My Life as it Should Be

The Possibility of You!

I wanted to post a scrapbook page I made over a year and a half ago... interesting to read the journaling now that little Kyle is actually here!  I made this for a challenge at the Designer Digitals site - create a page with no photos. The topic of another baby joining our family had just come up again the evening before I started working on the challenge, and was a perfect topic. Here is the page (click for product credits) and journaling:

Journaling (as if I am talking to our not-yet-conceived baby) - Last night was the first night you became a real possibility! Without going into details of what exactly Daddy and I were doing, I will simply say I was very surprised at the change in Daddy's answer to the question "Do you want another baby?"  We have been discussing this particular topic for about six months now and Daddy has always been a strong 80 percent NO!  I have held my ground at 50/50 with the main reason for not having a baby being my age.  However, with several babies being born to moms in our playgroup this past year, I have been having very strong maternal urges!  Of course having you come into our lives would mean new everything, since we have already sold or given away all our baby gear. And the gap between you and Alex will be six years - it would be like having an only child when you get older.  But I am in love with the idea of having you all to myself during the day when Brandon and Alex are in school.  With the experience from raising two already, no "brand-new-parent" worries, and no toddler running around to distract us, I envision lots of fun, and of course lots of pictures!  One of the main things that fascinates both Daddy and me is what you, another DeGuia baby, will look like... I guess we will just have to wait and see!

So it is fun to look at this page, now knowing the result of this little conversation.  It did take us longer than I thought, and the gap between Kyle and Alex is almost seven years instead of six, but fears of my age being a factor were unfounded and it is amazing to have him in our lives!

Two New Digital Scrapbook Pages

This past weekend Tony was away in California so the kids and I had fun on a beautiful Saturday afternoon washing the car!  Of course they like using the hose to spray the car and helping to wash, but what they really like is to play with the bucket an in the bucket!  I don't know why anyone would intentionally sit in dirty, soapy water but they love it!  I got a couple cute shots of them and picked the best one of them together to highlight on this scrapbook page.         I started with a template by Katie Pertiet (new this weekend at Designer Digitals), altered it slightly and added a couple other elements to finish it off. Pretty simple!  Full credits are here.

Here are a few more pictures of the fun time they had!

And one more layout from this past week. Journaling reads: "Alex’s class was releasing lady bugs when I arrived at school. There were still a lot of lady bugs in the grass around where they had let them go and Alex captured about five before we left. Her plan was to keep them in her hand until we got home, but we were stopping at Target so she stashed them in an empty water bottle for a while. She was concerned because the bugs were getting stuck in the leftover water, but they all survived. She kept them for a couple hours and then let all but two go free"  And... "Alex has such a pretty smile when it is a “real” smile which it is here! It was my idea to try to get a picture with the lady bug on her nose, but the lady bug was not cooperating with us at all!"  Full credits can be found here.

 

"All About Me" Challenges

It was kind of funny that right after I dumped my purse and took the pictures of "my mess" and wrote this blog post there was a request for pages for the next "All About Me" challenge from the CT at Designer Digitals. The topic: What's in Your Purse! LOL!  Since I already had the pictures, I though why not!  Here is the result of that page.

The "All About Me" challenges are great, and a fun way to document yourself... especially if you are usually the one wielding the camera!  As the main picture-taker the journaling is often about another member of the family or the family as a whole and rarely about you.  Completing these challenges is a great way to have a completed book and amazing keepsake to pass down to the next generation!  If you head over to Designer Digitals  you can find the first seven challenges, and join in the fun!  

Here are the first seven:

1. Me Now
2. How Did I Get Here?
3. What Makes Me Smile?
4. When I Was Your Age.
5. A Day in the Life.
6. I am so Good.
7. What's in Your Purse?

There will be more to come throughout the year - I can't wait to see what the next topic will be and it is always fun to read about the other members of the forum family!  I am a bit behind myself - I have only completed three of the seven, but plan to catch up soon!

Another Layout and a Sketch!

Another layout with recent photos.  Brandon wanted to mix "things" together to make an "explosion" so we used baking soda and vinegar!  We have previously done the "Diet Coke and Mentos" experiment - which works really well - but this was exciting enough for Brandon, as shown by his wonderful smile.  I love candid pictures of him because this is the only way he will show his teeth in a picture! Otherwise he keeps his mouth shut tight when he smiles.  Do you think he will need braces? LOL!

I have included another sketch with this layout.  I love how this page came together and it is fun to break it down and see the different areas of the page design in the sketch.  I think it would be fun to see a paper scrapper take this and make a page with traditional products!  Any takers?

And here is the sketch:

 
 

Planning for Summer!

Can you believe there are only two more months of school?  That means summer vacation is right around the corner and it is time to start planning activities to fill up the long days.  A fun experience for Brandon last summer was attending a science camp at our local university.  They have week-long, half or full day camps on a variety of topics.  The Space and Rocketry camp was a perfect match for Brandon and to say he "had a blast" is an understatement! While these camps are a bit more expensive than the other day camps in our area, I really recommend them based on our experience.  The hands-on crafts the campers completed were really nice quality and Brandon came home with an increased knowledge of space and an excitement to keep learning even more!

Here is a layout I made about the rocket launch on the last day of camp - a simple design to let the pictures take center stage.  I picked up the red, from the counselor's shirt and the rocket, as an accent color in the small strips of paper and title, and kept the background dark to help the pictures "pop" off the page. The arrow is a custom shape pre-loaded in Adobe Photoshop which added to the theme of the page... a rocket shooting up into space!  This is an easy layout to duplicate either digitally or with paper and I have included a sketch of the design so you can imagine your own photos on the page and go from there! You can see the credits for this page here.

And here is the sketch:

Brandon has chosen the "Robot Factory" theme this year and I will be putting Alex in the camp as well.  This will give me a small break of my own for that week - dropping the kids off from 8:30am to 4:30pm each day!  Now to figure out what we will do with the other nine weeks of summer!

A Trampoline for Spring

Well now that the warmer weather seems to be staying around we wanted to get something that would keep the kids out in the back yard a little more. They love jumping on the trampolines at their friends' houses so we decided to go with that over some sort of play structure they will outgrow more quickly. The boxes arrived on a Saturday and even though we didn't have a lot of time that day, Brandon and Alex insisted the building get started! The boxes were a big hit as well and kept the kids occupied while Tony put together the pieces. We finished it the next day and then the real fun began! The kids would sit in a meditative pose while Tony started bouncing, and when the big bounce came they would fly up in the air!  You can see Alex trying to keep her legs crossed and her hands in the same position they started in, but Brandon went all over! He actually came down on his hand and bent his elbow back but he was out playing again after he calmed down. 

 

This is an all digital layout and the background paper is a from Katie Pertiet's growing collection of Classic Cardstock over at Designer Digitals.  These make a great starting point for any page and I love the subtle texture!  

I have been missing journaling in my own handwriting on digital layouts so I decided to give it a try on this page. After putting together the main parts of the design, I created a new layer in the layers palette. Then I selected the the brush tool and set the size to 4 pixels at 100% hardness. Using a stylus with my Wacom tablet, I wrote out the words. It took a couple tries but I am happy with the results! Give it a shot - you might like it too!  

You can see all the credits for this page here.

A Happy Page

My first post on the topic of scrapbooking.  I thought I would start with one of my favorite recent layouts! Now these are not the best photos - a little blurry at full resolution, but I was drawn to my daughter's infectious laugh, and the bright colors in her suit.  When Lynn Grieveson's Wild Weekend Kit, available at Designer Digitals, was released a couple weeks ago I had just seen these pictures (on my computer) and knew they would work perfectly with the colors in the kit.  I also love the papers in this kit that mimic rays of sunshine.  Not only do they add interest in the background but they draw the viewers' eye to the main subject area of the page.  The lack of journaling on this layout is an anomaly for me, but I really don't know the whys behind the hysterical laughter in these photos.  That's what I get for waiting over two years to document this! However, if I wanted to add journaling I could write about her laugh or mention that she was very into Disney's princesses at this time - specifically The Little Mermaid, hence her colorful bathing suit.  There is always something to jot down related to the pictures you are scrapping! 

Detail about why I love digital scrapbooking - fonts are super easy to turn into titles!  

 You can find the credits for this layout here.