Chipmunk Cheeks and Scrapbook Pages

Happy Friday! Actually, during my two months off in the summer I can't tell Friday from any other day, but all I have to do is check Facebook or the forums at Cookin' Up Creations and I am reminded that Friday is here. Seems that almost everyone is posting TGIF!

We have a chipmunk in residence at our house! Her name is Mary Beth and she has chipmunk cheeks because she had all her wisdom teeth removed Wednesday. She's the cutest chipmunk ever, and is doing well, if in a lot of pain. There are no pictures, as you can imagine that 16 year old girls do not want their picture made when they are puffed up like a puffer fish.

Sarah has lots going on, including a little wreck yesterday. She was sitting still and was hit from behind, and then THAT person was hit from behind, and then THAT person was hit from behind. Fortunately no serious injuries to either Sarah or her boyfriend or the car. This is good because she goes next week to do band camp for the Southeast Lauderdale high school band. She is creating their guard routines for their half time show this year. She'll be there all week. Then when she gets home she has one week until move-in day in Oxford.

And then you have me, a terrible procrastinator! I have new pages with new product to share and haven't done it yet! Bad, bad!

First of all, Fishbowl Designs has some splatters that are wonderful. They are so versatile and add just the perfect little "filler" behind a picture or cluster.



Watercolored Painted and Spray Painted are available for purchase HERE at Sunshine Studios.

Here are two pages I made using the splatters and Fishbowl's kit Daffodil Dreams. I love this kit, and its colors are basically yellow and blue. They are deeper shades of yellow and blue, though, and easily became more like gold and purple so I could use it for Sarah's Lion's Band pictures.


Here is a picture of just the background, which started as a solid gold textured "paper." I added a yellow water color splatter, and two of the purple spray painted splatters, along with the bead splatter in the kit.


This page uses the kit in its beautiful yellow and blue form, with some of my favorite pictures of a beautiful butterfly on a yellow lantana in my mother-in-law's back yard. See the subtle yellow splatters? I also used a background template from Fishbowl Designs to create the page.


And besides those pages, I "revealed" four pages made with the beautiful kit Clementine by Shabby Princess. She is the digital scrapbooking sponsor for Cookin' Up Creations for July. My reveal included these pages:


I love these pictures of our beloved lap dogs, Scrappy and Chloe, enjoying a little "lap time" with Randy and Debbie. The alpha included in this kit is yummy, and one of my favorite alphas ever!
My dear friend and neighbor Janet hosted a grad party for Sarah. Check out the little cluster made with a striped ribbon, a button, and a cardboard tag, plus a couple of other cute elements. And the stitching is wonderful in this kit.

Here is a page showing Randy after he ran his first half-marathon a few weeks ago. The BINGO card is a nice versatile element in the kit, and these rich colors make great man-pages, don't they?

And, lastly, here is a page commemorating our 24th wedding anniversary, which we celebrated with a quiet dinner and 24 roses. This page uses the free template from the June challenges at Scrap Orchard, which is unfortunately, not available for download anymore. However, HERE is a link to the July free template, which is also very very nice!


While you are at the Orchard, you might want to check out the Iron Scrapper contest. I haven't really done much with it, but I did make this page for the first challenge:



One of the neat things about it is that there is a $5 kit each time the challenge changes, which I think is every week or every two weeks, and the kit is only available during that time. It gets retired at the end of the challenge. Here is a pic of the kit for Challenge #2:


Cute, huh? Get it HERE if you like it.

Wow, if you made it to the end of all of that you are awesome and especially deserving of a wonderful weekend! Hope you have a good one.

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!

Actually, lots of news, I guess! I will start with the fact that Mary Beth just got home from a four-day, invitation-only, oboe clinic held at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro. She worked with her grandfather, Charlie Wicker, and Dr. Dan Ross of the university. One of the main objects of the clinic was to teach participants the basics of reed-making, very important for double-reed players, and Mary Beth came home with three self-made reeds and a reed-making kit.

Continuing on with news from my children, I am so proud to say that the Mississippi Lion's Club All-State Band has won yet another International Championship at the International Lion's Club Convention in Sydney, Australia! Congratulations, Sarah and everyone else! Check out this video of their AMAZING parade performance that just brings tears to my eyes when I watch it. Turn off my crazy playlist and watch it - you'll love it.




And here is another video from the night of their concert before they left for Australia. I made it with my camera but it's not bad.



And my own little bit of exciting news: I am now a Starfish! Yeah, I made the Creative Team for Fishbowl Designs. See her store at Sunshine Studios and see my first two pages:



This page with my little barefoot beauty (Mary Beth) uses the Eco Earth kit, Fishin' for Dates, and a Fishfood Large Photo Template. The alpha is by Pixiemama and is part of this amazingly huge free kit created by a bunch of digital scrapbook designers as a thank you to all of their Creative Team members. The kit is called You and Me - here's a preview sneak peek:




This page uses Eco Earth, too (I really like the greens and aquas in this kit, they are actually my favorite colors to wear, so.........) The story about this picture is that we were at a Sushi Bar/Asian Buffet restaurant in Laurel, MS eating lunch with Sarah before the Lion's Band concert. At the door was a nice little fishpond with some beautiful fish swimming around. One of them was a HUGE white catfish-looking fellow who really liked the attention. On the way out I thought I might snap a picture of the girls with that fish in the "background" but when I pulled out my camera he swam away to the back of the pond. I guess he was a little camera-shy. As soon as the girls got up he came right on back for more attention. Even fish have personalities!



Next week Mary Beth and I leave for the Key Club International Convention in Memphis, TN. Mary Beth is on the LaMissTenn Key Club District Board and I will be the Kiwanis Host Committee Chairperson. This is the first time I have ever attended this convention, and the first time I have taken any students from the Ridgeland High Key Club. Four kids are going with me and I am pretty excited about it. We will be working hard at convention, since we are the host committee, but it's gonna be great! Plus, I get to dress up like Elvis! Maybe there will be a picture or two to share when we get home.

2010 Mississippi Lions All-State Band

Hello, world! Much has been going on around here since last I updated this blog.

Mary Beth went to Destin with the West's (thank you, Keith and Margaret), and Sarah headed off to Lion's Band camp.
She almost immediately got some kind of infection, because I dropped her off on Friday and when I went down there Monday she was running fever. They took her to the doctor and she was much better on Thursday, when they had their performance before heading out to Australia.

Here is a video of their parade routine...it is a little long, with three different segments. Turn off my playlist (which is annoying, I know) and watch the video all the way to the end; you won't be sorry!

Digi pages and a Running Picture

I have been participating (trying hard to keep up) in the Wet-N-Wild daily challenges at Scrap Orchard, and thought I would share some pages here. I will link you up to kits I've used to help you out with your shopping, too!

This one was for a challenge to use the June Mega kit - It's a Journey, and to scrap about the JOURNEY. Not the vacation, the travel! So here are two pictures of Adam singing his little head off, and dancing, too, while we were traveling to Sandestin last summer. Boom Boom Pow was his favorite song, and was guaranteed to stop any whining! I also used a template by Katie Pertiet at Designer Digitals.

This one was to scrap about a dream vacation, and I used the June Mega kit again.


This page was done for a challenge to scrap some vacation pictures, so I scrapped these pics that Mary Beth took while she was at Disney World during Spring Break. I used a grab bag, but here are links to some of the items that were in that grab bag:
Magical Vacation by Tracey Howard, The Happiest Place and by Wild Dandelion Designs, and the cutest alpha I've ever seen, the Beaded Clip Alpha by Wild Dandelion Designs.


This page was done for the Color Challenge and uses a free kit called Eclat Lumineux that I got at
Digital-Crea. They have some pretty stuff for sure! The little pink label is from the daily download-freebie kit Wet-N-Wild at Scrap Orchard.

There are probably more pages that I will share later on, but family calls and I have to go. Randy and I are going to go drive the half-marathon course he ran yesterday. He is becoming obsessed. Here is a link to a picture of him running. Sorry I can't share the pic....copyright and all that!

Ah, school is OUT for the SUMMER!

And I have been taking it easy, plus getting back to the chiropractor and gym, and scrapbooking again! Yay!

Before I start in on the scrapbook stuff, let me tell you what my wonderful family has been up to!

Sarah has graduated from high school, with distinction and as a member of the RHS Hall of Fame for 2010. She has made us quite proud, with her qualification as a Mississippi Eminent Scholar, a University of Mississippi Provost Scholar, a Key Club Scholarship recipient, and member of the Mississippi Lion's All-State band. Here are some graduation pictures:

Sarah with Granddad at her Graduation Brunch; with Aunt Mary Ann at graduation, and with Mary Beth....rockin' the zebra prints!

And here is beautiful Mary Beth, 16 and so grown up. She has tried so hard to find a summer job other than babysitting, but the job market for teenagers is not great these days. She has recently started her tenure as Lieutenant Governor on the LaMissTenn Key Club District Board.



She is also a budding photographer who takes some beautiful pictures:




Randy has been flying, flying, and flying. He has made ten jillion trips down to Louisiana, Gulfport, Pensacola, and Destin in the past few weeks. Most of these trips are related to the oil spill in the Gulf. He has also managed to squeeze in two triathlons and a half marathon! The other day we were in Bass Pro and he said he needed a new belt. "A new belt? You have TONS of belts!" "Yeah, but they're too big."

Ah, to have that particular problem. Here is the proud daddy with his girls:

And, like I said, I have been scrappin'! Both digital and paper, of course. And today is my day to reveal pages created with the using the adorable kit "Celebrate" by Designs by Krista.

My first page shows a couple of pictures of Sarah on Class Day.


I used a template on this one, from The Happiest Grab Bag, which contained several kits and templates and alphas and stuff by various designers at Scrap Orchard. The grab bag is no longer available, but the template is made by Tracey Howard and can be found here. The cute alpha is from an older kit that I love, called My Gurlz All That by Royanna Fritschman at Divine Digital. That white frame is from Krista's Bloomin' kit.

Yeah, I actually forgot I had pictures from Mary Beth's trip to Disney that needed scrapping. I think I am going to do them all digitally. I love the little hats in this kit, and knew they would look cute on the girls' heads in this picture.


And this next page is a simple one using an extraction technique to pop Mary Beth out of the frames. The frames are from the June Mega kit at Scrap Orchard, called It's a Journey. I got the idea for putting patterned papers in those stamp frames from a layout at SO by Athena.



My last page showcases some cute pictures of my daughter Mary Beth with our sweet baby Chloe. Chloe hates the camera, so it is hard to get pics of her without distracting her somehow. Smooches from Mary Beth seem to do the trick!

The font is Vaguely Repulsive, downloaded from Kevin and Amanda HERE; and the scalloped background was made using a template from Nee Nee designs, available at Scrap Orchard.


That's it! I hope you like my pages, and that you will follow the links to check out some of Krista's cute and reasonably priced digi kits.

And if you stayed to read that long, long, post, congratulations and thank you!

April Reveal for Cookin' Up Creations

Here are a few pages using a cute kit by Designs By Krista called "Tweet." Krista has some really really cute kits at really really good prices! She has a bunch of $2 and $1 kits, and her regular/recent kits are only $3!

This one contains pictures from beautiful, historic downtown Natchez, MS. Did you know it was once the richest city in America? Well, it was, in the pre-civil-war days. Its views of the Mississippi River are beautiful, and it has some great old buildings and homes.



This one shows the earthy elements of the kit, and don't you just love the little branch and bird element?!!?


Here is another bright colorful page. Sarah's term as Lt. Governor on the LaMissTenn Key Club District Board just ended with the recent convention. It was hard for her to say goodbye to some of her friends that she made. (The alpha on this page was a freebie by Karen Lewis)


And this last one uses a template by Petit Lips and more pictures from Natchez!



If you are in need of some inspiration or want to check out some challenges, come visit the challenge forum at Cookin Up Creations. We even have a digital challenge forum, too!

Well, we were going to go walk in the March of Dimes' March for Babies this morning, but it got cancelled due to bad weather. Bad weather that hasn't materialized! I guess I will have to go walk inside the gym and will be able to take it easy today. This is good, because I have an allergy/sinus thing going on and don't really feel all that great. Was really looking forward to the walk, though.

Whatever you are doing today, I hope it is blessed. Thanks for sharing a little bit of my boring world with me!

This time of year......

Happy Spring, everyone! And Happy belated Easter! He is Risen! Praise God!

This year we visited Randy's mom on Easter weekend (well, Sarah didn't...she had to work and had Easter dinner with my mom and dad and aunt). We took Mary Beth's friend Allison with us and took some awesome pictures of them on Saturday (there are awesome pictures of Alli, too, but she is not my child so I will not presume to post her pics on my blog!):






This time of year is so hectic and kinda stressful for me, and this year is certainly no exception!
Spring Break brings that last rush to give and grade nine-weeks' tests, tend to make up work, enter and post grades, and call parents if their kids are not likely to pass. It also brings all kinds of extra work if you teach a class that is tested in the State of Mississippi, which I do. Extra practice tests, item and data analysis, extra prep and tutorial classes, and the stress of the TEST DAY COUNTDOWN!

Add to that all of the work that is involved in taking my club to the Key Club district convention (it is an insane amount of work; I'm not even gonna go into it), induction ceremony, new officer elections and training, work on the scrapbook, and fundraisers. It makes Spring rather unpleasant.

Having said all of that, I MOWED THE FRONT YARD yesterday! Yay! It looks nice. I also raked the old icky pinestraw out of the beds in the front and chopped it up with the mower. I'm caught up on laundry, including washing all the blankets that the dogs used throughout the winter.

Randy helped his mom sell crafts at the Belzoni Crawfish Festival this weekend, and I chaperoned the Jr-Sr Prom last night. Sarah's Senior Prom. Here are a few pics:



I love that laughing picture, don't you?

Somewhere between the last time I updated this blog, and today, my little baby girl turned 16! She had a party with friends on Thursday (they all went to a Japanese restaurant) and then had some more friends over to the house on Friday.

Yes, she loves her new zebra-print dress!

With all of this that has been going on, I have been in a scrappy-slump. Cannot WAIT for summer to get here so I can scrap all these yummy pics I have!

Thanks for sharing this teeny tiny bit of my boring world with me!