Football Camp #1

Wyatt started Freshman Football Camp this week. It's 2 hours a night, which wouldn't be such a big deal, if it wasn't so hot out! When I took him over to the high school it was 111 degrees outside. At least for now they are just in t-shirts and shorts!


Wyatt is so different from Grant, who is so quiet about everything. Wyatt comes home from practice full of news and wants to tell us every little thing that happened. I hope that continues as he gets older!


Last night, Mike Pollak of the Indianapolis Colts came to talk to the freshmen. He's an alum of their high school, and Grant had his mom as a math teacher in 8th grade. Mike had already talked to the Varsity team a few days ago. Grant said he answered lots of questions about being on the same team as Peyton Manning!


Wyatt...in his very first Corona Football shirt.

Summertime!

Summer is more than halfway over! The boys have 4 weeks left before school starts again. Why does it have to go so fast? We've had Roanna and her family visiting, summer school for Wyatt (PE!), football practice for Grant, weight room for both Grant and Wyatt, Grandma visiting, and now we are down to football camps.

Kent and Kurt are still around, but they took the summer off from activities. They've spent a lot of time in the pool and hanging out with friends. In fact, we've had a revolving door for friends for all of the boys!

School will be here before we know it...maybe I'll be ready by that time to have the boys out of the house. But for now...I'm enjoying having them home and wish summer was longer...

End of the Season baseball video

It's been a long season for Kent and Kurt - they ended up coming in 6th in the regular season, but 2nd in the playoffs!

The Art Pot

This year at Kent and Kurt's elementary school, we are doing an Art Pot fundraiser. Each class in the school has to decorate some kind of pot and then it will be raffled off at the spring social in April.

I volunteered to head up Kent and Kurt's class' pot and chose to do a recycled/found object art piece with a garden theme. Their class is known as the Broncos because their teacher rides horses. So we decided to call it Broncos' Good Luck Garden with additions of old rusted horseshoes.

It started off as a galvanized bucket purchased at Lowe's. Then I added metal painted various shades of green to act as stems, grass, greenery, etc. Kurt and I then created lots of various pieces and took all of it into the classroom. The kids then all decorated and painted the flowers and insects in any way they wanted, and glued them onto the stems. I told them we were going for a worn, rusted look, and that the painting could be as messy as they wanted. They did SUCH a great job! I never would have come up with the designs they did. The result was a wonderful, whimsical, colorful (and heavy!) pot in which the winner of it can plant something or use it indoors as a basket.

When we were all done, I had the students all sign their names on the bottom of the bucket...as artists always sign their work!

Flag Football Stars!

Kent and Kurt started flag football a couple of weeks ago. This past Saturday they had a double-header and played great! Kurt is the speed demon and got his first interception - he was so excited jumping up and down! I was too excited to get a photo of it, however.

Kent made several catches and completed his first touchdown and extra point! That last point earned them the win!

Happy New Year!

I know - shock! that I'm updating this. I don't know why I feel like it's so hard to keep up with this.

Anyway, Christmas came, and went. It was a quiet Christmas for us, no extended family around, but as it turned out that was fine since a couple of us were sick. We had lots of celebrations the week before Christmas though (well, I did...dinners with friends and such). The boys enjoyed their Christmas break from school. We bought them a second Xbox 360 to alleviate some of the fighting between all 5 of them (yes, I include my DH also). So now we have the front room set up with a TV and a computer monitor where they can play side-by-side. My DH was a genious and found that you could hook the Xbox up to a monitor - yay, we didn't have to buy another TV!

As usual, we are into sports - Kent and Kurt start flag football (with DH as their coach), and Wyatt starts tackle football on Saturday. Grant is on a break as high school footbal just finished up in the middle of December. He played JV this past season, but was moved up to Varsity for the playoffs - it was quite an honor!

I'm still busy working for TJFormal and prom season is starting up so things will get even busier soon!

Have a GREAT 2009!

Pterodactyls

I just wanted to test out putting a video on my blog. This clip is from 2003 when K&K were almost 5 years old and they put our king-size pillows on their arms and acted like pterodactyls. It's very tiny since it took it with my digital camera. Note to all mom videographers...no talking or laughing! Ugh!

The digi layout I did of this moment is down below.

Back to School

Actually, my boys have just completed their THIRD week of school. The summer went too fast, and we have to start school way too early. Here's the boys on their first day - since I digi-scrapped these, I think I had them done that same day! For Grant and Wyatt's, I just swapped out the photos and a few other things and voila! I was done. This exercise in duplicating pages did make me realize that 2 times is my limit, so I went with a different design for K&K (I'll just print that one twice).

The Pope Conversation

More than 2 years ago, I detailed a conversation I had with 3 of my boys about becoming Pop. Iwanted to scrap that conversation since it was so cute and funny, but I put it off because I felt like I needed to scrap it for each boy (yes, I'm still stuck on the boys having their own scrapbooks). Enter the digi-world of scrapping and now I just have to print it 3 times! Woohoo!

I'm really having a blast with the digi-scrapping. No, I won't give up paper scrapping...but I do love not making a big mess and learning something new!

Digi-Scrapping!

Gosh darn it...I said I wouldn't do it. Ever. But dangit if Libby didn't get me started just because she has this fancy new job at Sweet Shoppe Designs.

First of all, after a hiatus of about a year from scrapping, trying to get over all the professional stuff I was involved in that almost ruined scrapping for me...I finally started up again this summer. I think I've been able to get back to the joy of just scrapping as a hobby, and for me, for the right reasons. My goal for the summer was to get 4 Athlete albums done for the boys with all their sports photos in them. Turns out that was a lofty goal. I did finish Wyatt's though and it's over 40 pages (OK, a few pages were already done)! I went with the KISS strategy, but I'm very pleased with my pages. What a RELIEF to use whatever supplies I wanted and not have to worry about whether it was "fresh and new" enough for ANYthing.

So in the middle of this...along comes Libby who tempts me with digi. I give it a try and so far I'm loving it. I've only done 6 pages, but it makes so much sense to me to do Kent and Kurt's pages this way so I can just swap out the photos and print them twice!

For their Athlete albums, I will just combine paper and digi scrapping and be OK with it. Their professional sports pictures will be done on paper and the snapshots will be done digi. Somehow I'll make it work!

Here are a few of the pages and I think I'll start a photo album with just digi pages.

Sorry, no trendy white-space pages for me! I like my pages FILLED with photos! :)