love, love, and more love

I'm totally slacking in pretty much everything at the moment. Boys have been back in school this week, thank goodness! Although Jace was out Wednesday and Josh is home today. Totally unrelated illnesses and symptoms, too. It's always fun wondering how many more of us will get sick. Even though I've had a few days to catch my breath after being full time mom for two weeks, I am still behind on housework, laundry, creative team responsibilities, email, projects for my husband's business. Seems to be... the story of my life. How many times have I said that? Ha! How many times have I complained about not being able to balance everything? LOL Geez, it's embarrassing to think about. So enough of that. Moving on to the good stuff.

First, tooting my own horn. How many of you have seen the Fall 2010 Edition of the Altered Hearts Zine?

 

Two of my recent layouts (love them & life with 4 boys) were picked up for this edition, and I have to say I'm honored to have my work appear alongside the other talent featured in this zine. Wow. If you happen to acquire a copy for yourself, look for me! Also, SherrieJD, who is the editor (?) of the zine and a fabulously quirky designer is having a newsletter drive. Once she has 1000 subscribers, everyone gets a $5 coupon! So hurry to her blog (find the newsletter link in the header) and sign up!

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I'm happy that after the recent closing of ScrapArtist, Dianne Rigdon has now opened shop at Two Peas in a Bucket! Congratulations and good luck with your new store, Dianne! 

Here's my layout using Dianne's latest release, Journalique. The photos used were just sort of random ones that we took last Friday, and even though they're just candids I really love them.... (click layout to see it in my DST gallery) 

  
Last Friday was a really wonderful day, not to mention my husband Jason's birthday. Sweet to have a way to remember it, even though he's not in the pictures (he was at work)... we were leaving the house to go get a few of the ingredients I needed to make this carrot cake and this icing for him. The cream cheese icing was the best I have ever made myself, and possibly ever eaten! The cake itself ended up being slightly over cooked, in my opinion (I reduced the oil and added applesauce as one of the comments suggested - that may have been the problem?). Still edible, and quite tasty, just a little dry. What I was most proud of though was the fact that Jason ate at least five pieces of this cake over the course of a few days. LOL He is not a big sweets eater, so the fact that he liked my cake and ate a lot of it made me happy and proud. I wish I'd taken a picture of it, as well as a picture of him blowing out his candles. Ugh. If you have a microscope and can read my journaling above, you know I am already aware of my laziness in taking photos. Sometimes it's due to laziness, but other times I just want to be in the moment (and then later regret not pulling my camera out). Rambling on...

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Here's another of my recent layouts using some of PixelWorks latest releases at The Lily Pad (click layout to see it in my DST gallery)

 
It was just a phone picture of the two of us taken at a wedding of one of his friends, but we have so few of us together... this one means a lot. We're one month away from our 15th wedding anniversary. Sometimes I'm just blown away by that thought.

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We have a very busy weekend planned, won't be much time for cleaning, but it some of it needs to be done before everyone is home again. So I am off to get busy. Thanks for reading, and hope you all have a wonderful weekend, too.