the girl who has a mind reader

Tio Sabi is missing some money.

That really doesn't surprise me as he can be prone to be, ah, scatterbrained (to put it kindly) about his personal (and other people's personal) possessions. I think its likely he spent it and forgot about it.

However, as things go in this household, when something is missing, we go to the kiddos.

"Boys, did any of you pick up a $10 bill you may have found laying around?"

Solemn faces, "no."

Ok, fair enough. We asked, they answered, my mom alarm didn't go off, so they are in the clear. (and, like most moms, I can tell when they are lying. They're pretty terrible at it.)

However, Ian has become my little story teller. He likes to participate in conversations by claiming he has performed the activity being discussed or owns the item currently being spoken of, or is "best friends" with whomever the conversation is about. He does it with a perfectly straight face. He is a classic "one-upper."

So, after the quick little mass interogation, he comes into the room, slides onto Tio Sabi's lap and lays this one on us:

"Sabi, Zacky took your money. I hear his mind say so."

the girl who has a warning

If you decide to decorate cupcakes with green frosting
and if you use the remainder of the tube of gel coloring
and if you throw that away and it misses the trashcan
and if your toddler picks it up off the floor and (unbeknownst to you) sucks it dry
and if you find the now completely empty tube on the floor of the living room with no idea of how it got there

then


don't be surprised
alarmed
or intimidated

by the florescent green diaper that said toddler gives you the next morning

and

if you use your powers of deduction
when the color starts bleeding out of the poop stuck on his leg and tints the bathwater a sickly green

you just might figure out what happens

when you decide to decorate cupcakes with green frosting.


(no pictures. I thought about it, but decided not to inflict that upon my very very few readers!)

the girl who is catching up

so..since my last post I've

straightened my hair (temporarily)

made Breakfast for dinner on April Fool's Day

Met up with an old friend and her kids

taught some classes at the Scrappy Store

scrapped a little for myself

discovered Lomo and all of its yumminess

Gone to the Celebration Art Festival and, feeling artistic myself, took a bunch of pictures.

and not found a job

Don't know how much longer my landlord will be understanding, but I'm crossing my fingers the employment drought will end soon.

Quotes from the boys:

"Mommy, the school bus ride was AWESOME!"
(matthew)

"I am the Master Prankster!"
(Zachary)

"I'm making costumes."
(Ian, my little dress-up guy)

"This?"
(Eli's favorite new word)

the girl who is wishing Princess a HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

Happy Birthday Princess! You are my mentor, my guru, my scrapping buddy and my friend. I think Jen Jen said it best when she said, "Happy Bday to the bestest boa wearin, tiara totin', F-U page scrappin, hair flippin, hairball throwin, shovel sister a girl could have! Love you Princess!!" That's pretty much all of our private jokes rolled up into one declarative sentence!

It can't be repeated enough, Love ya Princess!

the girl who is teaching a class

Coming soon to Piktails Scrapbook Store in Orlando, this Mixed Media Mini Album, taught by yours truly.

We will learn some painting techniques (crackle, dry brushing and stenciling), work with TONS of glitter, do a little dry embossing, and have tons of messy fun. This book incorporates chipboard, sheer acetate, acrylic, corrugated cardboard, and paper pages with surprises! We'll make a pocket page, envelope page and fold out page. This album incorporates 2x2, 3x3, 3 1/2 x 5, and 4x6 pictures. There is room for a minimum of 25 pictures in this album!

I chose a bright, Spring, color scheme for this album so you could customize it for your Easter, baby, family, or Spring pictures. Would make a great gift for a baby shower, mother's day or birthday.

Call Debbie at Piktails to sign up, but HURRY. Because of all the techniques, we are limiting this class to 15 members.

the girl who feels unmotivated

I have reached the doldrums. the blahs. the "meh" mentality. And I'm not quite sure what is worse...being in this particular mental state, or recognizing I'm here and still not doing much about it.

I have been unemployed for two months now. Two Months! I don't like it. I enjoy the ordered structure of having a schedule, having meetings, tasks that need to be completed: in short, having a job to do. I have tried, oh so desperately tried, to establish that same sense of order on my personal life, but it just isn't happening. I don't understand why I can't order and schedule and break my home life up into manageable chunks, but the dynamic is completely different.

What inevitably happens is that I maintain for a little while and then, suddenly it seems, it all goes to pot at the same time, I look around and see just too much to do at once and I shut down and enter the stage of "meh."

Example:


This is my loveseat. It is covered with a week's worth of washing. I feel like I just cleared this off, I turn around and its full again.


This is the surface of my furniture. It is filled, not only with thoughtful, decorative knick-knacks and family pictures, but all of the STUFF I pick up off of the floor, set down "just for a minute" or liberate from a toddler and set up out of his reach.


This is said toddler. The activity for the morning while I *try* to muster up the motivation to take care of Mount Washmore, is for his older brothers to put him in the back of this Tonka dumptruck and push him--SQUEALING at the top of his lungs--up and down the only clear pathway in the house. I'm sobbing a bit inside because I took him to get his curls trimmed last weekend and now he just isn't as curly anymore. I want to send the boys outside to play to get out of my way, but two of them are grounded. It's funny, I was just giving my humble advice to a friend this past week where I advised her to look for punishments for her child that didn't punish her as well and here I go, locking my two most active kids into this nightmare of a house with me. I'm a dolt.

So what HAVE I been doing with all of my freetime these days, you might ask?

Well, I've certainly caught up on my reading. Thanks to Book Mooch and Paperback Swap I have a ton of new books in the house. I've started reading Nora Roberts novels, FSM help me. They are addictive pieces of fluff. Well written pieces of fluff, but nothing but entertainment that doesn't require a whole bunch of thought. Addictive too BECAUSE they are well written. I get completely caught up in the story and end up with a perfect excuse to be unmotivated.

I have not been scrapping as much as I would like to think I would be. I did finish this lo at Island Jen's Craft Love Fest last weekend.


One lo. That's it.

But I have been working on a minibook class for Piktails, my local LSS. The sample is nearly complete and I'll have to start organizing my anal retentive instructions for the actual class. Here's a preview of the materials.


And I've been visiting friends, going out to lunch, and running errands for Larry and Judy. All of which keep me out of the house but don't go a long way to accomplishing anything about the mess.

So I am BEGGING for someone to leave me a hint, a clue, throw me a rope or SOMETHING. While I spend my time sending out resumes, making phone calls and trying to find a job...how do I get this personal life of mine into the same order as my professional life?

My friends laugh at my organizational needs. How I NEED to have things ordered, alphabetized, cross-referenced and filed. But WHY can I not transfer that same obsessive compulsive tendancies to my home life?

Help!

the girl who is wishing Island Jen a Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday Island Jen! I couldn't find a pic of you on the laptop, so I stole one off of your flkr page. I love this one! Have a great one and I can't wait to see you tonight!

the girl who is playing with pictures

Because I am not the photographer I want to be, don't have the photography equipment I would like to have, and don't have mad photoshop skills, I am forced to rely on programs found on the web to make my pictures better than they actually are. I thought I'd share some of my favorite "photo manipulation for dummies" sites out there on the big bad world wide web.

let's start off with a favorite picture of mine straight off of the camera:


All in all, an adorable picture of my middle man. However, it could use a little work. I may not have photoshop, but photoshop has a free basic photo editor available online. I play with the white balance, up the saturation, and use their touch-up feature to remove the perpetual dar circles under Ian's eyes and I get this:

Nice, huh? It's pretty easy to use and you can store your pics there as well. Not too shabby for a free program.

But maybe I want more "oomph." I want to make more of a statement. Say I want to do one of those fancy color pops on a B&W background. Then, I can turn to Color Select Studio's site. Yes, you do actually have to pay for this one, but it's pretty darn cheap and you can use forever. No messing with layers and flattening and all that business in photoshop, this does it all for you. So easy *I* can use it. And this is what it looks like:

You can select anything to highlight in color. I could have just popped the pumpkin, but I wanted to keep Ian the focal point.

Speaking of focal points...I stumbled across this little site. This feature is called "tilt-shift" and it's intended purpose is to turn landscapes into pictures that look like miniatures, but it worked for this purpose too--blurring the background behind Ian.

Now, I would only reccommend this for portraits where the subject takes up the entire height or width of the picture, and it only will edit horizontally, so if you have a vertical subject (like I do) you will need to rotate your pic before uploading it. But I like the effect.

And "effects" nicely segues us to this site: Be Funky. I found this site coutesy of Emily Falconbridge's blog and spent half a morning playing with pictures. Seriously, it was addicting. Not only does the site offer the standard effects like sketch and ink and such, but it takes it a step further with textured backgrounds and frames and just more.


I really have fun here. So much fun, I'm giving you another version with a different effect.

It is just a ton of fun.

Lastly, I bring you pikfix. This site offers much of what can be found on any basic editing site, but I find photoshop online easier to use. The reason I bring this site up is pretty much one reason, and one reason only. That reason can be summed up in one, now sadly defunct, word: POLAROID!


You can do a grungy polaroid, slightly smudged, plain, etc. Just be sure to edit your picture to a square first because it is, after all, only a border feature and the site does not stick to the standard polaroid shape.

They have other neato-skeeto options as well. The montage feature is cool:


As are the filmstrip, grunge borders, etc. A fun place to play.

Lastly, I can't give you all of these great sites without closing with my favorite place to get them printed: ScrapbookPictures.com. There are quite a few reasons I *heart* this site. 1.) the price is right and shipping is not exorborant. In fact, they charge the same for shipping one picture or 200 (and I've ordered 200 at a time before!) and the shipping is QUICK! Once your order is printed, expect them in a matter of days, not weeks. 2.) Sizes--besides the standard 4x6, 5x7, 8x10 they have 6x6, 4x12, 12x12...so many combinations!, 3.) photo paper: you can order in glossy, matte, or metallic. how cool is that? try it on a b&w and be amazed at the depth, or a vibrant color scene and thrill at the richness of the color!, 4.) Extras: they have borders of all kinds that toatally fake going all digital with photoshop. You can layer two on top of each other, change the colors, it's such a great feature! And these aren't cheesy either!, 5.) HUMANS process the pictures. They don't just upload to a machine and hit print. They look over your shots a make color corrections to ensure you get skin tones that actually look like skin tone and not ruddy or sallow., and lastly, 6.) Service. They actually have SERVICE! Got a question about your order? Fire off an email, you WILL get an answer! Have an issue? They will correct it! I had an issue once where I had actually fiddled with my pictures to washout the subject. It was totally on purpose and for a good reason. Well, I had forgotten about the Human eyes looking at my pictures, and they corrected it back for me. There were only four or five pictures that were affected this way, but when I brought it up, they reprinted my ENTIRE order for me and I had it within three days. (For the record, they have an option where you tell them "I have this the way I want it, don't make any corrections") That is service!

So there you have it. Some of the fun timewasters I use to make me look like a better photographer/photo editor than I am.

Now go have fun!

the girl who is emptying the nest

At the beginning of the school year I tried to enroll Matthew in the Voluntary Pre Kindergarten classes at Ian and Zacky's school. Unfortunately, the classes were filled. However, they run on half-year cycles, so I attempted again for the classes starting in January. After filling out twenty-ga-jillion pages of paperwork, I sent it off to school with Zachary.

That was a mistake.

I have learned, to my chagrin, that Zachary is not the most reliable of messengers. I discovered this after I was looking through his backpack and found the paperwork--three weeks later. I missed the deadline and Matthew missed out on preschool.

Until yesterday. Yesterday I got a call from the school. A spot had opened up! So today, my little Matthew started pre-school. Today I have just Eli home. Today I am going crazy!

first day

And would it be too much to ask that he NOT be so darn excited that he didn't show the slightest hesitation? No wavering, just marched right in, announced he was "King Mick Jagger" and then sat down to color. His teacher says he's "a natural." Matthew asked what the computers were for, his teacher said they were for the class. Matthew responded with an enthusiastic, "SWEET!"

My Sweetie Pie is all grown up and the house is too quiet.

the girl who can taste the rainbow

So I was surfing the Internet and came across this post detailing how to make a colorful, no fat cake. I liked the look of it and decided I could do it even better. So this is what I came up with.

Yes, my "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" cake. Since I didn't need to go low-fat, this are my instructions"

Step 1.) The ingredients: Make sure you use the gel colors, they produce much more vivid colors than the traditional liquid ones

Step 2: the technique: prepare cake according to directions and divide into roughly equal portions and color. I actually dived the mix up equally using a mesauring cup, then had some extra left over and beefed up the top three colors. Going in ROY G. BIV order and starting with red, layer the colors in a tube pan one on top of the other, trying to stay directly on top of the preceding layer.

Step 3.) the decorating: I mixed in one packet of blue kool aid into most of a tub of frosting. You may want to add additional confectioners sugar if it is too tart or use the pre-sweetened singles. Since white cake is pretty much tasteless, this adds some flavor to the party.I smeared the whole cake with the blue frosting, lumped on white "clouds" from the reserved frosting and added some sprinkles because EVERYONE likes sprinkles!


Step 4: the result: pretty cool, huh?

Step 5.) Enjoy! This cake produced some very happy customers!
Enjoy it! It was really easy. The kool-aid coloring trick could also be used on the cake, but, I think it would end up just being overwhelmingly fruity. Well, you could always just use the flavoring in certain layers. Something to play with. Also, I think I'd probably use two mixes next time.

Enjoy!

the girl who ain't a sissy

So, even though there seems to be a complete lack of Hospitality HR positions out there, I WILL be employed by next month.

I will.

I will.

I will.

(I have to!)

the girl who survived Christmas!

So, again, let me reiterate that December is CRAZY busy around here. Aramis' birthday is the 19th, Ian's is the 22nd, then, of course, there's Christmas. I guess the silver lining in being unemployed is that I had the time to really put effort into all of the festivities.

I was able to make gifts this year, which was both economical and a good use of my free time.

For my good friends at work, I made these Christmas trees.

Yes, I still went to the office Christmas party as my friends made it quite clear my presence was expected. I enjoyed myself, even though it was bittersweet.

For the kids' teachers, I altered some tins I had on hand and filled them with Christmas goodies. For Ian's teacher, I had Ian draw some Christmas-sy things and decoupaged them onto the tin.

(That's Santa's reindeer on top of our house.)

And for Zacky's teacher--a fellow scrapper--I went all out because I knew she'd appreciate it.

For my mother, I had this crazy idea I could get a massive cross-stitch project done in time for Christmas. And, I couldn't make it easy, no sir. You see, a few months ago my mother casually (Ok, about as casually as a Mac Truck) mentioned that she had cross-stitch projects from all the female members of the family framed and hanging on her wall and she would really appreciate one from me. Now, about the same time, my LSS hosted a sillhouette artist. Now, since my mother has sillhouettes of my sister and me and has always remarked fondly on them, I decided to get sillhouettes made of the boys. Then she mentions this cross-stitch thing and, silly me, I decide to combine the two and translate the sillhouettes of the boys into cross-stitch for my mother.

I started in November. I've had roughly six weeks and I got two boys done--even with my extra free time. Turns out my brilliant idea is HARD to execute!

But, as it so happens, I did get this far, and so maybe I'll have the other two boys done by her birthday (in September.)

Sorry about the sideways--Blogger is not cooperating! grrr!

Next up, Aramis' birthday. I made an awesome lasagna from scratch for him. Seriously, I wish I could put a sample on my blog because it was THAT good! We ate lasagna for two days and then I gave the rest to my neighbors. (I make an obscenely large lasagna.)

Three days later, it was Ian's birthday. Right about this time, someone on Freecycle put up some Batman decorations, so we actually had a theme going here. And since we decorated, we invited some kiddos over to share in cake and ice cream. I'm not up to hosting a full-on party, but I'll tolerate the neigborhood kids for an hour or so. Ian loved it. My little guy is six! Can you believe it?

Next up, of course, was Christmas. Thanks to some very special Christmas elves, we were able to fund Santa more than we had anticipated. It was a blessing, and unexpected, and oh, so welcome.

Getting ready for Santa takes up much of Christmas Eve. First, we must do the holiday baking, starting with GranMary's special Mincemeat cake. It's a Christmas tradition. The other part of the tradition is that no one but myself enjoys it, so I eat myself sick on this expensive treat. (still going!)

Then we bake cookies for Santa, open our Christmas pajamas (supplied this year by GranMary and Pa)--and btw, Ian was QUITE disappointed to find pj's and not a toy on Christmas Eve. You'd think the past six Christmases would have given him a clue! We put out reindeer food, to guide Rudolph and Co. But this year, I forgot until the day of to get the ingredients and had NO intention on going to ANY kind of store on Christmas Eve, so we improvised by putting out carrots. Zachary insisted we roll them in sugar ("because its shiny!") and then carefully arranged them into an arrow shape pointing at our door. After that, we track Santa on Norad and drink our foamy milk and eat our cookies. Finally we read "The Night before Christmas" and issue dire threats to all children about waking Mommy and Daddy before 7 am and put the kiddos to bed.

They actually went down without too much fuss--something that should have made me suspicious.

We let them sleep for about an hour or so before we get to work doing the last bit of wrapping and assembling. But the kids TRICKED us you see. They got up at 3 am--just when I was getting ready to put the toys out and drop off the stockings. So we wait.

And wait.

And wait for the kiddos to go back to sleep.

Not happening I tell you.

I drop off the stockings in front of the doors and say, let's go to bed. But Zacky GRABS his stocking as soon as he sees the lights go off in the livingroom and proceeds to WAKE UP his brothers!

At 4:30 we decided to just do Christmas as the kids would wake us in approximately 2 and a half hours anyway. We haul a semi-comatose Matthew and a-not-ready-to-be-awake-what's-this-Christmas-stuff-all-about-anyway?-Eli out of bed, set them among the toys and call out the other two.

Chaos ensued.

As you can see, the boys enjoyed themselves and had a great time. At seven am (our scheduled wake-up time) we sent the boys to their rooms with their new treasures and went to bed until noon. At some point, my BIL showed up because the kids woke us up to ask if they could let him in. I was only planning on sleeping until ten or so, but with an awake adult in the house, we grabbed a couple more hours. Then Christmas breakfast (lunch, brunch, whatever) and then I started making Christmas dinner.

We ended the day with only one child awake (I have no idea how Zachary managed it) watching WALL-E.

Oh, and I might mention that the tooth fairy and Santa Claus battled it out on Christmas Eve. Zack lost a tooth that morning, and I was awakened by the screams of Ian as Zack tried to dislodge a tooth in Ian's mouth that he just knew was loose too so they could both get visits from the tooth fairy that night. Because certain little boys refused to go to sleep, the tooth fairy managed to sneak in while putting away brand new toys Christmas morning. Luckily, Zack was so excited about Santa, he forgot to look for the Tooth fairy's present!

And now, I leave you with another Christmas tradition. Each year, my mother sends ornaments for the family and each year I also get each member a new ornament. We have a Christmas Code around here. Zachary is Santa's, Ian is Snowmen, Matthew is Teddy Bears, and Eli is Gingerbread men. This holds true in wrapping paper as well as ornaments. The boys also have their specific animals. Zachary is my Monkey Boy, Ian my Tree Frog, matthew my Mouseling, and Eli is my Eli-phant. So if its not one, it's usually the other. So I leave you with our new ornaments for this year.