Project Life - Week 5

Welcome to Project Life 2013! If you are new to my blog, welcome! I hope you will stay a while. I'm Jessica, wife to Juan, mommy to 1 year old Maddie. I am also an electrical engineer by day and I am participating in Project Life, a different way to record our lives by taking one photo a day. This was inspired by the fabulous Becky Higgins who has put together a wonderful kit to make this challenge easier.

I am using the digital kit on shutterfly (hopefully Olive once it has been released), find more info at http://www.beckyhiggins.com/blog. This digital version uses Shutterfly and is SUPER easy to use! See my completed pages for 2012 using the Shutterfly Cobalt kit HERE.

And finally, my POTW (pictures of the week):

Tuesday - Gas is $3.28 per gallon. It cost over $41 for 12-1/2 gallons to fill the CRV. That typically lasts about a week. Good thing I work so close!

Wednesday - Maddie has become obsessed with watching "Up". She likes to watch "moo" - movies; but after about 10 minutes always says...."up, up". I'm not sure why she loves this movie so much, but often she won't even watch Sesame Street, Super Why or Monkey See Monkey Do (her favorite shows). I think its the balloons!

Thursday - I gave Maddie a pringle today. She was hesitant, but then quickly finished it and asked for more. In hindsight, probably not the best thing to introduce her to.

Friday - I came home to find Maddie dressed in this crazy fashion. When I asked Juan, he said that Maddie picked it out and wanted to wear it. Hmmmm not sure I believe that one. 

Saturday - Today was busy. We went to Nana's and installed some Elfa in her washer/dryer room which she and Maddie played. They even painted with watercolors for the first time. I think Maddie was more excited to play with the cotton swabs.

Then we took Maddie to the park at Moss Haven Elementary. She was a little tentative and more interested in watching the older kids play. She did like hanging from the monkey rings, she is quite a strong little thing. We let her slide down the slide a couple of times, but she was more interested in trying to climb up them.

Then I made beef stroganoff and broccoli for dinner. Long, fun, exhausting day.

Sunday - We took Maddie to church today and she immediately went ballistic. It didn't help that about 4 other children were already crying in the room. The director talked to us and said it was better for us to just quickly leave. I explained to her that Maddie had screamed the entire service for two weeks in a row and they hadn't called us, so we stopped coming to church for about 6 weeks. This was our first week back trying again. She said that she would stay and make sure she calmed down. We came back after the service to find her sitting with Maddie in a stroller in the hall near the door eating goldfish. She said they thought we should try her in the next room up as Gerrie was more soothing with some of the little ones. Maddie was definitely glad to see us, so we let her play in the playground for a bit.

It was another very busy day. After church, Juan installed the electric fence so Dallas would stop jumping over the dog run fence. We also found Maddie inside the fireplace, yes inside it. Finally, we went to our neighbors, the Wideman's, for dinner. Their son, Henry, is just a couple months older than Maddie. When we arrived at their house and I took Maddie out of her stroller, she took off running down the sidewalk. I finally picked her up and carried her into their house and she was crying uncontrollably. I think she thought we were leaving her there. It took about 45 minutes before she calmed down and started exploring their house without hanging on to one of us. By the end of the night, she was laughing and playing with Henry, showing him how to use his animal pop-up toy. Maddie has her first molar on the bottom right.  She has one on the bottom left trying to bust through as well. Maddie has started wanting to climb the stairs alone everytime we go up. Daddy usually goes upstairs with her when we put her to bed. He started saying "boom, boom, boom" and stomping with his hands on either side of her as she climbs the stairs. She loves it and now when I tell her its time to go upstairs for bed, she yells, "Dad" "boom" and expects him to come to go up with her. It is very sweet.

Monday - Maddie LOVES snack time. Dried cranberries are one of her favorites. Daddy taught her how to give butterfly kisses and it makes her laugh hysterically. I give her eskimo kisses, and she laughs at those too. She loves her playroom and is getting very good at her puzzles and games.

Thanks for visiting!

Project Life - Week 4

Welcome to Project Life 2013! If you are new to my blog, welcome! I hope you will stay a while. I'm Jessica, wife to Juan, mommy to 1 year old Maddie. I am also an electrical engineer by day and I am participating in Project Life, a different way to record our lives by taking one photo a day. This was inspired by the fabulous Becky Higgins who has put together a wonderful kit to make this challenge easier.

I am using the digital kit on shutterfly (hopefully Olive once it has been released), find more info at http://www.beckyhiggins.com/blog. This digital version uses Shutterfly and is SUPER easy to use! See my completed pages for 2012 using the Shutterfly Cobalt kit HERE.

And finally, my POTW (pictures of the week):

Tuesday - Maddie loves the outdoors. It was nice enough to let her play outside today and she had a ball playing peek-a-boo from behind the columns on our porch. She thought it was quite a blast!

Wednesday - I was travelling again today for work.  Nothing like the security checkpoint at Love Field. Glad to be home.

Thursday - Dinner from pintrest tonight "Slow Cooker Hawaiian Meatballs" from Six Sisters. Yummy, easy and definitely one we will make again!  

Slow Cooker Hawaiian Meatballs Recipe

Ingredients:

32 oz. package of precooked, frozen meatballs (you could use turkey meatballs)

13.5 oz can of unsweetened pineapple chunks (put juice aside)
1 large green pepper, diced
1 cup of brown sugar

2 Tbl. cornstarch
2/3 cup of white vinegar
2 Tbl. Soy sauce

Directions:
Place meatballs in crock pot and top with green pepper and drained pineapple chunks.  In a separate bowl, mix reserved pineapple juice, brown sugar, cornstarch, vinegar and soy sauce.  Pour sauce over meatballs, pineapple and green peppers.  Cook on low for 3-4 hours or until heated through.

Friday - Maddie loves to eat. Just sitting in her highchair excites her. I am so glad that she is such a good little eater.

Saturday - Maddie is obsessed with my jewelry box. She has figured out how to open it and all of the wonderfulness inside. She tries to pull down all of the necklaces. This evening I heard Juan telling her to stay out of "Mommies jewelry box" and then I hear him laughing hysterically. I came upstairs to see this. She knows necklaces go over your neck and she desperately tried to put this one over her head, only it is not as long as most of them, so she ended up wearing it like a headband. She was quite proud of herself.

Sunday - Maddie received a belated birthday present from my friend Sabrina in Kansas. It was the most adorable little K-state cheerleading shirt and skirt/pants. She also sent some super cute hair barrettes, but Maddie won't keep them in. We took her for a walk today and she was quite excited. Maddie has had another of her incisors come in.  Her upper right one.  Her upper left one is almost through.

Thanks for visiting!

SYTYCS #6 - My Own Little Doll

Is tomorrow really Monday? Where did the weekend go. Here is my layout for Colorful Creations - So You Think You Can Scrap Week 6.  This layout is photos of my DD at 36 days old laying in my cabbage patch doll's bed.  She was so tiny. 

This week's challenge was quite a bit more difficult: 

Use the sketch below to create a MONOCHROMATIC layout. You can pick your color.  You may use black or white letters for journaling or titles only.  Layout MUST be double page just like the sketch. You MUST stay true to the sketch. You MUST use ALL of the following items on your pages:

Die cut

Border punch

Flowers (at least TWO MUST be handmade)

Bling

Butterflies

I used pink as my color scheme. The papers are all MME and the large paper die-cut is all pink from Making Memories. I used scraps of Bazzill and other cardstock papers as well, all varying shades of pink.  The border punch is from Fiskars and is along the left side vertically. The butterflies are jenni bowlin studio, but I removed the white pearls and added clear bling to meet the challenge requirements. The yo-yo flowers are handmade, there are two large ones in the large flower clusters on the left and two more smaller ones on the photos along the bottom. The other flowers are all Prima and all varying shades of pink. The chipboard die-cut was MME, also pink. The ribbon is pink, and the bling is all clear. Everything is pink, even the ink used to distress the papers and the line stamp I used for the journaling.  I used pink and white stickers for my title and black ink for the journaling.

I am also submitting this in the MME & Gossamer Blue Design Contest.

Here are a few close-up photos:

Materials used:  paper - MME, Bazzill, unknown; die-cut - Making Memories; flowers - handmade from stash & Prima, bling - Basic Grey, Want 2 Scrap, & TLC, chipboard die-cut - MME; Girl blocks sticker - Making Memories; border punch - Fiskars; ribbon - unknown; butterflies - Jenni Bowlin Studio; letter stickers - Thickers.

Thanks for visiting.

What's Cooking - SC Blog Hop Sketch & LGS

I don't know about you, but I am GLAD it's Friday! After three days without my laptop, it was finally returned to me as good as new! Thank God! They managed to save everything on my hard drive. What I didn't realize is how much my life revolves around this laptop. I was completely un-efficient at work and then couldn't catch up at night, didn't blog my daily pics, couldn't scrapbook, and the list goes on and on.  You would think I was completely off the grid, but I wasn't. I still had my Iphone, Ipad, and hubby's laptop.  Goodness.  It took all week to complete, but I finally finished a layout with our Halloween pictures this year. 

The left side was created using the Scrapbook Challenges Blog Hop sketch with Kristine Ponte's additional challenge to use stitching.  I used "faux" stitching around the "cooking" title letters and along the red border.

Here is an up-close photo of the stitching:

For the right side of the layout I used the Let's Get Sketchy sketch for February Week 1:

Here is the sketch: 

I added a second photo and used a recipe file in lieu of the tag.  My recipe is a recipe for a great Halloween photo shoot.  Here is an up-close picture of the recipe:

Materials Used:  Paper - MME & TPC Studio; boarder punch - Martha Stewart; rub-on - Karen Foster Design; Title letters - Pebbles; flower marker - the girls' paperie; recipe - TPC Studio; border flags - Basic Grey; button - unknown; twine - unknown; chipboard - Maya Road.

Thanks for visiting! Your comments mean so much!

Press Your Luck Challenge - Because of You, I am a Mother

Not much accomplished on the scrapping front today, laptop still fried; but I did finish one single page layout to live adjacent to the last layout I created.  This one is for the Press Your Luck challenge over at Colorful Creations.

I picked #20 and my challenge was to use: one cardstock, 2 pattern papers, 3 flowers and 4 buttons. My cardstock is the orange mat, the pattern papers are the purple stripes and the polka dots, the three flowers are orange, pink, and green, and the four buttons are at each flower and the dot on the I.

I used the sketch from Creative Scrappers - Sketch #246.


Here are a few closeups:

 

 

 

 

 

Materials Used: paper - Bazzill and LYB; flowers - Recollections; buttons - CTMH; rub-ons - DaisyD's.

Thanks for visiting! I hope you had a scrappy weekend! 
 

SYTYCS#5 - Maddie & Her Mobile

Hello to all my creative blogging friends!

I am definitley not off to a very good Sunday morning! Last night I inadvertantly spilled soda on my laptop. I didn't think it was much and everything seemed to be working properly.  A couple hours later the whole system shut down and refused to reboot. When I lifted it up, I realized there was a puddle of soda under the laptop. After many unsucessful attempts at rebooting, it finally gave me an error message that said there was an error and Windows was unable to load and then shut down. I hoped it just needed to "dry out" but this morning it won't turn on at all.  :(   This is not good considering it is my work computer, but I also keep all of my personal stuff on it including my pictures. Thankfully I backup to a hard drive often, but haven't done that since the beginning of the year. If the information is unrecoverable, I will have lost all of my pictures since January.  :(

I also failed miserably with the January LOAD over at Let's Scrap. I only completed 22 traditional layouts. With the digital I completed 53, which isn't bad but I was really hoping to complete the LOAD traditionally.

Oh well, life sometimes gets in the way. Moving on to SYTYCS (So You Think You Can Scrap) #5 over at Colourful Creations. I am still hanging in there, this is week #5.  Here is my layout:

Here is the sketch we were to use.  We were also required to use distressing, a recycled item, & tearing. 


I used tearing at the top and bottom of the patterned papers, I used ink distressing on the orange paper at the bottom as well as distressing the edges of my photos with a distressing tool. For the recycled item, I used a Prima flower cardboard packaging and punched out hearts that I used around the stitched circle.  Here is the flower packaging I used:

I'm also playing along with Lessology and their Challenge #21- You are my sweetheart. This challenge is to Upcycle a heart-shaped box OR punch out some hearts...incorporate a heart in your creation. Remember, you can create anything you like as long as it includes at least one upcycled item.  I used the heart shape punches from the recycled Prima product packaging (seen above).

Finally, I decided to play along with Frosted Designs - Fabulous Friday challenge - Love + Heart (Use the word "love" and at least one heart on your layout.  I used the word Love in spanish "Amore" on my layout and the little punched hearts around the stitched circle.

Here are a few closeups of my layout:
 

 

 

 

Materials Used: Paper - LYB; Decorative edge circle - LYB; Mobile sticker - EK Success Jolee's by You; quickutz - tabs; buttons - CTMH; distresser - CTMH; 3D stickers - LYB; stitching - Bazzill; punches - EK Success; Marvy Uchida, and Creative Imaginations; ink - CTMH; rub-on - Making Memories; border strip - Queen&Company.

Thanks for visiting!