... funny things are everywhere

art mimics life, in this case...

For all you fans of my boys' artwork, I present the following comic strip, drawn by James last week:

 

Truth of the matter is this drawing is more of a comic strip-styled documentary of our car rides to the club more than it is art. Ain't life grand? lol

Happy Tuesday, my friends! :)

my Thomas

* artwork done in 2004, by Thomas, 4 years old  

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Ten years ago, Mike and I were madly preparing for the birth of our first baby. We were painting and putting up wallpaper borders and assembling baby furniture and hanging cute matchy-matchy decorative items all around the nursery. Well, Mike was doing all that stuff (except for the matchy-matchy part) because I was too HUGE, too tired and too absent-minded to help. I was busy researching what to eat, what kind of car seat to buy, what kind of stroller worked best... and washing and folding teeny, tiny baby clothes.

<sigh> That seems like a long time ago.

Today, my firstborn, Thomas, is growing taller and bigger each day. The top of his head is level with the bottom of my nose. His feet are the same size as mine, something that came in really handy yesterday when I was out on my own, shopping for a pair of Crocs for him. He can run almost as fast as I can (or maybe faster!) for the first 25 metres of a race. Yes, he's definitely growing up. :)

Physical changes aside, I am even more impressed by all the growing up he's doing on the inside. He is definitely a work in progress, like most of us are for our entire lives, but I'm really enjoying the person he's becoming. Apparently, he is very polite and well-behaved when he's outside our home, and every now and then, I get a glimpse of that sensitivity and thoughtfulness that people keep telling me about. He doesn't agree with everything I say or do, but he's getting better at expressing his opinions or desires without blowing up. His ability to concentrate is getting better, especially when it comes to things he loves, like reading on his own or playing tennis. He's even getting better at getting along with his brother, although that's something that requires the efforts of two people, not just him. lol! Seriously though, this is all really big stuff for my guy.

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Today, my almost 10-year old boy reached another milestone. He lost his first molar. Wow! It's one thing to have your kid losing those front teeth... kids are still little when they do that. But to start losing those big teeth... somehow, that makes him seem so much older. I'm not sure I'm ready!

Then again, pictures like this make me think I don't have to worry about him growing up too fast any time soon. :P

say it with artwork...

We talk the talk and walk the walk. We compost; we recycle; I discourage the acquisition of Happy Meal toys and cheap Dollarama trinkets; I bus to work, and they walk to school.

I love this poster that came home in James' backpack a couple weeks ago.

I love that little man of mine. :)

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It's a long weekend here in Canada, and the forecasters are predicting beautiful weather from coast to coast. Hurray for spring... hurray for sunshine... hurray for three days off! Have a great weekend, my friends. 

creative streak

No, I'm not talking about myself. I don't really feel too creative these days. Life has been too busy, and I have a hard time creating when I'm stressed out. Yikes!

So whose creativity made me choose this title? Well, it's none other than my Star Wars and Wimpy Kid obsessed 9 year-old kid, Thomas. He took a break from his Star Wars theme to draw this for a contest that Owl magazine is running. :)

 

Not bad, eh? I love the description he wrote at the bottom. Great reasoning and excellent execution on the graphics. Not that I'm biased or anything. ;)

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I'll leave you with a slightly less creative endeavour by me. It's a layout based on Stacy Julian's colour challenge, posted here.

 

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Okay, that's it for today. Hopefully my scrapping mojo will come back in time for the weekend. It's National Scrapbooking Day on Saturday. Maybe I'll celebrate my making a layout or two. :)

Happy Earth Day!

 

James made this in honour of Earth Day. :)

I'll apologize again for my lack of blogging lately, but life has been so very hectic. I would love to think it'll slow down to a saner pace soon, but there's no guarantee of that.

I am taking lots of pictures and doing a bit of everyday life journalling with the intention of putting together an album a la Ali Edwards' Week in the Life. This week has been anything but typical... lots of last-minute busy stuff and an upcoming visit from an out of town friend, so it's been a fun week to capture with this project. I'll be sure to share bits and pieces with you when I have a chance to put the album together. Hopefully this weekend...

It's Thursday evening, which means my weekend has begun. Yay! Tomorrow will bring a long To Do list, but also a tennis lesson and some time with my friend, so I'm really, really looking forward to Friday even more than usual.

Thanks for visiting! :)

mid-March randomness

One of my young artists left this for me on the driveway on the weekend. It's gone now, due to the rain we had later in the weekend, but for a while, this is what I had to deal with every time I backed out of the garage.

 

That's the work of my Jamesie. He's become a real fan of Calvin and Hobbes and got the idea from a strip he read in the book, Attack of the Deranged Mutant Killer Snow Goons. Cool, eh?

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The boys are on March Break this week. They are keeping busy at a community centre daycamp. Each of them has latched onto one good friend at the camp, and they are having fun so far. Monday's outing was bowling. Tuesday-Friday... more fun outings, including a trip to the sugar bush, an indoor playground, the movie theatre... and so much more! All the fun outings they had in the brochure made me want to take the week off and hang out with the kids! But I have to work. Oh well.

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I'm still trying to get used to the time change. Hopefully I'll be back on track before too long. Other than my friends from SK, where they don't change the clocks, how is everyone doing with daylight savings time? Are you as tired as I am? *yawn* 

totally Olympics-obsessed

We've been watching a LOT of sports here at our place for the past two weeks. And no matter what I watch (figure skating, snowboarding, curling, speed skating...), I'm still of the belief that hockey is the BEST spectator sport in the world. :)

James drew this the other day... and cut it out. It's very intricate in real life. (The blue background is just there to block out the lid of the scanner.)

 

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Other random bits of news:

I'm continuing with my Friday tennis lessons with Thaddy. I'm hoping to get good enough to join the drop-in clinics in the next month or so. I know I need to be on the court more often than once a week to improve.

James started playing tennis with a by-invitation-only group on Wednesday afternoon. It's a crazy bit of scheduling for us to get him to the club for 4:30, but I'm sure he's going to make great progress with this group. The coach, Carlos, is very no-nonsense, which is just what James needs.

The weather has been so strange here... it's like spring has arrived in February! I won't get my hopes up though. Even though the temperatures have been above zero for the past few days, it's likely that Mother Nature will have at least one last dose of winter for us before spring really arrives.

I'm starting to think about our plans for the summer. It's time to sign the kids up for camps and sports and all that other stuff, so I need to coordinate vacations with some friends and also with my family out east.

Tomorrow's the last day of February and the last day of this current round of LOAD. I did really well for the first half of the month, but then life got crazy... but still, I got way more done this month than I otherwise would have, so it's all good. This is the 12x12 page I made last night:

 * sorry about the wonky scan... it's nicer irl. ;)

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And that's all the news from this part of the world. We've got a busy weekend of tennis lessons for the boys, visiting with friends (that's me!), teaching group fitness (also me!) and watching hockey (all of us!).

Go, Canada, go! :)

a clean(ish) desk & some found art

I've been procrastinating over cleaning my desk for months now. It's actually rather embarrassing, really. But hey, it's almost done now. I can actually see most of the shiny, slightly glue- and ink-covered top of my IKEA desktop, and it feels good. You know, not having to reach over a spool of ribbon, an empty Corelle plate and a roll of tape dispenser while I type feels like such a luxury. :P

As I cleaned off my desk, I found scraps of paper from projects I completed back in September. And I found notes from June's school council meeting. Yikes! It's almost December now. <sigh>

I've always been a procrastinator, much to my parents' and teachers' chagrin. I try to keep it under control at work, but I have to admit, even there, I find it a lot easier to get stuff done when I have unreasonably short turnaround times.

Oh well, in celebration of my clean desk, I'm going to share this piece of artwork with you. I found it buried under a heap of paper on top of my scanner. <blush> It's a water colour painting that James did in NS this past summer. Just a few tips from my mom, and he was able to do this on his own.

 

Well, that's it for now. Hopefully tomorrow I'll find time to download the pics from the past couple of days so you can see what we've been up to 'round here.

scraplift (round 2) & other stuff

When we last left the story of the scraplift gone wrong, I had just finished a digital scrapbook layout which was based on a glue and paper page I'd made earlier in the year. Unfortunately, due to a careless click of the "save" button in Photoshop Elements, the high-resolution file got saved over. What's a girl to do when the page she wanted to print for her mom and dad's gift album gets reduced to nothing by internet eye candy?

Enter the paper and glue version of the scraplift challenge. I used the same photos as before, and I came up with this 8x8 page:

I'm still loving that Lime Rickey collection from BasicGrey. <swoon>

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I was at a conference yesterday and had a chance to meet someone I've been working with for months and months now. I didn't know he was going to be there, so it was a pleasant surprise. We've spent hours on the phone and communicating by email, so it was really nice to meet him in real life. Funny how it's possible to really get to know someone using electronic media but not have a clue what they look like... and then, with the very next email or phone call, it's a totally different experience because there's a face behind the words on the screen or the voice on the phone.

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Still on the topic of work, the project I've been working on for what feels like forever and a day has been approved by my boss's boss's boss... so it's looking good now. I'll be so happy if we can get everything done before Christmas. Then I'll have a real reason to raise a glass at the staff holiday celebration (aka Christmas party) this year.

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Speaking of Christmas, someone in our house has a bit of Christmas spirit already. I love this paper, markers and tape creation, especially the realistic flopped-over part at the top. :)

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Well, it's getting late... time for me to put my jammies on and get a few things done before I go to bed. Thanks for dropping by to visit! :) 

random nsbr things...

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Hey, I noticed the other day that all I'm blogging about is scrapbooking these days. Which is totally absurd because, in real life, I'm crazy busy doing everything BUT scrapbooking. Goes to show that an addiction is an addiction, whether or not I have time to feed it! :P

Just to prove to you that I've been thinking about and actually doing other things, I present to you a random list of non-scrapbook related (nsbr) things:

1. I posted my weekend To Do list on facebook... teaching two group fitness classes, tackling a mountain of laundry, driving the kids to and fro from their lessons, grocery shopping, baking banana bread using the extremely over-ripened bananas on the counter and hauling out the fall/winter clothing from storage. I'm happy to report that I managed to get most of it done. The laundry is not 100% done, and the clothing still hasn't been swapped out for the change in seasons... but I added an extra chore to my list on Saturday... I cut the grass in the front and back before the rain rolled in. So yay for me! 80% isn't bad, right?
2. I ran into an ex at Starbucks last week. I was waiting for my older son, who was at an appointment, so I hauled some work-related documents down to the coffee shop, ordered a grandé non-fat latté and plugged into my iPod. I was completely lost in the world of classical music and Crown liability when I saw a somewhat familiar face. We didn't exactly end on good terms 17 years ago, and I haven't really talked to him since. The conversation was pleasant enough though... and the one thing I took away from it all was that I have a pretty darned good life with Mike and the boys. End of story. Bye-bye. See ya later. (said in my best Shrek voice)
3. I love the stage my boys are at these days. I could do without the fighting, but really, this independence thing really rocks. Over the weekend, the boys played with an educational book and demonstration set on magnetism. Thomas had learned a lot of the material in school last year, so he had fun reviewing some key ideas, but James read the book, learned bits and pieces from Thomas, assembled the demonstrations, practiced and then put on a show for us. It was really, really cool! I especially liked how he managed to work a Lego Stormtrooper into the action! Look for photos, coming soon to a scrapbook page near you! (oh, sorry... this is supposed to be a nsbr post!)
4. I ran with the boys at the school's Terry Fox Run on Friday. I love that event. How much simpler can it get? 300 kids running laps around the school. My boys didn't really run with me for long. I did a couple of laps with them, but I ended up with one of James' friends who wanted to hold hands and walk with me. She's so sweet. I wonder how many more years she'll want to hold my hand... kindergarten, grade one, grade two... I'm guessing next year, she'll just say hello and move on. See, that's the part I don't like about kids growing up. *sigh*
5. That picture up at the top of the post... James drew it. It's a parody on the AmieAmi program they run at their school. The cat and mouse are friends, and they teach the K-3 students about getting along and playing nicely. His picture made me giggle.

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It's Monday morning, and I hear someone out of bed already, so I'd better go. It's 6:30, and we have people coming to start our bathroom renos in 30 minutes. Yikes!

Thanks for dropping by to visit. Have a great week, my friends!