Weekend whirlwind

 My dad started a new job last week, one in which he's returning to drive trucks long haul and will only be home two days for every two weeks he's on the road. The last time he started driving long haul, it became incredibly difficult to see him, never knowing when he was going to be home (they would start sending him home, only to get him close to California before sending him off to the east again), and he lost so much weight that we all worried about him. Well, in talking with my mom Wednesday night, we found out that he was going to be home Thursday before hitting the road again Friday night. Thursday was also my mom's last day of school, and the plan had been that we would meet up in Blythe, Ca for me to give her my kids for almost six weeks. Well, when I found out that there was a short opportunity to see my dad, and let my kids see my dad, I hatched a very quick plan to be there Thursday night. So Thursday morning, I let the kids in on what we were going to do and we packed up and hit the road. As we started hitting the edge of Orange/Los Angeles counties, I had Bailey help me scheme to find out where my mom was so we didn't have to drive to a few different places looking for her. Since it would have been unusual for her to text my mom and ask her where she was, I told her to start with missing her Grandma and easing into finding out what she was doing and where she was. Well, Bailey did a fabulous job finding out where my mom was without my mom suspecting anything, but she had told my mom that she missed her cousin Hannah since my mom had just mentioned she had Hannah with her. So as we're pulling up to the major intersection before my mom's house, my mom called me on my cell phone. I put her off, telling her we'd call back in a few minutes, and minutes later we pulled up to her house. We were trying to be sneaky around her kitchen windows, and we were lucky she wasn't in the kitchen, so we were able to make it to the front door undetected. I got the kids on the top doorstep and had them knock...and boy was my mom surprised to find three of her grandkids standing there.

We had a lot of fun that night, the kids got to play with two of their cousins, and I got to spend time with my brother and sister-in-law, my brother's kids and my parents. But, the next morning I had to hit the road and get back home, so I made a quick visit to my grandma's house--I can't go all the way to my parent's house and not see my grandma--and then hit the road again.

When I finally got home, I was exhausted, and got to relax for about an hour when Jason sprung his surprise on me. Last year, for our ten year anniversary, we had decided ahead of time that we wanted to do something big to celebrate. And then the time came, and circumstances being what they were, we ended up doing nothing. I don't even think we had a date for our anniversary last year. Well, I guess that's been bugging my husband for a year now, and he decided that this year we would celebrate. So the only good thing about living in Arizona for the summer, is that the resorts are super cheap. And since we're used to the weather anyway, it's no big deal for it to be 100 degrees out to us because that's what it's like at home. He was playing in a tennis tournament in Carefree, Az Saturday morning, so he decided that I should join him at the resort and we would stay there all weekend. It was the most relaxing, enjoyable weekend, not worrying about what things I needed to accomplish that day, but just being able to enjoy it, and spending alone time with my sweet husband celebrating our anniversary and father's day. I was happy to have been able to capture some pictures of my husband playing tennis, something I don't get to watch very often, we did some window shopping, saw a movie, went to a great restaurant for dinner where they had a wonderful live band playing. This was the first time in our marriage that we have ever just picked up and left for the weekend on a moment's notice, but I sincerely hope it won't be our last. Having begun our marriage with a child, and having two more join us shortly after, we are so blessed to have family take them in the summer and allow us time to focus on each other and strengthen our marriage. I don't think anyone could have chosen a better husband for me than Jason, who is just an amazing man, a wonderful father, and the most incredible husband.

Anniversary

It's been eleven years since this beautiful June day in Southern California. And as much as we've struggled or gone through trials, I wouldn't change a moment of it. I'm so happy that through this crazy life, I have my very best friend by my side.

Catalog update

I'm embarrassed to have made a mistake, but in my excitement about how early I can get catalogs this year, I missed the announcement by Stampin' Up! that says I can't actually sell the catalog until July 1. I am allowed to give them out for free beginning June 20, so if you want to place a $50 for retiring items, I can get you your catalog on June 20, otherwise, I can begin selling the catalog on July 1. I spent an hour pouring over the new catalog this afternoon, and it is just beautiful! There are some exciting new stamps and accessories that I definitely can't wait to get my hands on! If you have any questions or want a new catalog, just let me know.

It's the most wonderful time of the year

Okay, so call me a little crazy, but this time of the year is almost like a second Christmas to me. There's only one month left on the current catalog, which means that it is officially the new catalog transition period. The retirement list came out tonight, and I'm happy to say that I haven't lost many stamp sets. I'm really sorry to see some of the accessories go, though (especially some of the punches!), but I'm hopeful that will mean room for more fun products to take their places. I'm also super excited because I should get my new catalog really soon (one of the perks of being a demonstrator!). For the first time ever, I will also be able to receive my box of catalogs in early June. Please let me know if you would like a new catalog so I can make sure to order enough. They are $5 which just covers my cost on them, or they are free with a $50 order. To view the retiring products, click here which will take you to my website where you can order (you can also call or email me your order). While the stamps will be available through June 30, the accessories on the retirement list are on a first come-first served basis, and once supplies are exhausted, they are gone. I have seen some accessories sell out on the first day in the past, so if you have your eye on an accessory on the retirement list, don't hesitate to place your order. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Finding creative ways to say thank you

Every year, as we reach the end of April, I start the arduous task of trying to figure out what to make the teachers for end of the year gifts. It's especially difficult in years like this year when a younger child has the same teacher as an older child, so you have to be careful not to duplicate gifts you made in the past (as if I can even remember what I did!). It's so important to me to thank our teachers, though, because they work so hard and get paid so little all to deal with children all day long (and adults who act like children after that). My kids have been blessed to have great teachers minus an exception or two, pretty successful when you consider that they've had 14 different teachers. This year, we had two female teachers and a male teacher. Most of the time I'm able to make the same thing for each of the teachers, but I didn't think our male teacher would really dig the gift I made for the female teachers, so I made him something different. This was the gift for the female teachers:

 I found cute little pails in the dollar section, filled them with beans and wrapped some ribbon around it. Since the pails were slippery and tapered, I added some hot glue to make sure they didn't move.

 Then I took some stick pens and wrapped them with green patterned paper (you could use card stock, but it's so thick, you would really have to roll the paper on the edge of a table a lot before you wrapped it around the pen to get a nice curve instead of creases). For this part, the thinner the paper is, the easier it is to get it to curve nicely. After that, I made the flowers. They are an origami fold called Kusudama and you can google a tutorial for them, I found that it was helpful to use both a picture tutorial and video tutorial, especially when I got stuck on one part and couldn't figure out what the picture was trying to show.

 After I was done with the flowers, I had to cut the bottom off each so that I had something flat to glue to the top of the pen. I hot glued the flowers to the top, and then I stuck a pen through the middle of a purchased paper flower and pulled it up to sit at the base of the folded flower. Then I glued up the petals and wrapped a little ribbon around the bottom to clean it up a little. Finally, I added some glitter glue to the petals of the flowers to give them a little bling. To give credit where it's due, I found this project on another blog here and used this picture tutorial for the flowers here (I don't have a link to the video tutorial I used, I just found it by searching).

 For the male teacher, I liked this project for the simplicity (especially after folding all those flowers), and I thought it would be useful as well. I was able to use some rub ons I had on hand, and stamped his name, kind of making it look like a chalk board.

 

The pencils are held together by a cup in the middle. Try to find a cup that has sides as straight as possible. The gaps in the pencils at the top are due to the tapering of the cup, so even though I thought I had really succeeded at finding a straight cup, it highlighted how wrong I was.

I tried to think of a quick but cute design for the gift bags, and I thought they turned out good, and they were super quick to make.

                                                                        

 

The cards came from a project I'm working on with my scraps, I have three different cards with the same design, just a different rub on for each and I let the kids choose which ones they wanted to use. 

I know they are really simple in design, but I made them entirely out of scraps (well, except for the card base), I would even include the rub ons as scraps because they were left over from another project a long time ago, so it was nice to be able to use them here.

I also decided to include a small gift card for each teacher, that way they can get something useful in addition to something cute. I hope the teachers like them and know how much we appreciate their hard work with my kiddos throughout the year.

Eager to heal

It's been a week since my injury, and I'm healing up pretty well. I ditched the crutches a couple days ago; not because I really thought I was ready to be done with them, but they were tearing up my sides and I was frustrated with them, so I decided to just limp around. Today I've been working on walking slowly but with as little limp as possible. It's been a pretty good day, I've only had to put it up a couple times because of swelling, and although it's hurting, I don't think it's hurting bad for how much I've walked on it. The best part of today is that it's been my first day that I've been able to sit at my desk and work, so I'm really happy about that. I've got a pretty big project that I've been working on which I'll be posting about when I'm done with it. So I might not be posting a lot of projects in the coming weeks, not because I'm not working on stuff but because the project I'm doing is going to be taking a lot of hours to finish. I'm sure I'm going to have to take a break from my project to figure out teacher year-end gifts, so I'll post those when I've completed them too. But for now, I'm just really happy to be physically capable of sitting in my craft room working.

I love it so much it hurts

I always knew my competitive streak was going to cause problems for me. Most of the time I come home from softball with funny stories and what I call war wounds. Like this, for example:

 I say that you know you're having fun when you come home dirty and this is no exception.

On the same dive, I got these and a couple more scrapes on my legs. But I was so proud of myself because I really should have been out. My at bat started out nice with a great line drive up the middle, earning me a base hit. Then, while on first, the catcher dropped the ball, so I took off for second. After a couple steps, I looked back to see how far the ball had gotten and realized the catcher came up with it quickly and I was toast. She just looked at me like, where are you going to go? I quickly made up my mind, took one fast step back toward first and then dove. It was a good enough play that I was able to get under the tag and I was safe back on first. I ran into bigger problems, though when I was going on a short base hit trying to make it to third. I have been taught, and really do know, that you either slide or you don't. If you do something in between, you get hurt. Well, I decided way too late to slide and rolled my ankle into third. I was able to get back up after a minute and finished playing the game (and then played a second game after), but by the time I got home, I knew I was in trouble. I was really having trouble walking, but I was kind of hoping that some ice, elevation, and some rest that I might be ok today. I think halfway through the night that wasn't going to happen, though because it was aching all night long and as soon as I woke up, I knew I wasn't going to be able to walk on it. Unfortunately, I chose the worst day possible to be injured because today is AAA's annual take your child to work day. Two years ago, J took Bailey, and then last year Cole got to go. So Lindsay has been waiting anxiously for this day to come, so I had to let him go to work and leave me to take care of myself. As soon as I dropped the kids off at school, I headed over to urgent care for some x-rays. The good news is that I didn't break it. The bad news is that I severely sprained it, so I can't bear weight for a week and am stuck in a splint and ace bandage. So here's my new fashion accessories:

I'm already discovering how difficult this is going to be at my age. I don't know how my mom did it last summer with her knee. As much as I'd love to be forced to just sit and take it easy, I don't think this is how I wanted to do it. I shudder to think what my house will look like with a week of me not cleaning up, and for now the discomfort is really getting to me. Maybe now would be a good time to teach Charlie to fetch whatever I need for me.