Merry Christmas

How does this keep happening to me? Lately every year Christmas has been sneaking up on me. This year I thought that I was on the ball, and I started with some of my Christmas prep the day after Halloween. Sadly, it still wasn't enough time for me, either that or my list is too long!

Posting will be a little light until after the holidays. I'm looking forward to spending the holidays with my family. I can't wait to see my kids open their presents on Christmas morning. Claire gets so excited for anything that has to do with Christmas- today it was the flashing lights on my Mom's Christmas tree. Every two minutes you'd hear "WOW, flashing lights. Mommy! Flashing lights!" I need want to take time to record all of these seemingly simple things. Oh to be 2 1/2 again! 

Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays.

Daily December- 6-12 (more or less!)

I cannot believe that it's Christmas next week. I feel like I still have so much to do. My daily album is coming along well though- of course I'm a few days behind, but it will all come together eventually.

 Day 6 was a big day, so I used a transparency to separate the events

 Day 8 & 9. Originally I had a card sleeve separating these pages, but when it came to actually working with the pictures that I had printed, the sleeve didn't work. So, I just added the pics that I had and a few simple embellishments.

 Day 10- doesn't get much simpler than this, a little journaling block

 Day 12- some happy tape, a snowflake brad and a little journaling block

Days 7 & 11 aren't quite done yet- hopefully I'll be able to add those ones soon.

Claire's new cards

I have been working so hard to finish making some presents for Claire for Christmas. Again, this is probably something I should have started in July if I actually wanted to get them all done in time. One of Claires favorite things to do is to seek out my wallet and take out ALL of my cards. Generally I don't mind, that it of course until I go to pay for something and I can't find my debit card. So I decided to make Claire some of her own cards for Christmas. Actually I'm going to fill a purse for her- of things that she might find on my purse- maybe then she'll leave mine alone!

 I started by opening a document in paint and resizing it to my desired size. Then I coloured the background, and added the font. For the pictures (the flowers, stars and cow I used a dingbat font. I love dafont for free fonts & dingbats). For the Curious George card I got the pictures from the George website. I also made the backs of the cards too- complete with the black magnetic stripe! I then printed off the cards, glued the cards together, and laminated them.

 I added the images on the back of the cards so that Claire can practice counting while she's in the shopping cart.

 The cards in her new (Auntie's old) wallet.

 Hopefully Claire will love paying for the groceries with her Moostercard- I sure would love a break on my grocery bill!

Daily December- the first 5 days

 I am so excited that I'm making such progress on my album. I head into Walmart to print my pics, so I work on a few pages at a time. I'm love that I'm actually completing pages- journaling and all! I usually get so caught up on making my pages perfect, that it takes me ages to do just one page. For this project (and hopefully as a go forward) I'm remembering that it's just important to tell the story.

Day 1- just added some rub ons and some journaling strips.

 Day 2- I adhered the picture with my happy tape, and added a bit of journaling to one of the card protectors.

 Day 3- Used some decorative tape to add the picture, and a sticker.

Day 4- more journaling and a picture that Claire drew.

Day 5- rub ons, a small transparency, a round sticker, and a journaling block.

I feel like I should mention that the posting has been/will be a little light for a while.

A teething (and not sleeping) baby + a very busy toddler = one super exhausted mother/blogger

Hope to have things return to normal soon :)

hello Santa

Oh boy. I took the kids to see Santa this weekend. Can't say that I predicted this outcome. I thought for sure that Claire (2 1/2 yrs.) would be the resistant & crying one- but she left that up to Simon (6 months). Well- that's not entirely true, moments after we snapped this pic she burst into tears and ran to Super Auntie (my Sister).

What's funny about this, is that we asked Claire about 30 mins after seeing Santa, if she had a good time. She replied yes she did. I love that she remembers having a good time, even though she burst into tears and had a death grip on Auntie.

12 Days of Christmas decoration

December 1!! I love December so much. I finally got our Christmas decorations out today, much to the delight of my daughter. What I discovered though, is that I have a lot of decorations for my tree, but not nearly enough for around my house. So, I went to work and made this wall decoration. This was a fairly quick project that I did, using my cricut cutter. In hindsight, perhaps I should have used more Christmas-y colours, but the colours looked so nice together. I used a silver paper behind the red one (12 lords a-leaping) because it's impossible to match two shades of red. Well, I tried a LOT of shades and couldn't find two that looked right together.

wooden joy sign

 As we get closer to Christmas I should be checking projects off of my list. Instead I keep adding projects to it because I'm so inspired by projects that I see on the blogs that I read. 

As I was walking through the isle of our dollar store the other day I was keeping an eye open for some materials that would make a good project. I came across this plain wooden sign, and I knew that it would make a great (& cheap!) Christmas craft.

What you need:

wooden sign (check the dollar store)

scissors

paint 

Mod Podge

paint brush

scrapbooking paper

 cardstock

 cricut/sillouette/exacto knife

 ribbon

1. This is what my sign looked like when I bought it. Not so exciting is it?

2. I painted the sign white, although, you really just need to paint the edges white. (Sorry, the photo's not great, I was trying very hard to get the project done during naptime!) I also painted the eyelets, which I wasn't going to do, but I may have been a little bit too generous with the paint, and I got a bit of paint on the eyelets, so I decided to go ahead and paint them. I'm glad I did now.

3. I cut a piece of scrapbooking paper to cover the sign. Once I made sure that it was the right size, I took the paper off, covered the wood with a coat of Mod Podge, and then placed the paper back on the sign. I smoothed out the paper, trying to get rid of all of the air bubbles. Then I applied another coat of Mod Podge on top of the paper.

4. I used my cricut cutter to cut out the word joy, but this could be just as easily done with an exacto knife. Once I had my letters placed where I wanted them, I lifted up each letter, one at a time, and slathered on some more Mod Podge, and then placed each letter back down. Once all of my letters were down, I painted the final coat of Mod Podge on to seal everything. (I'm sure you probably don't need to use this much, but I wanted to make sure that everything was stuck on there, and sealed very well!)

 The last thing that I did was replace the chain with a piece of ribbon. And there you have it- a new Christmas decoration for about $4.

Linking up with My Backyard Eden & Fingerprints on the Fridge.