New Easter Dresses

Each year I make the girls new Easter dresses! I had bought fabric a few weeks ago and it just sat on my sewing desk collecting dust! Well, of course it is Saturday night, the eve of Easter and the fabric sits un-cut on my desk. I spent Saturday running kids to friends in Kuna, shopping, and anything but sewing. Finally it is 10pm and kids are going to bed and Kristina says to me "I can't wait to see my new Easter dress!" Great! How can I not stay up and get these done now! So it took me 1/2 hr to cut the fabric and then by 2:30 am after many, many yards of gathering we had Easter skirts! I had found Emily's dress about a month ago and that is what I matched the girl's skirts to. They are darling!

Emily's 1st Easter

Emily's 1st Easter! She is also 5 months old on Easter Day! Time sure flies by!

Living Portrait Museum

Logan's 5th grade class has been preparing to present a living portrait museum. This project required them to prepare a biography paper on an influential American. They learned the research and writing process and then had to write a speech that they were to memorize. The museum portion required them to dress up as their chosen character from history and make a "frame" from which they would give their speech. Logan did a great job! He was proud of himself for memorizing such a long speech and we were proud of him too! All of the students in his class participated in this project and they lined walls of the gym and gave their speeches as people walked up to them. It was great to see all of the costumes and children! Oh, and his influential American was William Penn!

Food Meme

What is a Meme anyway? I have seen them floating around. So I googled it and found this cool link all about Memes. The Daily Meme
So thanks to LDS Mom, here is my first Meme!

What do you usually eat for breakfast? I love to have some toast and oatmeal, not the instant, flavored kind. I love fruit too! But a lot of mornings lunch comes along and I have fogotten about breakfast!

Have you ever tasted caviar? No, not interested.

What is your favorite cookie? Warm, homemade chocolate chip oatmeal.

Do you prefer sweet or salty snacks? I usually like sweet, but if I eat a salty I usually have to follow it with a sweet!

Do you drink milk or are you lactose intolerant? I was lactose intolerant until I got pregnant! Now I can drink milk but don't much unless with a warm cookie or certain meals that milk just tastes good with!

Do you like spinach? I love canned spinach with some vinegar! Ohh my mouth is watering!

Do you like liver? NO!!!!

Do you prefer milk chocolate or dark chocolate? Milk chocolate everytime! I'd rather not have any if it's not milk chocolate!

Italian, Chinese, or Mexican food? I have favorite dishes in each but I would probably choose, well, it depends on the day I guess.

Do you chew gum? No.

I tag anyone who reads this blog. Copy this post, switch my answers for yours, and post the Food Meme to your blog.

Baby LOVES watermelon

Emily is all hands these days! If it is within her reach she will try to get it and then get it into her mouth! It doesn't matter if it is your finger, your shirt, the edge of the table, or the food that you are trying to eat while holding her. We have been letting her try some of the foods we eat. Watermelon was a big hit! She sucked on it with such vigor she actually got a chunk off that I had to promptly dig out of her mouth. If she had teeth she would have devoured that piece of watermelon. She loves strawberries too! She seems too young at 4 and 1/2 months to be so into food. But who can blame her on the fruit? I ate so much fruit while I was pregnant she must have it running through her veins.

Another Digital Scrapbook Page

Here is my second attempt at a digital page. It is so much fun! I think I have a new addiction.

Link to a great digital scrapbooking site

Here is a link to a great website providing tons of free digital scrapbook stuff.
http://www.freedigitalscrapbooking.com/index.html

Digital Scrapbooking

I started scrapbooking about 13 years ago. I had one child and plenty of time to make all of these elaborate pages. My oldest child has three or four scrapbooks that are about four inches thick with double-sided pages. Then child #2 came along and I still kept up pretty well. When children #3, 4, and 5 came all at the same time I was sunk!

We are avid photographers and will take dozens if not more of the many family events like birthdays, at the park, holidays, etc. Since we have gone digital it is not exaggerating to say that I have thousands of photos from the last 8 years. That would be a fortune to print and scrapbook! Not to mention the time it will take! I have kept their school photos and miscellaneous awards and papers all organized in their scrapbooks. It is just the photos of birthdays, Cub Scouts, Christmas, etc. that are not there!

My children love to get their books out and look at them and remember all of the stories that they have been told about themselves. This is especially true of my 3 children from Kazakhstan. They each have 1 and a half books chronicling their lives from Kazakhstan to the present (what I have done).

With the digital scrapbooking world exploding I am anxious to try and scrapbook the impossible pile of digital photos that are collecting digital dust! There are so very many freebies out there for digital scrapbooking so I don't have to drive to get the paper or other scrapbook needs! I don't have to clear a space on my craft table or clean-up when I am done either!

So here is my first digitally scrapbooked page. It was totally fun! I designed the whole thing using Photoshop. I have been using Photoshop for awhile as the webmaster for my children's school. (www.compasscharter.org) The big photo in the background is of all the cars for the race, with Carson and Logan's cars 3rd and 4th up from their photo in the center.

The possibilities are just as endless are they are when you are using scissors and paper! More to come!!!!!

Blogging and Baking....

Okay, so I started making cookies for the kids after school snack. The first batch turned out beautifully! I then loaded up the baby into her stroller and away we went to meet the kids at the bus. We all came home, had some cookies and I proceeded to put another batch into the oven. I set the timer. Kids were working on their homework around the table. Grandma Murphy was there with them, someone had the baby so I thought "Aha, a moment to blog!" Upstairs I went since my laptop I had in the kitchen had died! :( Then 10 minutes went by, 20 minutes went by, and I think I smell something! "Hey Kristina, did you turn the timer off?" "Yes mom I did !" I ask myself why would I smell burnt cookies and ran downstairs. I found that yes they had turned the timer off 10 minutes ago when it went off but had only just pulled the cookies out of the oven! Needless to say they were just a little over done, I mean burnt!!!!! And this was the batch that I put nuts into for Steve. I NEVER cook with nuts! I thought chopped pecans sounded good in my oatmeal chocolate chip cookies!(Pregnancy has changed me!) I was so proud of myself for putting nuts in! I was so frustrated with the kids that they would run up and just turn off the timer without telling me or looking into the oven since they knew I was making cookies for them! Well the moral of this story is not to bake and blog at the same time! (The cookies were so burnt, that Steve, who likes crunchy cookies, spit out the bite he took!!!!)

Printing your blog

I have been wanting to print my blog and LDS Mom reminded me of that. But whenever I printed it gave me blank pages before and after my post and included all of the sidebar info that I don't necessarily want to print with every post. So to Google I went!
I found a cool tool! It is a widget to add to your blog so your blog can be printed in nice format without all of the sidebar info. This widget is put onto your blog page and will show you your current month's posts and let you choose which to print. There is a printer icon at the end of every post after you have posted. Or you can use the button that is installed. It then generates a PDF of your posts! It looks great! Give it a shot!

Printing Your Blog