A week in my life...

Ali Edwards is one of my favourite scrapbookers. I like how she incorporates so many of the day to day details of her families life into her scrapbook pagess. I check out her blog every couple of weeks to see what she's working on.
This week she has started a 'Week in the Life' album that will focus on documenting everyday details over the course of seven consecutive days. And she's invited her readers to join her. It sounds like fun to me so I'll be packing my camera around all week documenting. Here's a short glimpse of Ali E's instructions...

"Commit to keeping your camera with you throughout the day. Capture everything. Capture things that may seem silly or dumb. Capture the normal. Capture little things. Capture your environment. Here's a couple questions I ask myself or I keep in mind as I am going about this project: what's my daily routine, where did I go, who did I see, what do I do, what does the inside of my home look like, where do I spend the most time, etc. Capture stuff that you use everyday: your computer, a coffee mug, a favorite pair of shoes, a book, etc. Make sure to take a photo of yourself each day"

It sounds like a fun project. Here's a few of the photos I've taken yesterday and today; starting with our morning routines.

Daniel, like his mother, is most definitely not a morning person. He's up, he's dressed, but he's not moving too fast...

Breanna is chirpy and organized first thing in the morning. She's dressed, hair brushed and making herself a morning cuppa.(green tea)

As I'm sitting beside my lazy son sipping my latte the sun hits my Rowan Tree which is in full fall colours at the moment. Even through the sheers on my living room window it looked beautiful, glowing with the sunrise, so I snapped a few pictures.

And now I'm heading in to work. First stop (if I haven't made myself a latte before leaving home) is Tim Horton's for my caffeine fix. My Tim Horton's coffee fund is kept in the door handle of my drivers door. I clean out my purse every now and then and dump my change there. And when Rick empties his pockets on his night table I scoop it up and run it out to my car before he notices.

Poor Duncan isn't feeling well, but after he enjoyed the weekend so thoroughly his mean old Mum made him go in to school with the proviso that I would pick him up at lunch if he was still feeling really awful. I had my fingers crossed that he would perk up by noon, but I got the call and went to pick him up as promised. Here he is walking out of Bert Bowes Junior Secondary School.

And again when he notices the camera in my hand.

And again when I(the Mum) yell at him and order him to smile nice for the camera.

When I get home I find my family all outside enjoying the balmy fall weather. It's an amazing 24*. The pesky pine beetles attacked our pines this summer and Rick wanted to burn them in their homes before they flew off to greener pastures. He's cut down two of our pine trees so far and this is the third. Breanna and her two friends were helping rake leaves, but had to come pose with the fallen tree. But wait! Who is that I see in the bottom of the photo. It can't be my sickie Duncan. He's supposed to be in bed. His immune system fighting for his health. NOT out playing lumberjack!

Oh, look. Someone gave him a power tool.

The girls finished raking the leaves.

Hmmm. What to do with that lovely big pile?

Breanna had a belated birthday party

My two best friends weren't around for Breanna's birthday in July so they came out with presents and cake and spoiled my girl all over again. Here's the layout...

ScrapJacked

I played again. This week we're scrapjacking Rose Eckford. Love her fun layout. Here's my version...


The journaling is about my son who at thirteen and in Junior High, has absolutely no concerns about being fashionable. Most of his trendiest clothes are hand-me-downs from an older friend. The same friend told his Mum to tell me to tell my boys that it wasn't cool to be seen in 'Incredible Hulk' t-shirts now that they were highschoolers.

Adding some bling

Here's an old photo of myself at 10 yrs old. I wanted to add some sparkle and shine to my layout so I pulled out my glue pad and a tube of Stampendous 'Crystal Snow' glitter.
I stamped my image first with black ink. Did you notice what I was using for a stamping block? The stamp I'm using is slightly wider than the stamping blocks I have so I'm using a CD cover. It's broken and was headed for the trash when I discovered I was in need of a square stamping block so I tried it. It's see-thru so I can see where I'm stamping, the stamp sticks to it as well as to my acrylic blocks and it's a good size.


After cleaning the black ink off my stamp I inked it again really well with the glue pad. I pressed it down on my layout, just slightly off the black image.


I sprinkled lots of glitter across the stamped image.


After shaking off the excess glitter I added a large Imaginisce 'Party Petals' bloom. The flowers are already layered with a pretty brad in the center.


I used some white Doodle Bug 'Boutique Brads' to add more bling to my stamped image and as the body of my butterfly.


I added my matted photo, some strips of patterned paper and matching ric rac. The black chipboard with the white doodles on it is from the bottom of the Chatterbox 'Artsy.licious' alphabet sheet.


I added a little ric rac, another bloom and an Artsy.licious 'H' to the top left corner and called it done. The sparkle from my glitter doesn't show up well in the photos, but it looks very pretty IRL

Biking around town

The boys have been wanting to bike to school since the beginning of the year so last weekend I said we'd give it a try; see if they could make it all the way to town and back. With Dairy Queen as incentive there was no complaining on the way to town. The way home was a different story, but we made it.

So the boys got everything ready the night before school (sort of) and the next morning at 7:30am we hit the road.

Tikanii was eager for a good long run.


Poor Tikanii. He got sent home. Told to "stay", "Get in your bed", "NO!".


Breanna and Takisha were waiting for their bus on the corner. They waved us off.


And we're heading for school and work at cruising speed.


Duncan had to do a little showing off. "Look, Mum, no hands".


And this is the look I get when I do the Mummy thing and tell him to be sensible and safe.


Daniel is all grins. Check out his water bottle holder(the white tube below his right hand). He made it himself with paper and LOTS of packing tape.

So the boys and I biked to school Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. On Monday and Wednesday I biked with Breanna to Baldonnel School.

There are frost warnings for next week so I'm not sure if we'll be able to do much more biking this year.

Is it a bird. Is it a plane...

Nope, it's Super Daniel...


My friend Lilia suggested this phrase when I challenged her to give me a title without E's and L's because the letter stickers I was planning on using was all out of those two items. She must not have read that far in my email because there are more then a couple E's and L's in this title.
Had to pull out the Quickutz and alpha stamps to accommadate Lilia's idea, but I like how it turned out.
The layout is a sketch from the Prima Blog

I won...

Some fun blog candy from this blog...
My Semblance of Sanity
I won a magabook called Between Us Girls by Vicki Courtney. Can't wait to read it with Breanna.

Love the edge on this paper.

It's all cut out and lacey. The white butterfly lace paper went perfectly with it.

ScrapCentral.ca is having a crop.

I have a houseful of sickies so I didn't get as much scrapping done as I wanted, but I did finish off two pages.
The first layout is photos from 1973 when Granny and Grandad Lewall came to visit us in Auckland. It was only the second time I had met them. The first being when we travelled to Vancouver the Christmas I was five. The pocket on the left hand border holds tags with random bits of info; Mum sewed all my dresses; my skirts were ALWAYS very, very short; we made grapefruit juice every morning from the trees in our backyard (that's me picking a grapefruit off our tree in the oval frame.


I took this next photo this past summer. We were in Starbucks, in Whistler, waiting for our coffees and I was playing with my camera. Breanna and Daniel were just playing. I like this photo. They look happy.