New Year's Eve

Just want to wish everyone a happy New Year! Seems like I just started getting used to writing 2007! It's amazing and scary how quickly time goes by.

A Page in my Visual Journal

Kylie loves playing with my computer and doing her letters. I printed her manuscript out and glued it on as the background for this page then used a creamy wash over it.

She hates Santa, as you can see!

Two books I bought at Borders in Keene when we went down to our son's for Thanksgiving: Salem Falls by Jodi Picoult (excellent!) and Double Cross by James Patterson (I'm hooked on Alex Cross!).

Secret Santa

Secret Santa at school was fun. When I went to the Yokohama Restaurant, where we had our party, I had mine narrowed down to 14 people! Most people already had theirs figured out. Luckily, I was not first to guess, so through a process of elimination, I was able to correctly identify my Secret Santa. Ironically, I was sitting right next to her.

Christmas 2007

Kylie had no idea what Christmas was all about...at the beginning. Once we started opening gifts, she got the hang of it and loved guessing what was inside the packages. She delivered the presents from Gwampa to the lucky recipient and helped that person open the gift. "What is it?" she kept asking.


She was thrilled with her Radio Flyer tricycle and her LLBean rocking moose.

As you can see, our Charlie Brown tree was small but filled with memories. I used my mom's 60-year old ornaments. We got the tree from my husband's logging job. He had cut a bunch of fir trees but couldn't limb them until the temperature got colder. So, we went up there on Saturday morning and he sawed a top off before running over the trees with his skidder to delimb them in the freezing temperatures.


I like this tree as opposed to the ones you can buy that come from a tree farm because those are just too perfect. The trimmed branches don't hold the ornaments like the old-fashioned ones do.


All in all, a great Christmas!

Poetry in the Mail

I guess I should have cropped this picture to get rid of my purple fleece!

I'm going through craft withdrawal! My work area is in the dining room and I had to put everything away because of Christmas. It'll come back out on Wednesday, that's for sure!

Adoption

I bought a white Deco Color opaque paint marker and it worked pretty well except for that one blob. I'd been looking for something white to use on dark backgrounds.

A Couple Poems and a Snow Day

I go for a walk just about every night so was tickled when the prompt at Sunday Scribblings was "Walk." I was pretty happy with the metaphor I used in this poem. I also posted it on the Creative Writing yahoo group I'm in and the moderator, Sharon, wrote a response poem. So I figured I'd include them both in my journal on this unexpected snow day.

I tried doing a bit of collage under the poems but I'm still not very good at it. I'll keep trying, though.

Owl says, "Whoooo"!

Back to Visual Journal Pages

Did this page for Thanksgiving week. We were away for part of it then had Kylie for the weekend so working on this took forever.

The Final Three

I wasn't sure what I was going to do with this page. There really wasn't a theme to it so I just started matching colors to the pictures and before I knew it, somehting was happening. I've always enjoyed Erin's visits, but this day was nuts with everything that was going on.












I was so happy to get back to babysitting Kylie when Erin went back to work at the mountain.
On this day we did my favorite thing: visited a bookstore.















This is the last page in the album. As it turned out I babysat Kylie on her first birthday. We had celebrated it before this day because both Erin and Shaun had to work. They get days off during the week but have to work on the weekends. Such is the ski business.

I really need to start an album for her second year which is coming to a close next Sunday!

Summer 2006

I was happy to get a picture of Kylie and her dad, Shaun. She looks so much like him.

I used burlap for the background and tried to keep it from getting to girly.














Here are the three of them. They do make a beautiful family!













Kylie and I had so much fun this day by ourselves while the others went tuna fishing.

We are in the middle of a snow storm today so school was cancelled.


I had a hard time with this layout because there were so many different colors in the photos. As you can see, I ended up changing them into black and white and going with red, silver and black. Kind of different for a baby's album but I was getting sick of pink!









This one is my first time using a transparency. I added the yellow under the stars and strip on the left. It was an easy way of getting a page done quickly. It almost felt like cheating!













We finally got a decent picture of four generations of women in our family. My mom hates this picture of her because she's looking in the wrong direction. I think she looks beautiful. I, on the other hand, am a mess! This was taken at my sister Nancy's birthday party and it was cool and windy and my hair went crazy. (It does that often! I got my dad's curls!)

Three More

Nathan hadn't seen Kylie since Christmas so he was amazed at how much she'd grown. I really didn't want to use pink on this page but I didn't have much choice because of Kylie's outfit. So, I mixed brown with it and really liked the results: not too feminine and not too masculine.













Once Erin was done working at the ski area for the spring, she didn't need me to babysit anymore and, boy, did we miss seeing her every Sunday. Funny how these little ones burrow into our hearts and settle in!













These pictures were taken on Easter. Kylie is wearing the cute jumper that my friend sent her from Florida.

The stamp is one I had made but can't remember the web site just now. The stamps really work!

Great Gloria is what my husband's mother decided she wanted Kylie to call her. When she saw her last week, Kylie was actually able to say it, sort of: "Gweat Gloalia."

It was a beautiful day and Gary had his motorcycle out and couldn't resist putting his doorag on her head. Such a cute little biker chick!

Three Kylie Pages

Figured I'd add several pages this time so I can get this done and return to my visual journal.


The first image was taken on my birthday and I couldn't think of anything I'd rather do than baby sit her. "Gwampa" went down with me, too, and she slept on his shoulder for quite a while. It was a nice day so we took her for a walk in her stroller.




The following Saturday Erin brought her up to our house and she stayed overnight and graced us with her first smiles. It was so great to see her reacting to us. Gary even held her for about an hour. He'd stick his tongue out at her and she'd stick hers out right back at him. We knew then that she'd be a pip. I think that's the moment he really fell in love with her.



I didn't take any pictures of Kylie the following Sunday because on my way down to babysit, I hit some black ice and rolled my 4-Runner over and totaled it. Luckily, I had my seat belt on so didn't get hurt at all but I was shaken up and just couldn't do anything after that except hold her.



I was so lucky to be able to baby sit her every Sunday and watch her change.