some scrapping

Here is a fairly 'orange' layout (with a fairly, I mean VERY ordinary photo). Double click on the image if you want to read journaling.

This lightweight cotton blanket or 'throw' was a gift to eldest girl last Christmas and she drags it around the house with her.  She has always been a decent reader but has really got into choosing her own books and reading for pleasure over the past few years. It's a great thing and I'm not complaining, but being a reader and having night owl tendencies do have it's downsides, which are seen the next day with a tired and possibly grumpy girl.  Of course we tell her to turn the light off and go to sleep, and God love her, she gives it a go, but half an hour later when sleep hasn't come and she is still awake, she can be found under her covers reading by the light of a nintendo DS.

This old patterned paper has been sitting in my stash for years, just waiting for the right moment, and the moment arrived with the orange, pink and blue that came through in this photo.

The next layout is also of eldest girl. A photo you may have already seen as I took it in Melbourne last year on a horse & cart ride. I love the cathedral in the back ground. This was her favourite photo of the trip so I scrapped it as a 6x8 enlargement on a page of it's own.

We went to Melbourne for ballet and I hadn't yet scrapped any of the ballet related Melbourne photos, even though that was the point of the trip and the main story that had to be told.  In the following image below, I added the other remaining key photos of our Melbourne trip and a block of journaling to a 8x10 'canvas' in photoshop and printed the whole thing out as an 8x10 and stuck it on a 8.5x11" piece of green cardstock and these two Melbourne layouts sit beside each other in her album.

And yay, it is done. I was so mad at myself for leaving the scrapping of this event so long. The photos were taken in Sept last year, and the story was there THEN, and it was hard to take my mind back 8 months and scrap it. It was a really great time for us, and I wish I'd scrapped it at the time, might have done it more justice. Well, never mind, it is done now, and we both love looking back on these photos, and I hope she'll enjoy reading the story in years to come.

I know I'm at least a good week late with these - sorry, but I'm lucky to have got here at all!

BACK

I'm back! No I am not ill, no my husband hasn't left me, no I haven''t been in rehab...or prison, no I haven't lost any close family members, yes, life just got a bit busy. Thank you so much for all your emails of concern and 'are you okay's'. Lovely to know you guys care - really, I was most touched.

I thought I was gonna return two Fridays ago, but it didn't quite happen. Then I thought I was going to return last Friday, but then it, too, didn't quite happen. So here I am returning to blog land. I need to scrap my current routine, cause it would make your head whirl. It is crazy, and the annoying thing is that I always thought mothers who had crazy lives thanks to their children were S.T.U.P.I.D! I never wanted to be one, yet here I am.  Just preparing and organising all the food for them so they have decent meals and snacks is almost a full time career. Meals are often on the run and at varying times - ie must plan portable food that doesn't necessarily have to be hot, or at least pack it in thermo-insulated packing to keep it warm, (and make it contain some decent protein, so they are fuller longer, and apparently the protein helps with muscle they are using lots of muscle!). You get my drift. It is very difficult to decide what is worthwhile (as far as the bits that make up my routine) and what is just plain STUPID. What the kids love and are decent at helps the decision making process, but doesn't help the chaos. They only do a couple of things each, but I guess when the few things gets times by three... Opportunities for certain special activities outside of the normal arise (ie involving gym, music and ballet), and I feel I can't just say, "Well, sorry, I really don't feel like driving that day". Sometimes I just gotta grin and bear it, but don't worry, plenty of things get knocked back and refused. I have never been organised like I am now. And add preparing CV's so your kid can get into out-of-area high schools (high school?? What the...) and add attending interviews with principals and diagnostic tests for those schools to the already lovely schedule.  So my brain was and is full, and that is why I had to go on blog holiday for a minute or two (or a month or two).

I found it helpful to step right away from this screen in front of me, and instead, when I needed some rejuvenation, I found myself here.

I played piano a lot as a kid - first just pottering as a child, and then taking lessons as a teenager. I have been without a piano for about 18 years, but just last year, I sold lots of my husbands old lego sets on ebay (hehe - don't worry I got his permission) and with the lego selling proceeds bought this digital piano. Yeah, there was a fair bit of lego, and it was old and 'retro' being from husbands childhood. And if you knew my husband you know it was all in pristine condition with original perfect instructions. (Um, obviously we didn't sell any of MY old lego...or middle childs lego...). Don't worry, he did keep all his favourite sets.  I haven't played for, well, like 18 years, but recently found my old exam books and have been finding much pleasure getting back into it again.  I push all the lovely kids out the door for school at 9am, and sit down at my piano with my coffee instead of losing myself in the computer. Piano is very therapeutic and relaxing and wonderfully solitary - so apart from being taxi and head chef and life orgainser around here, this is somewhere I've been lately.

So what else has been happening? I've taken a few photos of some families which is fun. It's 'full on', in a hard way to explain, but quite rewarding. Here's a few of the most recent: A little girl and her baby sister, sitting in front of their garage door; a 8 day old girl; and a family at a local beach.

During the past month we went a park just down the road for my nieces 5th birthday.  We took a standard shot of all the cousins, actually it was the first one we've taken since the baby in the picture was born, there were scooter races, and 2 yr old red headed boy found the bubbler (drinking fountain) and delighted in getting very wet (and naked!).

 

We endured a very wet weekend in March, so by Sunday afternoon I let my girls return to their younger years and paint. Bad mother that I am, I pretty much never let them do this any more at home, hoping instead that the school teachers do it. I went to my studio (5 minutes away), gathered up all the old acrylic paints, lots of paper and lots of my brushes, and brought it all home for them. I completely covered the dining table with newspaper and let them go for it. They had unlimited pieces of paper, so they just kept painting! Kept them occupied for a good hour or more!

And speaking of painting, I did a little painting to get a 'red' thing I had going on out of my system - I decided to call the piece, 'green tea' even though it is all about the red for me (confused? - yeah me too - blame it on the full brain). It is very different to the usual landscape that I paint, and I find it quite difficult to get red into my landscape paintings, so I got it out of my system with this. Weird, but it was fun.



Now I'll have you know that I HAVE scrapped, and WILL be back with scrapping SOON!!
I PROMISE!!!