December Daily...Dec 14-17

I'm going to try to get this post done while both kiddos are napping, so I may not be able to give a whole lot of detail about each page. These are the pages that I had already completed in the album but just hadn't had the chance to post yet. First up, December 14th:

The film strip is from Designer Digitals (Katie Pertiet). I changed the photos to black and white because there were just too many colors going on in the pictures. The circle journaling spots are from Jillibean Soup.

On the back of this page I cut out another page from the Holidays with Matthew Mead magazine. It fit the size I needed perfectly. I added a strip of ribbon at the top and bottom to cover up some text from the magazine that I didn't want showing.

The next page (December 15), uses a baseball card holder. The top right is a piece of felt, the bottom right is a bingo card from Jenni Bowlin that I used for the date, just circling the number 15. The bottom left is a felt snowflake sticker that I added to the outside of the sheet.

On the back are three pictures from around my house, and then the bottom right I adhered the same felt snowflake on the outside of the sheet, to mirror the one on the front.

On the right side I added in a 4x6 photo, seen below, of our mantle and stockings. On the photo I added a semi-opaque white strip towards the bottom with the words "The stockings were hung by the chimney with care."

For December 16 I used another page from the Holiday with Matthew Mead magazine, and stamped the circle and number 16 in the white space. I thought this title worked well with the pictures I had for this day, which were of Avery and I making Christmas cookies. This was adhered directly on the back of the 4x6 stocking photo. Pretty simple.

The right side of day 16 was all done in photoshop, and printed on an 8x10 photo sheet (trimmed down to 8x8).

My December 17th page includes quite a few pages. This was the day of Avery's Christmas performance at preschool. Since my photos include so many of her classmates though, I've decided not to add those pages to the blog, since I don't feel like spending the time to blur out their faces. Sorry! I will add the last page, though. This is the back of a file folder that I added patterned paper to (from Jillibean Soup). Then I made a pocket by sewing a piece of black felt to it. On the felt I added a felt snowman and snowflake, and a beaded candy cane that Avery made in preschool.

Inside the pocket I included a photo of the wreath ornament that Avery made as a gift for me and her dad at preschool.

I also included the reindeer hat that she was wearing in her performance, which was made out of her handprints, and two letters that her teachers sent home. One was Avery's letter to Santa, which was basically some scribbles on a piece of paper, which she told her teachers "these are toys." The second letter was Santa's response to her letter. I thought all of these items were pretty cute and worth holding onto.

So that's my album as up to date as it is right now. I'm itching to finish it, but my guess is the only time I'm really going to have to finish it up is when Avery is in school. My evenings tend to get a little hectic with getting the kids to bed (and we're still trying to figure out our evening routine with Grayson), and I've been hitting the sack right after the kids are down to try to get as much sleep as I can. That being the case, it'll probably take a while for me to complete, but I'll be sure to update the blog as I go.

Baby Grayson

There's been an obvious disruption in my December Daily album posts, but for good reason. We welcomed this little guy into our world on December 28th. He was born at 2:55am, weighing 7 lbs, 14 oz. I've been meaning to get photos up on this blog for the past week, but, well, life took over I guess and I've been spending more time doing laundry and dishes, cleaning up spit-up, and changing dirty diapers than I have on the computer. But, without further ado, here he is:

My water broke around 10:30pm (while I was in bed trying to get some sleep, which is easier said than done when having contractions fairly consistently), we were at the hospital between 11:30 and midnight, and three hours later we had a baby! It was crazy fast, and crazy painful, but I did get the epidural, and once that kicked in things were smooth sailing.

I hate being in the hospital... with all the poking and prodding they do, you can't get any rest. So we were there for all of about a day and a half, and then we went home.

I've been lucky to have my mom and my mother-in-law here since giving birth to help out. So I've been able to get plenty of rest, which has helped tremendously with my recovery (it also helps that Grayson has been sleeping like a champ at night). I'm feeling great this time around, which I definitely couldn't say when I had Avery. Yesterday was my first day being on my own, with no help from the grandmas, and with Abe at work. The day went pretty well. I ventured out for the first time on my own with both of them, to Avery's dance class, without any problems. Yay!

As for Avery, she is definitely the proud big sister. She is adjusting so well to having the baby here.

She thinks everything Grayson does (with the exception of crying) is "so cute," and spends most of her time around him with a big smile on her face.

That's all for now! I'm off to do yet another load of laundry (boys sure are messy).

*I'm hoping to get back to the December Daily album fairly soon. I have a few additional pages finished that I haven't yet posted on the blog, and then I think I need to do about 8 more pages to complete the album. Depending on how the baby cooperates, those eight pages may take me eight months to finish, but I'm really hoping to get it all done much sooner than that!