Head hurts...

My head hurts today. I can't figure out what I can do to make it better. I've tried ibuprofen, water, a workout, quiet time, caffeine... Nothing seems to be helping. :-( Matt came home today and complained of a headache as well. Well, at least I'm not blaming this on Adam, lol!! He's been pretty good all day, no major confrontations, so it's been good. I'm sure it'll go away eventually. I think I'll try some sudafed - maybe it's my sinuses...

More layouts to share

Here are a few more layouts. The first two were pics taken on the same day. We went to Boo at the Zoo and carved pumpkins on the same day. Our October was really busy this year and we were running out of time before Halloween. Both layouts used paper from Heidi Grace.

The first layout shows everyone busy carving. The second is of Adam being very tired at the end of the day. The top pic really touches my heart. He was tired of carving and wanted to move onto something else, but everyone else was still working on their pumpkins. Oh, and I got to use a flower on it, lol! I so seldom feel that I can use flowers on layouts without making them too girlie for the boys, but I think this one worked perfectly for the layout.

Pumpkin patch is our trip to the pumpkin patch this year. It was a gorgeous day out, although a bit windy. I actually managed to get two pictures of the entire family together!! Matt wasn't too cooperative in one and Adam kept wanting his hat to hide his face. You take what you can get when you've got two boys, though. :-)

I'm not sure if I've shared this layout with everyone before. It's

about Matt learning to ride a bike without training wheels. The journaling discusses that things usually come very easily to him, so he doesn't really have to try hard. Learning to ride was a different story. It tried his patience and it took him a long time to get the hang of it. It was a very good lesson for him, since he really doesn't have to try to do well in school. I think this will serve him well in the future - to know that there are things that he will struggle with, but if he perseveres, he can succeed.

Another day off

Matt's got the day off today, again. He went outside for a while, but it's all iced over and you really can't do much with sleet. No snowballs or snowmen and there's not enough to sled on. Poor kid came in after about an hour. Adam went out for a whopping 5 minutes.

Adam is feeling much better. He's eating anything I'll give him, but I'm afraid to overtax his tummy yet. I've been disinfecting everything I see. This is not something we want to share.

We're having a small birthday party for Adam tomorrow, so I need to get the house clean. Sunday, I'm going for some much needed crafty/me time. I'm heading to a Stampin' Up! party that a friend is hosting. Right now, I've got enough on my want list to hold my own party - have to trim that down quite a bit... I'm looking for some good sentiment stamps.

Anyway, life is better today. I'll try to post some more layouts tonight, if I can get on. The evening should be a little more open since Matt's tae kwon do class was cancelled.

Blech...

The stomach flu has come to our house. Adam's got it. Thank goodness Lee came home to work from home. I had him stop at the store and get a little green machine for cleanup and some popsicles...

Bad weather in StL

Imagine my surprise this morning when, after getting Matt up and out of bed, I find out that school is cancelled. Apparently, between 6 and 6:30 this morning, we got hit with sleet and freezing rain. When I looked out the window in back, it just looked like a light dusting of snow. Unfortunately, that's not the case. We've been really cold the last week or so and all the rain that is falling is freezing pretty much instantly. The trees don't seem to be getting coated, at least not at this point, but the roads are really bad.

We're supposed to get another wave later today, so it's not finished with us. This storm system is moving across the state and into Illinois. I wish the roads weren't so bad - the boys aren't getting along well today. Matt's getting over a combination of strep and a cold and Adam's just started antibiotics for the strep and he's got the cold as well. Adam is really short tempered today. I wish I could take them out of the house to work off some of this energy. I might venture out to get some movies.

I wish this were snow - at least then we could go outside and sled. I've thought about sending the boys outside anyway - they could slide around on the driveway, but I'm afraid that they'll fall and break something...

I'll have to dig out the scavenger hunt game. http://www.amazon.com/University-Games-01427-Scavenger-Hunt/dp/B00065AQ12 It's a great game - gets the kids running through the house collecting items, so it burns off some energy. The best part of the game, though, is that one of the rounds requires all players to return all the things collected to where they got them from, so it's all cleaned up as well. Must have been designed by a mom, lol.

Enough whining. I'm going to go make the best of today. Maybe the boys will want to do something crafty...

sharing some layouts

I've finally taken some pics of the layouts I've recently done (with my new camera!!). The "adam" layout is one of my very few one picture layouts. I had to do this page, though. That picture is just so precious that it screamed to be enlarged and scrapped by itself.

"Overcoming Adversity" is another layout that is one page and one pic. The journaling is about how things in nature can overcome adversity (as this tree obviously did) and flourish. It's a reminder to myself that no matter what happens, life goes on, life is good and I should live it and not worry about how things "should" be or "could" be.

Artiste is about Adam's food sculpture that he brought home from school one day. It's a fun layout and I really like the colors. I think that I might need to add some brads or color on the photo mat that has the close-up of the sculpture.

The last layout, Christmas Kitty, talks about what a wonderful gift

our cat, Miss Cuddles, is to our family. She showed up in our neighborhood as a stray and has been an incredible gift - she loves us all and we love her. She was a gift we didn't know we needed or wanted.

I'll post more layouts soon. I've got more pics ready,but I don't want to overwhelm, lol.

Happy belated Valentine's day

Yesterday was a crazy day! Both Lee and I tried to keep our spending down over Christmas on each other, so yesterday we gave big gifts. The funny thing is that we both decided to do this without talking to each other about it... We've never done big things for Valentine's Day before - let's face it, it's mostly a marketing ploy by card and candy companies and flower growers. Now, don't get me wrong, I have a romantic streak, but Valentine's has always seemed somewhat forced.

So, Lee bought me a Nikon D40 camera!! I'm so excited about it. :-) I looked at them before Christmas, after Christmas, as well as many times last year, but never did buy one. I have trouble spending large amounts of money on myself when I don't need to. Anyway, he bought it at a camera shop, so I get photography classes to go with the camera, too!! I'm really looking forward to this.

I got Lee a BluRay disk player. He's been wanting one since we got the big HD tv last year. I kept wanting to wait to see which format would win out - HD DVD or BluRay. It's looking like BluRay is going to win out the format wars, so I got him the player and Pirates of the Carribean to watch. Let me tell you - that movie looked fantastic on that big tv with the high resolution!! It was really cool - all the detail showed so well.

I also got the boys small gifts - Matt wanted a wallet with one of those photo holders (it was harder finding that than I thought it would be). I also got him a book - Diary of a Wimpy Kid. One of his friends really liked that book, so I thought I would get it for him. Adam got a set of Morphs. They're interchangeable animal parts - heads, bodies, legs, arms, wings, tails, etc... He really liked it and it'll help with fine motor skills, since they need to be snapped together. Yesterday, we made real animals. I think today, I'm going to start combining different things and come up with my own animals. Should be fun!!

New vehicle...

... for Lee. He's been itching for something new for about a year now. He finally decided that he'll forgo the good mileage in place of being able to tow and haul stuff. He traded the Mustang in for Honda Ridgeline last weekend. Personally, I think it's an ugly vehicle, but it has lots of redeeming qualities if you don't look at it, lol! I like the big "trunk" under the truck bed, the back seat is roomy and pretty comfy, all the bells and whistles that come with Hondas (dual heating/cooling zones, heated seats, etc)... It's going to be a really useful vehicle for us (he gets to haul my compost for all my garden beds this spring!!).

A friend of ours said that I don't like it because of the "El Camino" effect and he really nailed it. To me, the transition from the cab to the bed of the truck is the ugly part - very similar to the El Camino... Guys tend to like those cars, but I have met very few women who do. Go figure. Well, I don't have to drive it, so if Lee's happy, so am I. :-)

Toasty Feet

Who knew the right pair of socks could make such a big difference? It seems like I have cold feet all winter long no matter what I do. So, shortly after Christmas, I went to LL Bean and ordered a bunch of wool socks for myself. I hadn't done so in the past because I just hated spending the money on socks, kwim? No one really sees them and they're not exactly glamorous. Anyway, I have had toasty warm feet ever since I got those socks. It's amazing! I mean, I used to get cold feet even while wearing shoes inside at home. Now, my feet are toasty warm as long as I'm wearing those socks. They're a bit on the bulky side, though. I'm going to have to look for some that are a bit lighter. I'm really liking the wool socks theses days. :-)

Adam wants to marry me

My almost 4 year old son wants to marry me. He's been telling me this for the last few weeks. When I tell him that I'm already married to Daddy, he says that Daddy can marry Matt, lol! He's so funny! I need to get a cute pic of him and scrap this. He can be so sweet sometimes - it makes up for the times he's not so sweet. ;-)

Retreat fun!

I went to a scrapbook retreat with my friends Laurie and Lori last weekend. I got a lot of visiting done as well as some scrapbook pages and cards. I really enjoyed myself. It almost didn't happen, though. Whenever I leave town without the boys, I have to leave my car with Lee, so he can drive them around when necessary. I end up with his Mustang. Last winter, I got stuck in Chicago because of a snow storm. The car wouldn't move well at all. We've gotten new tires for it since, but it still doesn't handle well in the snow. Of course, Thursday night, we got 7 or 8 inches of snow and I was supposed to be leaving Friday around noon. Needless to say, that didn't happen. The babysitter that I had lined up to watch the boys couldn't get out of her driveway, so she never got here. Lee couldn't take the day off work, since it was his first day at the new job. I was ok with all that, though. I couldn't leave because there was snow on all the highways I was going to have to drive down. I got to play in the snow and sled down the hill with the boys instead for a few hours. I ended up leaving at about 5 and arriving just before 8. The roads were cleared and I didn't make the acquaintance of any ditches.

It was really nice to get away and get some crafting done. I'll take pictures later of my favorites and post them. I actually did some one-page layouts - this is really unusual for me. I also had two layouts that only had one picture - a first for me.

Lee's doing ok at the new job. He's still settling in and figuring things out. Found out today that his blackberry is forwarded to someone else's phone - accidentally. Really strange, but it should be easy enough to fix.

I haven't talked to the teacher again about Matt's make-up work, but she hasn't sent any home since our little discussion. I think I still need to talk to the principal about her resentment of kids leaving her class one day a week. I don't want to push her away and cause problems for Matt, so I'm waiting a while to see how things go. I talked to another mother about this (she's been having issues with this teacher's lack of willingness to challenge her child, too) and we both decided that we should take things carefully and not antagonize anyone. We've still got a bunch of the school year left and we don't want to ruin it for the kids. After all, school should be all about them. They should like going to school (within reason) and enjoy learning. If the relationship sours with the teacher, then any hope of liking school and enjoying the process is out the window. I'm going to request that Matt be assigned to a really strong teacher who is willing to do some extra work to keep him challenged. He's just bored silly this year.