Pregnancy twins congratulations card.

So my cousin and his wife announced they were having twins!  SO exciting!  I had a card made for 1 baby in my shop, so I just added another heart on there for baby #2 and voila!  I’m a scrapbooker, not an artist, so what do you think?  I’ll also sell these in my etsy shop if you email me and ask for the change.

Mommyfest has begun!

So I discovered this really cool blog party today and I’m a bit late but I joined it anyway.  Better late then never, right?  All these moms who have blogs are leaving their links so you can blog hop for 4 days and enter contests and giveaways and find new blogs to read.  This is the 5th year for Mommyfest but I’ve just heard about it.

Right now there are 263 blogs signed up (I’m #263 at this point!) here where you can go and maybe find some new reading material or win something!  The party is running until May 16.  I’m supposed to tell you a bit about myself, so here goes.  I’m a mom of an almost-8-year-old girl, who is the love of my life.  I’m a scrapbooker, and it is my passion.  I love photography also and I love documenting our lives in scrapbooks.  I live in the Midwest, but wish I lived on the beach somewhere.  I recently started a small business (named after my daughter) making scrapbooks for other people who DON’T scrapbook and somehow got into making sets of notecards while I was at it, so I have a shop on etsy for that.  I also sell scrapbooking supplies on ebay here.  Yeah, I’m kind of obsessed.  Oh, maybe I should mention I also have a hubby?  ha!

So…….the prize I am giving away is a free set of 6 personalized note cards and envelopes and I’ll choose the winner randomly from comments left here on this post on the morning of the 17th. 

Here’s an example of the notecard set I’m talking about

You can see more of the types of notecards I’ve made in my etsy shop here, but yours will be personalized to reflect the people in your family. 

You can click on the Mommyfest box to the right of this on the sidebar to see more about it.  Go blog hop and have fun and don’t forget to leave a comment for my prize!

To Abby

Happy Birthday To YOU………

Happy Birthday To YOU………

You look like a monkey………………

And you smell like one too!     (That’s the way Summer sings it!  LOL) 

Happy birthday my friend.  Love ya to pieces!

Hey everyone, go over to Abby’s blog here and wish her a Happy birthday.  She has a cool blog where she shows all her scrapbook pages and crafty stuff she makes.

I went to the Ellen show!

So at the request of my fan club, I have to buckle down and write about my experience last Saturday.  My fans are relentless!  Emailing me and calling me at all hours…….they’re very high maintenance. 

I drove 3.5 hours to a Chicago suburb, picked up my buddy Thea, and the next day we drove an hour into the city to see the Ellen Degeneres show because I was lucky enough to score tickets.  Overall, it was sort of disappointing.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love Ellen.  She cracks me up.  And maybe things were done differently since it was in a different city from where they usually film it, or maybe because it’s not normally outside.  I don’t know.  But I doubt that I would do it again. 

Unfortunately, it was rainy and windy and cold.  Now, I was prepared for rain.  They told us it was an outdoor venue and I knew the weather forecast called for rain.  Thea bought us rain ponchos, we took our lunch and magazines with us prepared to wait a long time after being seated.  We knew we had to be there at 11 and the show didn’t start taping until 2.  But even with a ticket we had to stand in a line (that snaked around an entire block!) outside for 3 hours.  THEN we got seated.  That part sucked.  It was just brutal on my back.  See that line of people in the photo below?  That’s half of the line of people with regular tickets.  I was standing on the other side of the block when I took the photo with my cell phone.  What you can’t see here is that there was another line just as long of people with VIP tickets that went in before us so they’re not in the photo!  What you also can’t see is that next to this line of people you see here, standing alongside them to their left is another line of people who are just on standby in case there’s an available ticket after everyone is seated who has tickets.  And that’s not even counting the people who were lining Michigan Avenue to watch the show.  It was crazy! 

Robin Williams was the guest, and he was pretty funny, even during commercials.  But it seemed like he only talked to Ellen for 15 minutes and then it was over!  I guess with all the commercial breaks on TV it makes it feel longer.  During commercials the DJ played music and everybody danced.  That part was fun.  It was also fun to see Ellen give away a car.  They played a game called Cram In a Car or something like that.  They actually came over during one of the commercials and pulled 17 people out of the audience to cram into the car and those people were sitting in the 3 rows in front of me and Thea and in the row with us.  When they cleared those people out, Thea & I were the only ones sitting there!  It was pretty funny watching this couple from the audience try to get everybody in the car including themselves and Ellen and Robin Williams.  But they managed it and then Ellen gave them the car.  I thought the lady might have a heart attack she was so excited! 

A couple of American Idol kids were there too, but I don’t watch the show so didn’t know who they were and frankly didn’t think they were all that great.  I myself can’t carry a tune in a bucket, but whatever.  Oprah sent pizza over from her favorite pizza place in Chicago, so that was nice.  They threw a lot of T-shirts into the audience as giveaways, but Thea and I could never catch one cause they always got thrown to the middle it seemed like and we were sitting more toward the side.  Oh well, after the show was over we stood in ANOTHER line and bought ourselves a T-shirt. 

So, I love you Ellen but I think next time I stand in line like that it’s gonna be for Oprah!

Custom cut Pazzles title for scrapbook.

This is the awesome title that my friend Jill cut for me when she was demoing the Pazzles machine at the St. Louis CKC.  I used to call my little girl “Cupcake” as her nickname and wanted to make a layout about that sometime so she found a pretty font for me and made this to use on my page.  She wanted to fancy it up and make it all glittery, so she cut it from 2 different kinds of paper, 1 of them being sticky.  Then she peeled off the sticky part and took it to the booth across from her booth at the convention and they put embossing powder on it and heated it up with their embossing tool thingamajig.  I have no idea how to emboss, so don’t quote me on that! 

The specks all around it are because it’s inside a name tag holder that I had around my neck, so some of the sparkles are trapped in the plastic holder with the title.  I think I might coat the title with something clear like decoupage or something to seal all the glitter so it doesn’t get all over my scrapbook page when I get around to using it.  I absolutely love this and can’t wait to design a page for it!

You can learn more about the Pazzles and if you have one you can get free files from my friend Klo’s blog.  She does tutorials on her blog and gives away files she has created so you can cut them yourself by going to www.scrappingklo.blogspot.com.  (I think she can even hook you up if you want to buy one)

 So look what I found at Jo Ann Fabrics for $1.00.  Not only can I use the pink one on a page about my little cupcake, but I can also make birthday cards or whatever with the others.  Gotta love a $1 bargain!

Floral Notecard Set.

I sold these as a custom order to someone to give as a birthday present to a coworker.  She likes daisies so we picked out a flower stamp as close to a daisy as I could get.  You can buy your own set in my etsy store or you can order your own custom set if you’d like a different flower type at www.summerrosescrapbooks.etsy.com.  

Summer’s Hospital Adventure.

No, she didn’t actually have to go to the emergency room or anything drastic like that.  However, she did have to go to the hospital today for an upper endoscopy procedure.  That’s the one where they put the tube down your throat with a tiny camera on the end of it and look at your esophagus, stomach, and top part of your small bowel.  The part that freaked me out about it as a mommy was the fact that she had to be put under anesthesia to do the procedure.  That wasn’t something I was real excited about. 

Summer’s been having tummy troubles since last fall.  Every day she complains that her stomach hurts or she doesn’t feel good or she feels like she’s going to throw up.  Every day.  I’m seriously at my wit’s end over the whole thing by now.  She doesn’t want to go to school in the morning because she’s afraid she’s going to throw up in front of all the kids and be embarrassed.  I can’t really blame her for that!  Sometimes she’ll say she can feel vomit come up in her throat and then go back down, which makes me think she has some acid reflux going on.  I’ve taken her to her pediatrician 3 times and by the third time the doctor could see that I was really at the end of my rope with this thing, this not knowing what’s wrong with her and being totally helpless as a mother to help your kid when they’re sick. 

So we got referred to a pediatric gastroenterologist.  At that appointment, he said lots of kids have the complaint of “I don’t feel good,” but Summer was so specific in describing her stomach hurting and where it hurt and the feeling in her throat that he thought it warranted a closer look.  About a week and a half ago she had an ultrasound of her abdomen to make sure nothing bad was going on in there, and it was normal. 

Then Monday was the big day.  There I was trying to fend off an anxiety attack because I’m freaking out about the anesthesia thing, and I’m hiding it and trying to reassure Summer (who was scared to death) that she will be fine and she won’t feel a thing or remember it.  I’m such a hypocrite!  I was so proud of my daughter, though.  She was scared, but she did it anyway and she didn’t cry (like I thought she would) when they were wheeling her away from me and her daddy.  Shoot, I WANTED to cry myself, but I didn’t.  I had taken my camera so I could take photos of her and remind her later how brave she was by making a scrapbook page about the day.  You can tell she’s the daughter of a scrapbooker, because she was all, “Mom take a picture of my bracelet.” and “Mom, take a picture of my IV.”  Gotta love this kid.

Here’s my brave girl before she went to the procedure room.  She took her treasured favorite teddy bear with her for moral support. 

On her way to the procedure.

They do the procedure and then bring her back and I am immediately freaked the hell out because there is blood on her bed.  No blood when she left us, but now there’s blood!  Are you kidding me?  Right away the nurse says the IV fell out of her hand and they had to put a new one in her arm and that’s what the blood is.  Um, yeah, thanks for mentioning that cause I was just getting ready to ask!  The doctor asks me right off if Summer snores and I tell him yes.  He asks if she snores loud and I tell him yes.  Are there people out there who actually snore SOFTLY?  I haven’t actually met one yet!  Then just to get me more freaked out, the doctor tells us that Summer had very obstructed breathing during the procedure and had a bit of trouble a few times.  WHAT?!?  He says she needs to go the ENT doctor to see if there’s something getting in the way of her breathing normally such as her tonsils or adenoids or something else.  She’s never had any tonsil or throat infection trouble, so who knows but we’ll see what happens.  He says that obstructed breathing like that or sleep apnea like a lot of adults have could be causing her stomach to hurt and/or be causing her to have acid reflux because the abnormal breathing could be upsetting the pressure inside her stomach.  That when people have sleep apnea they quit breathing for seconds at a time and that affects all of your organs because they’re deprived of oxygen.  But in her case maybe she’s breathing not very well and then taking a big breath to compensate and that’s making the pressure change in her stomach and making it hurt or making acid come up out of it when it shouldn’t.  Oh lord, I never thought I’d be having this problem with my almost 8-year-old. 

The doctor says also that she could have a hiatal hernia, which isn’t really a good thing.  That’s where part of your stomach sticks up through the diaphragm where it doesn’t belong.  It isn’t really life threatening and lots of adults have it, but he said it wouldn’t be a good thing for her, maybe because she’s a child?  I don’t really know.  But he couldn’t tell for sure if it was her stomach pushing up through the diaphragm on its own or if it was being pushed up like that due to her having problems breathing during the procedure.  So we definitely need to see the ENT before we look any further into what’s causing her stomach troubles.  Our appointment is Monday, so hopefully we’ll get to the bottom of what’s going on with her.  It’s gotta totally suck to have your stomach hurt and feel like you’re going to throw up every single day.  Did I mention it’s EVERY DAY? This poor kid needs a break!

So is there anybody else out there who has had this kind of problem with their child?  I would love to hear about it!

Altered Butterfly Canvas

So my creative scrapbooker friend Jill always has the neatest ideas for projects to make and recently she made this awesome butterfly canvas.  I think it’s so cool from the side view.  She tells about how she made it on her blog here.  It really makes me want to try using that crackle paint on something.