I Am So Funny :)

It was beautiful out this afternoon, so I let Eli stay at school for a bit and play on the playground with his friends. As we were walking back to the car, I cautioned him that he'd been playing a little too rough. His response? "But mom, I was just playing enemies with my friends!" My response? "Hmmm...so do you play friends with your enemies?" His response? To my great delight, it appears that Eli has mastered the eye roll/sigh combination. :)

Crazy Fast Layout

Under twenty minutes, including the printing of the photo:

I've been part of a small supper club full of serious foodies for three years now, and it's so much fun! We rotate the hosting every month; the host is responsible for choosing a theme for the dinner and making the main course, and the other couples provide the first course, side dishes, and dessert. Everyone also brings something to drink to accompany their course. We make a couple of exceptions to the norm each year and do either a family dinner (where we start earlier in the evening and include all of our kids) or go out together to a restaurant.

While we've done a lot of very interesting themes (Georgian food anyone? the country, not the state), we keep coming back to the Sunday Suppers at Lucques cookbook (see salad above). When Seth and I lived in LA we ate at Lucques more often than we could afford to; after we moved to Denver I stalked the publication of Suzanne Goin's cookbook and bought it as soon as it came out. Now we've converted our friends and everyone in our supper club has bought their own copy! It's full of seriously time-consuming dishes with ingredients that are sometimes hard to find, but every minute spent cooking something from this book is worth it. Trust me!

Random List of Things That Make Me Happy

• honey vanilla chamomile tea, with honey
• Sadie saying, "Mommy, you're my special friend."
• anything by Jonathan Kozol
  
• lowercase letters
• asparagus
  
• friendship
• notes from Eli
• patterned paper (especially if it's American Crafts, Collage Press, KI Memories, October Afternoon, or Scenic Route)
• Mark Kurlansky's article in the most recent issue of Bon Appetit, in which he takes down the movement to sneak vegetables into children's diets by camouflaging them
• days that Seth works from home
• "Friday Night Lights"
• Bazzill orange peel textured cardstock
  
• laughter

Sometimes You Need a Little Grownup Time

And I got two nice doses of that this weekend.

Friday night I got together with friends to scrapbook. It was great hanging out with everyone and it felt good to finally get a layout done after having been in a slump.


Saturday night Seth and I went out to dinner with two other couples to experience Denver Restaurant Week (nearly all of the swank restaurants in town participate, offering a three-course menu for $52.80 per couple). After an unpleasant start to our evening (the restaurant we'd made a reservation at screwed up said reservation, but the manager rectified the situation by getting us in to a sister restaurant and giving us some gift certificates and coupons) the night turned around nicely. Our conversation wandered from food to life experiences to politics - a very nice change from "Wonder Pets," toilet-training, and reading Caps For Sale for the umpteenth billion time!

Gumdrops With Legs

Sadie's new favorite hobby? Drawing gumdrops with legs. I'm not sure where the idea came from, but she's taken off running with it. This morning she produced an entire gumdrop family:


That's the baby gumdrop at the top, and the rest of his family below (left to right: kid, dad, mom).

Roses Are Red

I think Eli and I have the same brain. Seriously. He was doing "homework" (in quotes because he's only in kindergarten) the other day and one of his assignments was to decode a message where a picture stood in for each letter. As soon as he decoded each word he read what he'd decoded so far. When he got to "Roses are red," he paused for a second and then said, "Well, yeah, but they could also be pink or yellow or white or some other color, right, Mommy?" Right. It was at that moment I knew that he will have all the same issues with standardized tests I always had. Sure, there's always one "best" answer, but who's to say that any number of other answers aren't equally valid, depending on what angle you're coming from? Sigh...

With that, I shall leave you with an "I love you" card I made. Why post it here? 1) It matches the title of this blog post. 2) I took no photos of Eli doing his homework. 3) I have ceased to be able to make layouts and can now only make cards. Mojo, where are you?


Note: the patterned paper in the background is another October Afternoon paper from the new Detours line. (The rub-ons are all also October Afternoon, although not new.)

Sick

My house is currently full of tissues, juice, children's medicines, and chicken noodle soup. The kids have watched far too much television. Hopefully we'll be through this soon!

Finally Getting Around to the CHA Update

Apparently I needed a day to decompress and then yesterday was totally consumed by kitchen time. Sadie and I baked cookies. It took a really long time because she "helped."


Then, when Eli was home from school, we decorated the cookies. Sadie had a tough time understanding that once a frosted cookie is covered with sprinkles adding more sprinkles isn't the best idea. I was willing to let her figure that one out on her own but Eli was a little stressed out that we might run out of sprinkles. As if! The minute the cookies were done I had to get started on Little Mr. Foodie's Valentine's dinner request (no one else had a special request, but you better believe Eli did!): seared salmon with balsamic-glazed peas and carrots plus salad with roasted asparagus, avocado, blackberries, pistachios, and balsamic vinaigrette. As if dinner wasn't already complicated enough, I decided it would be a good idea to have our cookies with vanilla ice cream and homemade raspberry-hot fudge sauce. Seth is still doing dishes (okay, not really, but it did take him way longer than usual).

Right! I was supposed to be posting about CHA! CHA was fun. I could tell stories for days, but I won't bore you. I'll just share a few snippets:

Apparently, driving on southern California freeways terrifies most people. Except me. Then again, I lived there for seven years.

This is what Bolsa Chica State Beach looks like when the mad dash to beat the sunset fails:


Having never before done layouts for a trade show it was fun to see my work displayed in the October Afternoon booth (the top two layouts are mine; the bottom one is by the fabulous Judi van Valkinburgh).


I saw lots of great products and can't wait to get my hands on quite a bit of it. Thankfully I have a mostly un-spent holiday gift certificate that I can use!

I had a fun time reconnecting with old friends and making some new ones (please say hi if you are lurking here!).

It has been confirmed that In-N-Out burgers live up to the hype. Either that or Heather, Houston, and Janna were humoring me. The event was not well documented because we were in a mad rush to get to the airport to catch our flights home.

While CHA was a blast, it is good to be home.

Slice Girls

I was all set to write a long post about our amazing CHA story, but it turns out Em beat me to the punch. So...please go to Emily's blog to read the incredible story. (Thanks Em for beating me to the punch - now I have more time to scrap! :))

October Afternoon Sneak Peeks, Part Two

Just a quick post with two more projects:

1. A card made using paper from the Daydream line, people rub-ons on the outside and word rub-ons inside, and one of the extras that come with the matching chipboard/sticker alphabet - the frame around the people.



2. A layout using two of the papers from the Daydream line, a rub-on (on the photo), and more of the matching chipboard/sticker alphas and extras (the circles here are part of the alphabet set).

October Afternoon Sneak Peeks!

I've had the privilege of being able to work with some of October Afternoon's new products, which are being released at CHA this weekend. I've done three layouts thus far with their new Detours line. The colors are bright and fun, and there's a good mix of more traditional patterns (stripes, polka dots, grids, etc.) and whimsical ones (apples, woodland scene, etc.).

Speaking of apples...


On the layout above I cut a bit around the edge of a couple of the apples on the patterned paper and used them like paper clips on my photo. Isn't this paper fun?!

Here are three more of the patterns from this line (look closely, I stamped on a third paper that's a small-scale grid):


And this one uses the new alpha stickers and chipboard, with some handcut pieces from another one of the more whimsical patterns in this line:


Check back here later for layouts using the Daydream line!

Go-To Design

I made this layout today, and, after it was done, realized I'd subconsciously used my "go-to" design: two vertical columns with one photo crossing over the center. I'm sure I've done this same design at least eight to ten times, yet somehow it always feels new to me. Guess that's the beauty of varying color, texture, text, and pattern! How about you? Do you have a "go-to" design? (By the way, this is another layout using October Afternoon products: patterned paper and a rub-on.)

Back to All Things Scrappy, Including October Afternoon

Now that the birthday furor has subsided around here it's back to all things scrappy. I had the great privilege of accompanying my lovely and talented friend, Emily Pitts, on a tour of October Afternoon's headquarters last week. Emily is on the October Afternoon design team and invited me to drive down to Colorado Springs with her to meet the October Afternoon staff and tour their facility. I had a fantastic time! Kim, Jon, Yolande, and Cathy are all amazingly friendly, the office was a model of organization, and the sneak peek I saw of the new lines being released at CHA next week made me positively giddy! I'm not allowed to say much more, but I will say that the new lines are amazing! They feature gorgeous colors and patterns, and Kim and Jon have lots of fun new things up their sleeves.

Kim and Jon wouldn't let me go without giving me a few stamp sets and rub-ons, so I came home and created this layout with some of the stamps and their paper:



Fun stuff! (And, an aside, I think that framed layouts are becoming my signature. I can't seem to do much these days without trimming 1/4" - 1/2" off each edge of my layout and adding a border in a coordinating or contrasting cardstock color!)

Celebrate!

First, we finished building the Lego Hogwarts castle (freestanding herbology classroom and castle addition not shown):


Second, we got ready for the party. Isn't my husband a genius? He made this cake all by himself (well, okay, so I mixed the blue frosting and the gold frosting and supplied the paintbrush...I mean broomstick):


Third, we had the party at a local gym (one of the many times Sadie was airborne):


Fourth, we went out to dinner at Eli's choice of restaurant, Rioja. (Yeah, he's not my son or anything, is he? :)) He started with the crispy coconut calamari with passionfruit coulis, Thai marinated cucumber salad, cashews, and coconut glaze. After that he had the roasted parsnip ravioli with hazelnut brown butter, crispy parsnip-sorrel-apple salad, and apple red wine gastrique. He finished his meal with chilled s'mores pot de creme with chocolate custard, house made graham crackers, and bruleed house made marshmallows. Three times in a row we lit the candle on his dessert and Sadie leaned over and blew it out. Eli was not happy. (We finally restrained Sadie on the fourth try.)


Today was a long day, but fun!