Three Layouts!

I had a blast this morning...Jasmine and I got dressed up and Josh took a bunch of pictures. She looked soooo cute :)


Okay, so Blogger isn't doing what I hoped it would. You can see my layouts here:

Fun in Photo Shoot

Princess Jasmine

Princess for a Day

And I did another one, using my kit: All Teal, All the Time (Expansion Pack):
Personal Penguin

CT, part 2

I have two more ladies on my CT, that weren't officially added until after my "big" announcement. They are:
Jenna and Kim. I'm thrilled to have them both on board! I have a great CT :)

Still been procrastinating on the finishing touches on my new kit and calendar, but hopefully they'll be available very soon. In the meantime, you can see some of the layouts my girls have made using the expansion pack:

Updates about everything!

I have exciting news in my scrapping life: Liddy's Loft is opening back up, to a more limited extent, and I am starting to sell there. Holley is keeping things simple and hopefully non-stressful, since her life has been getting busier :)

Josh, Jasmine and I had an appointment with our family doctor on Thursday. Jasmine is perfect, which we already knew. The doctor was pretty sure we were right in our diagnosis...we both likely fractured our sternum from the seatbelt. Thankfully, it isn't slowing down the healing when Jasmine puts her weight on my sore chest, it just makes it hurt more. He said it's usually better in 6-8 weeks. That's a long time! But it was nice to know that we will recover without any more hospital visits or strange braces, just patience, prayer and some added calcium :)

Jasmine needs some mommy time, so I guess that will do for now :)

Layout time!

I'm working on an expansion pack for the Teal kit, and I'm really excited about what I've come up with. I'm hoping to have a preview up before too long...

In the meantime, I got a Private Message last night from one of the ladies at TDC, letting me know one of my layouts had been chosen as Layout of the Day. I was so excited!! You can see the layout and the comments here. :)

When I loaded more pictures onto the computer a couple days ago, I found out that, for some reason, not all the pictures I took the day of the accident showed up the first time. Thankfully they were still there, and I got a couple good ones (and a lot of lousy ones). It was very eerie, looking at pictures that I took on our drive, moments before the accident...last night we drove up the same street and I compared where the last photo was taken with where the accident was...it seems like it was only about 2 buildings before the accident, that I took the last picture. I'm thankful I wasn't actually taking a picture when it happened, but just the same, it was pretty close!

Here is a two-page layout I did about the storm last weekend. The bottom picture is my favorite...wind storms can knock down trees and limbs, but looking at this tree, it's obvious is wasn't a wind storm that caused this destruction.

(papers: Iced Cocoa by Christina Dudley; sketch for first page by Kimberly Geswein.)

My Creative Team!!

I'm sorry this has taken so long to do. I had intended to make the announcement last weekend, but with being without power, it sorta didn't happen!!

So, without further ado, I introduce to you the amazing women who I am now very lucky to be working with (alphabetically) (edited to add: I'm waiting to hear back from one more person, so if you read this, go check your email!!!):

Danielle
Iris
Kimberlee
Lisa
Tracy
and Verna

I'm very excited about my team and the amazing things I've seen already from them :)

Story Time

Sorry that the pictures are backwards chronologically..it's the first time I tried using Hello to bring my pictures over. It was certainly faster than the old way :)

What a week it's been. Hard to believe it's only been a week...it feels like at least a month!

The snow started in the afternoon on Thursday. They were predicting 1-3 inches for most of us, with 3-6 inches in Lockport and Amherst (north of us). Imagine our surprise when we woke up Friday morning to an average of 22 inches!! We lost our cable before bed on Thursday evening, and the power went out at some point during the night.

Josh went out in the morning and got some pictures of the snow and the sagging trees, and discovered that a huge tree had come down and was blocking our exit from the complex. So we spent the day in the living room and kitchen, eating whatever we could from the fridge, knowing it was likely to go bad. At around 5 he found out that the tree had been moved, and the road was getting plowed as we headed out (the snow was melting quickly, too) to my uncle and aunt's house, up north of the city, where they had gotten barely a dusting and still had power.

Our timing was perfect: the water pump that gets purified water to the areas we live in lost power, and our area was waterless for an hour or two right after we left. After it came back, they said we needed to boil our water before using it to drink or use for cooking...kinda tough with an electric stove and no power!! So it was good that we weren't home.

We had a great visit with my family, and Jasmine got good at crawling backwards down their steps. She was getting a little tired of the steps by mid-afternoon on Saturday, so we went home for a few things and then headed to my parents' (an hour east, no snow there).

Unfortunately, there were many mounds of snow from parking lots, taller than our cute little car. A woman was getting ready to turn left out of a gas station and couldn't see us, and we didn't see her until it was too late. Josh hadn't been going very fast since I was taking pictures, and he did slam on his brakes, but we ran right into the side of her truck. She was fine, didn't have enough damage to need any repairs at all. But we weren't so lucky. The seatbelts did their job and we didn't get hit by the airbags, but it totalled the car.

Josh's neck was a little sore, so they put him in a neck brace (and on a stretcher!!) to make sure he was fine. Something hit Jasmine's forehead (she had her doll and a bottle of water in her hands and was asleep when it happened, so we think it was one of those things). It didn't bleed but she got a "strawberry," so they put her in a back-thingy and on a stretcher too. I was okay; my chest hurt from the seatbelt, and I remembered an online friend who had been in an accident at about the same point in her pregnancy, who spent the remainder of her pregnancy on and off of bedrest, as labor kept trying to start.

So we all took an ambulance ride (no sirens or lights, thankfully) as a precautionary measure. I was thankful I was the one (of the three of us) to walk into the ambulance...I don't want to think how much harder it would have been for me if I'd also had to relive the "fun" of my first ambulance trip from after Jasmine was born.

We were there for a few hours...Josh had X-rays done, and they looked at all of us. They were all confident we were okay, and his parents took us to McDonald's for dinner and then to their house for the night. They were using a generator, and their power came back Sunday evening. We stayed there Sunday night, too.

Monday we stopped by our apartment and found that our power was on!! We also stopped at the car (now that we knew where it was) and picked up all our stuff (our computer, camera, all our clothes, toothpaste, you know, nothing important) so things were starting to feel more normal. Still no internet, but we were happy that things were slowly getting back to normal again.

Tuesday the internet was back when we came home from looking at cars (long stories there, too) and Wednesday (yesterday) we found our car!! A 2001 Honda CR-V...green...it's gorgeous!! We love it :)

So things are getting normal again. Still no internet at the office (so Josh may work from home this afternoon)...laundry's getting there (we were totally out of clothes)...it feels good to have things getting settled again.
I go see one of the OBs in my midwife's practice this afternoon, to make sure everything is fine with the baby, and next Thursday we all go see our family doctor and make sure we're all healthy.

And there you have it :)

yuck. There's a lot of work left to be done before things look "normal" again around here. 

sorry it's off-center, but just to give you an idea of the magnitude (and bad weather) 

Yup, it seems like all the trees look like this (or worse) 

And this is a blurry look at what it looked like as you got further south (sorry; we were driving) 

This is what it looked like about 20 minutes north. 

because the leaves were still on the branches, it was the healthy trees that lost branches, instead of the dead trees like the Ice Storm of 1991. 

more sagging trees 

sagging tree (and a branch down) 

Yup, really. October 13th 

22 inches of snow 

Power free and enjoying a bit of 18th century in Buffalo!

This is Charlene's mom. She's living the Amish life right now, no power, no internet, no car.... The Buffalo weather took down their power and internet, a driver who couldn't see around a snow bank (yes, a snow bank, and yes, in mid-October!) took care of the car part. They're looking for a horse and buggy and trying to find a jungle drum for communications, but until then, they're even more behind the times than usual for Buffalo. :-D It could be a week, the area is just decimated.... Everyone is fine and warm living with relatives who managed to get their power back.

Charlene's mom, in sunny and warm Rochester, garden spot of Western New York

Come join me!!

The Digi*Dreamer is having a big grand opening over the next two weeks, starting Monday the 16th. I'm leading Bingo, twice, and would love to see lots of people in there playing. You can win my "Overjoyed" kit :)

The two game times are Wednesday, the 18th, at 5 p.m. EST, and Saturday, the 21st, at 11 a.m. EST. I'm hoping that at least one will work out for most people, between time differences and work/life schedules. It should be a lot of fun :D

We won't even talk about the Yankees...I'm disappointed that the season is over (no more baseball games in this house until spring training) and really disappointed with how poorly they played. One thing I liked, though, is that we can't blame the pitching. They really did pretty well, but the offense just couldn't do anything! As my mom likes to say, they seem to slump as a team, and this was a really rotten time to slump!

Creative Team Call!!

This should be fun....
Edited: Thanks for applying!! See the list of my new Creative Team here! :)

It's Up!

My "All Teal, All the Time" kit is up now. Feel free to take a look. I had a lot of fun writing the description...what do you think??

Preview: All Teal, All the Time

I'm just putting the finishing touches on my new kit, which I'm hoping to get into the store tomorrow. It's all about Josh's favorite color, which has become one of my favorites, too. I had so much fun coming up with patterns, and then when I made a layout using it, I thought of more elements that would be helpful. So, without further ado, here is a preview of "All Teal, All the Time":



And here is a layout I made with it:

*****

In non-scrapping news, I got my hair cut last night. I'm really pleased with it; yesterday I curled my hair (just a bit) for our date...by the time Josh got home to get us, the curls were out and my hair looked unloved again. It was full of split-ends and was just too heavy (due in part to the pregnancy, I'm sure). So this was much-needed, and I'm excited because it doesn't fight my wave, but just lets it do what it wants to do anyways :)

Jasmine's Language and a picture I forgot

I forgot: I intended to put a close-up of my kit here, since the textures were so much fun to make :)



Jasmine's language is officially taking off. She picked up a few words today: fish (a bath toy), chair, and my personal favorite, cool. Suddenly everything is "coo." It's hilarious!! :) She knows the sign for "more" and uses it, which is nice since she hasn't started saying the word, so she would just whine when she wanted more food. This is a definite improvement :)