came home, she painted his nails with Belle lip gloss. ("It not Teen-ter-bell!" she said, and I had to clarify, "No, it's Beauty and the Beast Belle!")

Superdaddy also put together Kate's new highback booster seat, which arrived today. I was going to wait until the first week of kindergarten, but we're doing respite for another foster family next week and this way, we won't have to move any car seats from the SUV into the minivan to accommodate our new, short-term guest!

After "Prince of Egypt," we put the girls to bed in their own rooms. No surprise, though, they ended up on the floor together in Kate's room, side by side along with several stuffed animals also covered with blankets. And Claire is still wearing the tutu.

That's a day in our life. How about yours?

Scrapbooking before Kids #TBT

I love to look through my scrapbooks—usually, the more recent ones of our family adventures in the last couple years, seeing how much the kids have grown and changed, etc. But recently I picked an older book off the shelf, and I just marveled at all the fun pages I made back before I had kids!

It's not just that most of our ordinary life and fun events involve the kids now (so of course they feature in most scrapbook pages) but I was also forced to get more creative to even find things to scrapbook. See, it's not just about the events getting documented, but the joy of the craft. When I got/get the urge to scrapbook, I'll find things to scrap about. And, of course, I had more free time to spend hours on a page, cutting out tiny embellishments, stamping out the lettering, etc.

2003: I did a whole two-page spread on the church I went to my last two years of college. (This was my stint in the Episcopal church, discovered through the guy I dated my junior year. I kept going and got even more involved after we broke up—and still went out to lunch with his mom sometimes!)

2007: I used a couple pics of Matt and I enjoying cocktails before a friend's wedding to make a page devoted to a "Friends" quote! (Chandler's boss says "There's no I in team," and Chandler quips, "but there are two in martini, so meet me at the bar!)

and like an elderly shut-in with only the weather to talk about, I did a page about the crazy heat that summer! (I tried to fry an egg on the blacktop. It didn't work.)

2008:  The author of the first book I edited was profiled in the paper (with a sidebar about the book) so i scrapped that, of course. The page protector is cut such that you can actually fold out and read the whole article. Opposite that, I did a page devoted to the beloved rabbit I had my senior year of college.

Actually, I did fancy pages about a lot of the special people and creatures in my life. Here's one all about Charlotte, our "first child," so to speak. She was a gift from Matt for Christmas 2004, so she's almost ten years old now. These pics were from around 2006-7, probably, and they were the most recent I could find when I had to make her "Lost Cat" posters in fall 2011. Sad!

 

I did a lovey-dovey page about Matt in 2007 too. Like the cat, Mommy and Daddy don't get a lot of photo love after kids, either. 

 

My dad got some scrapbook love in 2007 when I did a spread about his stint as Kentucky State Parks Commissioner. 

 Sometimes, scrapping was a way to preserve and highlight old photos I had sitting around. These on a page I titled "Pretty Mommy" were of my mom from 1970-71. Love it.

And I honored my grandmother, whose name was passed on from her mother (in center photo) and great-grandmother and is part of Kate's name as well.

I did pages all about our homes in our first years of marriage: the duplex where we first lived, complete with paint samples to show the color scheme of each room!

 

 And the parsonage we lived in from 2007-2011, including not only a sketch of the floor plan, but a flip book of the floor plans of the duplex and Matt's and my apartments in Nashville during our single days.

Finally, the scrapbook page that changed it all. . . yes, I surprised Matt with the news of our first pregnancy via a scrapbook page. The photos and journaling of Matt's reaction were added later, of course, but I actually did have the sticks there on the page when I opened the book and said, "Check out the scrapbook page I did while you were gone!"

Our lives—and my scrapbooks—would never be the same.

This post is linked up with The Mom Creative's "Throwback Thursday Stories" #TBTstories.

Starting School #TBTstories

Linking up with Throwback Thursday Stories on The Mom Creative.
This week: 1987. I was six.

Kate will start kindergarten two months from tomorrow. That's right—early August. (Last year, I think public schools here started July 31, so at least this is a little closer to "fall.") In any case, I'm super excited about her starting "real school." Field trips, school projects, getting to know her teacher, all that fun stuff. I feel like the dorkiest mom out there to be so excited about this, but maybe I'm not alone. Matt's the one who's feeling misty-eyed about this milestone.

The pictures above were from my first day of first grade. I did preschool and kindergarten at a church preschool, so first grade was the start of my elementary school experience, as kindergarten will be for Kate. I don't know if Kate will pose so adorably on the step of the school bus (or even if we'll have her ride the bus in the mornings) but you can bet I'll be taking pics in front of our house with Kate and her little backpack. She'll be wearing a uniform (public schools here do "standard attire") but otherwise, I don't think the scene will look too much different. Lots of things change, but the excitement and sentimentality over the first day of school is a constant.

Project Life Monthly: April-May

We took a "vacation/staycation" last week, so in addition to a few days away, we enjoyed lots of fun downtime at home—which meant I got to do a lot of scrapbooking, which was so nice. I did my April and May layouts, though our adventures from last week are still forthcoming, of course. (I just uploaded the pics and will share those soon!)

 

 I did several "traditional" layouts in addition to the Project Life divided pages, including the one above I titled "Springtime Sweeties," with those cute coordinating polka-dot and umbrella papers I've had in my stash for a while.

Below, a few pictures of our kitchen remodel, as we went from peeling white thermofoil and blistering formica to wood and granite. My mom (who really needs to get a job at Home Depot, or as a quality-control inspector for a home builder) project-managed the thing for me, so I included a couple pics of the fun we had while she was in town helping out—Chuck-e-Cheese and the Muppet movie!

 For Easter, I used a 3-3x3 page between two bigger pages to accommodate all the pictures

After Easter, I had a couple pages of other fun stuff we did in April. (I tilted the camera to crop BGC's face out, but both those pics are so cute, I wish I could share. She's getting more of a personality all the time!)

 And the girls loved getting their faces painted at the Main Street Festival in Franklin.

 Then there was May—the first Saturday in May, to be specific! That is, Derby Day. One divided page for a few pics and other little scraps—a brunch ticket, the card of the restaurant Matt and I ate at on our Oaks night date, and a page from the racing guide. I embellished the month card with a Derby ticket on one side and a bit about what the girls did that day on the other.

Two of the traditional pages I did were for Derby (above) and Kate's pre-k graduation (below). Like Easter, I added a 3-3x3 page to the graduation stuff, to include more pictures and the text of the little poem the kids read during the ceremony.

One of the page protectors I used has a long vertical strip, so I gave Kate a strip of paper and asked her to write whatever she wanted, so I could have a good sample of what her handwriting was like as she finished pre-K. She chose to write her own name and the names of the other girls in her class.

I hope you have a hobby that gives you a stress release and creative fulfillment. I love how scrapbooking gives me a creative outlet and creates something special for our family to treasure for years to come.
For more Project Life posts, check out the link-up on The Mom Creative.