Sunday night (late, like 9 PM) I was settled in with my two oldest sons to watch an episode of "House" when I turned to my son and mentioned that he hadn't done a book report in a while and asked when the next one was due. He got that look that said, "Um, yeah, it is due tomorrow." I was NOT a happy camper. He pulled out the instructions and the book report required him to write a children's book version of the book he had read. Why, oh why can't they just write a report?!? In about an hour and a half (I was lecturing him for about 45 minutes of that) he wrote up the draft, downloaded some clip art and created his report using My Memories Suite, I thought it looked good for a last minute effort and he was able to complete it while I was lecturing him - very impressive. He came home on Monday he said his teacher was so impressed that she asked if she could keep it as a sample!! So much for for him learning not to put things off to the last minute.

PS: Do I get the mother of the year award for the best report or should I be guilt ridden that I didn't know that the report was due? In support of the guilt, Carter did have the due date of the report written very neatly in his calendar - if only someone had been looking at it!

Very Cool Bag and Free Giveaway

My cute friend is just posted the coolest bag on her blog and she has a give away too! You can change out the card in the bag's window and the cards she designed using the My Memories Suite software are darling! Just go leave a comment after her post about the bag and you could win a red mini tote. Here's a sneak peek of the bag.

Nicole and John

It is Sundance time here in Utah and my friend Nicole headed up to Park City under the guise of going to see a movie. The reality is that she was stalking her dream boy - John Kraskinski, aka Jim of The Office. There is a long story of how it all came to be but the short of it is that Nicole met him in a dark alley and though a proposal was not forth coming (darn it!), he did offer an autography and a photo op. Niocle is hilarious and several years ago sent out a Christmas card with a picture of her with Apollo Ono. Several months later, her grandmother saw Apollo on tv and called Nicole to let her know her "boyfriend" was on the tube! I thought Nicole might want to use this photo in her Valentines card so I created this for her using My Memories Suite. Then Nicole can tell her grandma that she can see her boyfriend every Thursday on NBC!

(I created this using one of the new design from the Design Shop. It is from the Ettes - their stuff is great. This layout is really just a tag - I imported it as a jpeg and then created this page.)

The best thing just happened! My 5th grade son won the school wide geography bee. Here's how it played out: There were 5 5th graders and 5 6th graders on the stage. The teacher went down the line and asked them all a question. Only Carter and one other boy got a question right in the first round. In the second round nobody got a question right which made Carter and the other boy the finalists. This stressed the teacher out and she decided to have another round. Now the practice questions were like this:

"This state is the closest state to fjords and active volcanoes."

Hard, but if you think it through you can figure it out. The actual test questions were NOTHING like that. I have a map hanging on my wall, I've been some places, I went to college and studied history and I knew the answer to ONLY ONE question!! Anyway, even after letting the other kids have another shot at it, we got to the final round and it was still between Carter and a 6th grader. They both missed the first two questions and then Carter won it with the last question.

Picture it, the suspense is building. Both kids hadvea whiteboard and have to write down their answer to the same question. They have 15 seconds to answer the question. They read the question and I had no clue what the answer was (ok, that the case with all the questions). My husband (who is way smarter than me but still can't be in charge of the boys getting their Eagle Scout) knew the answer (to ALL the questions) and whispered it to me. I was watching Carter write the answer and I could tell he got it RIGHT!! Unfortunately, the 6th grader missed it so Carter WON! Every kid needs to be the winner sometime so it was cool he got his moment. Anyway, this is your chance to prove you are smarter than me - and those other 9 elemetary kids. The question is written below, give yourself 15 seconds to answer it - no cheating!!

"Mexico City is located on the site of Tenovhtitlan, the island capital of what empire that was conquered by Spanish explorers in the 16th century?"

Seriously, that is HARD and nothing like the practice questions! (Can't figure it out? I'll post the answer tomorrow). As excited as I am for my son I have to say I think, like algebra, you can get through life without knowing this information. Really, there is only so much room in our brains and we have to save space so we can remember when we are supposed to be watching American Idol.

Conversations with a 13 year old boy

I picked my son up from school the other day and this is the conversation we had:

ME: How was school?
HIM: Fine
ME: Did you start a new piece in your Urban Scrawl class? (Do you see how smart I am? I have read all the parenting books about raising sons, I know you should ask specific questions to draw your children out!)
HIM: No
ME: Did you see Luke and Joe at lunch? Are they still getting ready for their big backpacking trip? (See, I am not giving up! I will continue to question him and show interest in his life and friends because I read that in the parenting book)
HIM: (Grunt)
ME: So did anything special happen today? (I know, it is open ended but I am running out of ideas here.)
HIM: No.
(I notice a blue bracelet on his arm that I haven't seen before.)
ME: Hey, what is the rubber bracelet you are wearing?
HIM: Oh, I go it from this guy who came and spoke to us today. He is in a wheelchair and is climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro to raise money for kids in Africa.
ME: Why didn't you tell me about it?
HIM: You didn't ask.

OF COURSE!! One of the questions, clearly should have been, "Did you have any motivational speakers today?" - why didn't the parenting books tell me that?!? Maybe because the people who wrote the parenting books DON'T HAVE ANY CHILDREN. Maybe I just didn't understand the instructions they gave me, this conversation is eerily like many of the conversations I have with my husband so maybe it is me - any thoughts?

Hospital Bag

When my youngest son was born he spent his first few weeks in the hospital. People left all sorts of goodies on our doorstep - flowers, meals, notes, Diet Coke, bags of Cadbury mini eggs (that is all I ate for three weeks). My sisters would haul the goodies up to the hospital and it always lifted my spirits. One of my favorite gifts was given to me by friend from high school. She sent a bag with an egg crate cushion for the chair/bed I was sleeping on, a notebook, a pen some lotion and chapstick. It made my stay in the NICU a hundred times better! Now whenever someone has a child in the hospital I send them a "hosptial survival bag." More than once I found myself at the hospital with no purse, which meant no money, which meant no Diet Coke and we all know what that means. I have also gone up for a short appointment to find myself there overnight unexpectedly with no clothes, toothbrush, comb etc. So I encourage poeple to leave this survival bag in their car so that always have a few comforts of home. Here is what I include:

-An egg crate for that horrible bed/chair you sleep on (if the friend lives locally).

-A cute bag.

-A makeup bag with lotion, carmex, toothpaste and toothbrush, deodorant, a comb, tampons.

-A comfortable pair of sweats (in case of throw up, spit up, blood).

-A funny book you can read a little at a time and set down.

-A notebook and pen for taking notes when the doctors come in.

-Cash, including change for the vending machines.

-A nice note (I made a cute one in My Memories Suite software** that matches this bag which is for my girlfriend in Minnesota)

One of my girlfriends received a box of thank you cards when her son was in the hospital because the giver thought it might be good for her to stay caught up on her thank you's while she was sitting with her son. NEWSFLASH! That is not a good idea. If your child is in the hospital people should not give you stuff that makes you feel like you have to do ONE MORE THING! You have enough things to do. And I don't care what Miss Manners says, I think this is the one time the thank you notes are optional!

**The card I created was made in the MMS software from scratch. I simply opened up a background and flourish embellishment from the Tinkering Ink Designer Pack that is available in the Design Shop. The rest is created with my cool fonts. But the best feature of the software is the color matching/color picker...I can easily match the text with my backgrounds and/or photos and I think it's one of my favorite features in the software.

And the winner is . . .

The winner of the cupcake book giveaway is Cheryl! (Cheryl send me a quick email with your address etc!). On another note:


I just got this text from my 13 year old son:


"Youll need to make us dinner"


He is at a scout activity with his 11 year old brother and didn't eat before he left. Why he thinks I was abducted and replaced by Donna Reid while he was gone is beyond me. Seriously, I have provided milk AND cold cereal. What more could he possibly want?

Traditional album to photobook

This is a page out of a scrapbook my mom, sister and I created out of my grandma's photos after she died in 2001. My grandma was a woman who liked to get stuff done so her photo albums consisted of those self adhesive books - she would just stick the photos in there and that was it. There were photos from 1971 next to photos from 1952 but they were in an album!!! In an effort to save the photos and restore some chronology we created these traditional scrapbooks. It was definately a labor of love. We presented the finished albums (3 volumes in all) to my mom's 3 brothers and her sister the Christmas after my grandma died. While they were thrilled to see the photos and read the stories my mom wrote they were also a little annoyed that they didn't have a copy of the photos OR the album. The albums had original photos, there was only one copy and the album posts were always coming apart. We had to treat them like small children we were all sharing custody of. This year I solved the problem! I scanned all the pages from the albums and imported them into My Memories Suite as backgrounds. Then I ordered photobooks for my aunt, uncles and siblings. It was super easy and fast and I was able to condense all three traditional albums into one photobook. The books were a huge hit and now we have gone from being the people who were hoarding the albums and photos (you know they were thinking it!) to being the favorites!

Let them eat cake(s) - 600 of 'em!

There was a request to see the 600 cakes so here they are . . . they wouldn't all fit on the stands so we just kept refilling! It seems fun in retrospect but I am pretty sure I am deceiving myself.

Cupcake Book Giveaway

I keep seeing this book - at the bookstore, at Costco, at Sam's Club. I have picked it up a few times and flipped through it but yesterday my girlfriend brought it in and I really sat down and looked at it. I HAD to run out and buy it. It makes you want to have a party just so you can make some cupcakes! I like it so much I decided one of you should have one too! So make a comment below and I will pick one lucky reader at the end of the week to receive the book!

In my former life I used to make wedding cakes and totally over the top birthday cakes. If I went to a kid's birthday and they had a store bought cake I was pretty sure that parent didn't actually love their child. I had my third child and got over that -my kids have had more than one ice cream cake, which feels like some kind of a step up from the grocery store cake! I got the obsession about fancy birthday cakes from my mom. She used to hand us a big stack of Wilson cake decorating books and let us pick any cake we wanted for our birthday. I had a hot air balloon cake, a grand piano cake (I didn't practice piano, I can't play it now, but I did take lessons!), and of course the infamous Barbie cake. I haven't totally given up on the cake decorating - a few years ago my little brother got married and I made 600 (!!!!) mini cakes for his wedding. After that my hiatus from cake decorating began! But I am back - reinvented as a cupcake decorator! I will keep you posted on how the designs work out!

This is a photo of the birthday cakes my mom made for my birthday circa 1978 . . . she made an individual cake for each kid at the party - oh the things mommy guilt drives you to do!

I just started this album on January 1st - I got the idea off some other brilliant person's blog. The concept is simple, you take one photo every day of the year and journal a few sentences about it. It may be a photo of your child, a photo of your dinner or a photo of your laundry (there are lots of days when I feel like that is all I see!!!). I am trying to keep it REALLY simple so that I will actually follow through on it. I am building the album in Polaroid My Memories Suite (http://www.polaroidmymemoriessuite.com/) which I love - it is all digital, the design is done and it is FAST!

So far I love making this album - it lets me include all those little things I normally wouldn't take a photo of but are a big part of my daily life - backpacks, laundry, snow shovels (I am SOO ready for spring!!) Yesterday I took a picture of my new tires - $650 dollars and I haven't gotten a single compliment on them all day! I hate buying tires, I feel like they are accessories for my car when I would rather buy accessories for ME! Anyway, at least now I have commemorated the occasion!