Valentine's Day Cards

I made some cute valentines for Avery to pass out at school, that apparently have already made the rounds on the blogosphere (mostly last year I think?). But I had never seen them, and when Julie posted this link on Facebook, I knew I had to make them for Avery to pass out in class (thanks Julie!). They were so easy to make, and I think they just turned out adorable.

Happy Valentine's Day!!!!

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!

December Daily...December 12th and 13th

For the 12th, since we didn't do a whole lot, and since we got our first real snowfall of the season, I thought I'd do a page with a picture of the outside of our house. The picture above is the photo I used on the page, with journaling.

And here's what the page looks like. I used the same paper that I used on the front cover of my album, though you can't tell in this picture that it has the tone-on-tone white polka dots. I rounded the corners of the page as well as the bottom two corners of the picture, then stitched the picture with zig-zag stitching. For the title I used Thickers, and for some of the letters I just traced the thickers and hand-stitched the letter, just to change it up a little bit.

For the 13th, I didn't use a photo. The day for me was all about my doctor's appointment and finding out whether or not we'd be having our baby later this week. I was disappointed to find out that the answer is no, we will not be induced since I'm not dilated enough yet. It's the right decision, not to do the induction and to wait until my body and the baby are ready, but I was sure hoping to get a different answer that day! I had a little pity party for myself on the drive home from my appointment, and then I got over it and am now content to wait it out and see when this little guy is ready to join us on his own :)

The paper I used as my background came from the Holiday with Matthew Mead magazine (some really pretty photos in there, I have a few others in mind to try to include in the album as well). I cut the tag out using my Cricut and stitched it on with red thread, then stamped the number 13 before writing out the journaling. Here's a closeup of that:

And that's it. A simple page, but I didn't feel like it needed too much with all that was going on in the background.

December Daily...December 11th

December 11th for us was a very busy day, so I have lots of pages in my album for that day. We went to a Breakfast with Santa with some friends, so the first page is Avery's picture with Santa. I couldn't believe she actually sat on his lap...never thought that would happen. For this page I printed a 6x8 photo, and then used a scallop border punch on the edge. I attached the photo to the red polka dot patterned paper with zig zag stitching. On the photo I added my journaling in Photoshop (using the 20% opacity text box that Ali Edwards had a tutorial about on her website). I also added in some of the Christmas Cut-ups from Katie Pertiet (which I got from Designer Digitals last year).

Here's a closeup of the journaling. You can also see the felt present that I added with the number 11 on it. I also attached a safety pin (from Tim Holtz).

On the back of this page is an 8x8 photo of Avery rock climbing, which the kids started doing after their visit with Santa (the Breakfast with Santa took place at a Fitness Center). Sorry about the glare on the photo.

Here's a better look at the left side page:

And the right side:

On the back I did some hand journaling and added a photo of Avery ice skating that Abe had taken with his I-phone.

Then I had just a few more photos that I wanted to include, so I just attached two 4x6 photos back to back and punched holes for the rings. I added a border on both photos with white pen. Here's a rare photo of the three of us (we never seem to be able to get a good photo of our family, so I'm glad we were able to get this one).

And then here are the two preggos, ready to pop! Holly's due in January, and I have just about a week and a half left until my due date. Every time we've gotten together (and had our cameras available) during our pregnancy we've been sure to take a picture of our growing bellies. I'm pretty sure this is the last photo we'll get to take before I give birth, but maybe not! Who knows how long I'll go and if we might get together again before then...

Phew! That's a lot for just one day. I'm working on days 12 and 13 now. Hope to have them up tomorrow.

December Daily...December 9th and 10th

Here we are at Day 9. By this point I'm starting to lose a little bit of my mojo. It's definitely difficult to keep this up every day, but I'm determined to do it, and I do like how the album is coming together so far.

On the 9th, I hadn't taken a picture all day, and by the time I was finished making the cinnamon rolls that I decided to bake, it was after dinner and dark outside. So by the time I finally decided to actually take any pictures, it meant that I had no daylight left for a nice photo. Since I absolutely hate the way my pictures look indoors with the flash on, I decided to just use the pics without the flash. They're not great either...they have that yellowy look to them and are slightly blurred. I really need to learn more about how to take photos to avoid these issues {sigh}. Someday.

So anyway, the not-so-great photos are adding to my lack of motivation. But, trudge on I must. I happened to see this post on Ali Edward's blog of a page she recently did for Hero Arts, and I decided that the layout would work perfectly for the photos I had. I went ahead and pretty much copied the layout to a T, so I could hopefully get over the hump.

So, here's my page for December 9th. There's a lot that I like about it, but one major thing I disike - I stitched the border around the outside of the photos way too far in, and I just hate the placement of it. I wish I could take it off, but unfortunately stitching can't be undone, so I'll learn to live with it :). I do, however, like the zig-zag stitching between the photos and the patterned paper. I made a tag out of polka dot felt I had on hand and added a "Countdown to Christmas" sticker to it, where I circled the number 9.

The journaling around the photos reads:

"I've been craving homemade cinnamon rolls lately so I decided to make Pioneer Woman's cinnamon rolls today. Unfortunately they didn't live up to my expectations because the dough didn't rise like it should have. Guess I'll have to try again!"

Getting that page done did get me over the hump, because I also was able to whip out the page for December 10th last night as well. I just used the back of the page from the 9th, which is patterned paper from Jillibean Soup. This picture was taken at the Widlights at the Zoo (and if I'm being honest, it wasn't taken on the 10th - we went to the zoo back in November when it was a little bit warmer, but I feel like it's part of the holiday celebrations, so it should be included in the album. I didn't have any other photos for the day, so this was a good add-in).

Journaling reads: "Even though this picture of Avery is super blurry, I still thought it was super cute of her with her hot chocolate"

I cut out a portion of the brochure that we had gotten at the zoo that night and added it to the bottom, along with a few felt snowflakes and the Jenni Bowlin bingo card (where I stamped a circle around the number 10). Easy peasy.

December Daily...December 8th

Today's page took little time at all since I had premade the envelope when I put together the foundation pages for the album. This page is dedicated to Avery's Letter to Santa. I traced "dear Santa" onto the front of the envelope using some chipboard letters from MM. Then I painted with red and green to fill in the letters. After the paint dried I added the faux stitching with white pen around the letters and as a border.

The letter is made up of white cardstock. I added the strip of red cardstock (that I punched with the threading waters border punch), and the green polka dot ribbon at the top, then I stitched across these with red thread. Next I used a few stamps from Art Warehouse, in Cranberry Chalk ink, and then drew lines on the page. Once that was complete Avery and I sat down and she dictated to me what she wanted on her list. My favorite is Girl Toys, "cause I'm a girl" she says.

Then I had her sign her name at the bottom, and took a picture of her doing this and added it to the back of the letter.

And that's it for Day 8!