Back on a schedule

For awhile I was doing really good on a schedule where I would clean the house a little every day so that it never got too dirty and then I would have time to be crafty. Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans...I guess I can just say that spring happened to me. We've been dealing with the normal weeds because we got some rain, which would be fine except that the house we're living in was vacant for over a year before we moved in. And so the weeds and grass have had their run of the yard as much as they've liked for over a year and no one has tried to do anything about it. So my last two months have been spent waging war on the yard, trying to get it back in shape. I absolutely love my yard because it's so big. But over the last two months I've been cursing the fact that it's so big, and, in true Arizona fashion, is mostly rock (can I just say how much I despise desert landscaping?). As if that wasn't bad enough, there is a tree bed around the edges of the yard that line up with the grass. And with a year of no one keeping the grass out of the tree beds, the grass has decided it wants to go all the way to the wall. And, as if that wasn't enough, there are a bunch of dead bougainvillea in the yard, and when I saw all the fruit trees at the home improvement store, I decided to replace it myself. My original intentions were good...Jason had wanted to remove all the weeds, and I should have just had to replace the plants. But there's something about my poor husband who is already working three or four jobs trying to spend about 15 minutes a day pulling weeds, and I took pity on him and have pretty much done all the work myself (except for the one weekend when I got sick of the kids playing video games while I was working and made them "help"--I don't think I got much actual help out of them, but at least they learned something...I hope).

At this point, I'm declaring victory over the yard. There's still some grass in the tree beds (which I've told J, after all the spider bites I've endured in those tree beds, it's now up to him and the kids to get rid of the rest of the grass), and today's chore time was taken up with pulling weeds in the front yard before it gets bad enough to get a notice from the hoa. So now my time this week is going to be spent taking back the cleanliness in my house, It's amazing how quickly it all falls by the wayside when you've spent hours in the yard and are too tired to do more than dishes or clean something that is obviously dirty. The nice thing about attempting to get back on a cleaning schedule is that it means that I've had time to do what I want to do again. I think with how long it takes me to get one page done that I'll never be caught up scrapping, but at least these are a few more memories preserved.

 I was happy with this one when Jason said that it's one of the best I've done. I love it when I'm able to top my best. It was also a lot of fun to scrap these pictures because this really shows Lindsay's personality.

 I wanted to really emphasize the big, so I added some Crystal Effects on the word to give it dimension and shine.

 This one gave me a lot of trouble. Sometimes you have a layout that just comes together really easily and works out great (like the one above), but this was not one of those. I had it in my mind some of the elements I wanted, like the circle, and the sequential pics on the bottom, but I had to rearrange a dozen times until I was finally satisfied with how it came out. I can't say I really love this page, but it worked out well enough.

 This sequence of pics is one of my favorite, although for some reason I forgot to capture her actually landing in the pool with a splash!

I've been trying to stop being such a hoarder, and this new metal flower worked perfectly for the page and I got to use something that would otherwise still be hanging on my wall.