Today will be spent...

...working on the Women Writers January issue. Lots of work to do there. I need to email a bunch of people and get to editing the stuff I do have. I think it may go a little later than my initial plan but with such a loose schedule for the next few months, I think I can get it done anyway. I will actually have free time! Yay!

Andrew's home sick today. Poor thing. He's kind of a wimp when it comes to tummy ailments, and is back in bed after trying to get up. I have the baby monitor on to hear him in case of an urgent need. I hope he just sleeps. :)

Yesterday, while the kiddos & daddy were watching TV, I worked on some scrapbooking. I love doing that and I'm about a year behind on pictures. But it really makes me feel a little crazy all the digital photos I have on my hard drive. I need to find a quick & easy way to back those up. I would be devestated if I lost all of those. I'm thinking an external hard drive would be a good idea.

Here's one of the "spreads" I did yesterday:

Another Cute Picture

I've been working really hard to try to get caught up to the present on my pictures for scrapbooking. I'm up to mid summer last year, actually, which isn't bad. This one below is one I did yesterday which features Sean. Most of the cute spreads I have thus far have been Maia and I didn't want you all to think I've been favoring her. :)

As you can see, he's going to be a nail biter, like hsi mommy. But this is from last summer when we were staying at the family's lake house. Isn't he adorable? He had gone for a long time with dad on the kayak, and finally made it back, he escaped as fast as he could and would not be talked into getting back into the kayak.

How Cute Is This?

Okay. So one of the pages I've done. Maia, about a year ago, helping dad make pizza. Please to enjoy.

Digital Scrapbooking

For my mom's birthday, I printed up pages from the digital scrapbook I made of the babies' first year. During that crazy, crazy 12 months, I managed to create a 150ish page book of images of the babies on a program from Hallmark. It was both hard & easy. I printed it up, and then sort of left it. Babies got into it when we moved here to Shreveport and got the pictures all out of order but I just stuck it in a box and then didn't mess with it. I've been taking lots of pictures, but I haven't been scrapbooking.

When I printed out the images for my mom, I looked at them and thought of how precious this time was, this book that I made which highlights special moments of that first year. How things can be forgotten and the details fade over time. Yes I have multiple versions of the photos on various places, but you distill an image in a scrapbook page. You type out dates, special details that could be forgotten over time.


So. What you're probably guessing is true-- I've decided to get back to doing the scrapbooking thing. I bought a new program which is specifically designed for digital scrapbooks, and you would be amazed at the amount of websites out there with special graphics and designers for this kind of thing. They are gorgeous, and could run into lots of cash if one were so inclined. Luckily, a lot of them also give out freebies, often as much as once a week. So I spent a bit of time this weekend downloading some of those things, and gathering up the stuff I had from last time I did this.


Last night I made a couple of new pages. The next book is going to be something like "Toddler Years" since I will need to cover everything since the last one. So it'll be images from years after the 1st birthday to 3ish. I am both excited and apprehensive because I know how much time these kinds of things can eat up. But if I'm just working on them while I sit and watch TV, it's not like I'm taking time away from other, more important activities. Maybe do a page or so a day. But it is fun to go back through those pictures that I hadn't seen in a while.


This is a screenshot of one page I did yesterday. Cool, huh? :) I swear the pictures were not posed-- she was really being that adorable. All the graphics, the "paper" in the background, etc, are freebies I got from an awesome digital scrapbook site. It's made with the new program, and I think it's pretty spiffy.

Anyway, this page is just a beginning. When I was taking those pictures of the girl, I could just "feel" the page that they would make. And Maia loved it. It's a start.