Absolute Poppycock

Just Another Scrapbook Layout

Okay, I think I might be addicted. I’d forgotten just how much I love scrapbooking. I haven’t had much opportunity to scrap since Gracie got old enough to “help” (read destroy every page I work on). So, this digiscrapping thing is awesome! I can work on a page a little bit at a time and don’t have to worry about getting stuff out and putting it back up every time the girls come in the room. Now, if they’d only come up with a way to digi-sew!These pictures are from Wednesday. The girls and I got home before Steve and we were playing in the yard. The mini-rosebush in the front flower bed is totally full of perfect deep pink blooms. Gracie picked one for herself and one for me. At least I thought that was all she picked. When we got home yesterday, I noticed about 15 little roses on the front porch. So, either we have a bandit that likes to steal our roses off our bush and then leave them on the porch or Gracie picked more than I thought.  Steve wasn’t too happy that she picked all the flowers, but look at it this way – now we have pictures of the flowers to remember them forever (and I have a cute page for her scrapbook!)

Credits:  Template by Misty Cato at www.scrapbookbytes.com
Papers from Arigato kit by Nancy Kubo at www.oscraps.com
Font is Dingleberry (and yes I picked it, just ’cause I love the name)

And because I’m an equal opportunity mommy, here’s a picture of Abbie

It’s not the greatest picture of her face, but I love her chubby baby hands.  And that look of concentration on her face.  “Hmmm, how am I going to get this shiny green stuff out of the ground and into my mouth?”  Don’t worry – she figured it out in about two seconds.  Poor Steve – one of his kids pulls all the blooms off of the rosebush he worked so hard on and the other one pulls up huge clumps of the grass that he’s babied for years while his wife just sits idly by and snaps picutres.  We’ll make it up to him on Father’s Day, I promise.

Happy Monday!

Just a couple of pictures to start your week off on the right (if cold) foot. You can click on the pictures to see them larger.

Abbie outside on the porch on a warm day last week
I messed up the picture that was here before of the girls – I’ll fix it and post it later.

Death Of The Little Black Bag

So, walking into work this morning, I tripped on the sidewalk and fell on my hand and my knee and banged one of my ribs up with something that I was carrying.  I turned and sat on the cement for a moment to catch my breath and looked around at all the things I was carrying.  I had my breast pump, my laptop, my purse, the bag I carry my milk in, and then my bag of other stuff that I might or might not need at work (my organizer, snacks, a soda or two, a pack of pictures to show Virginia, a digital scrapbooking magazine, ribbon making supplies – Ribbon Making Supplies?  What do I do at work all day – do I really think I might have time to make HAIRBOWS?)  No wonder I fell – I was lugging enough supplies to keep a small army (okay, a small army of breastfeeding, scrapbooking, hairbow-making babies) happy for a week.  Anyway, that is not the point.  It may be A point – like at some point I need to evaluate why every day when I come to work, it looks like I’m evacuating for a hurricane, but it is notTHE point, the point of this blog entry.  The point of this entry is that I realized when I looked around at all the various bags that fell when I fell, I saw nothing but a sea of black.   Every single bag that I have is black – and not just the bags I brought with me, the bags at home are black, too.  My camera bag, my video camera bag, my other laptop bag, my scrapbook totes – black, all black.  This is a picture of part of my black bag collection:


I realized something, sitting there on that sidewalk amidst all of those black bags. I am like the Goth Queen of bags and I do not want to be the Goth Queen of bags – I am not a classic, black kind of person.  I love color – I love pattern – I love texture.  I do not buy plain black material – if you look at my material collection, it’s filled with bright, bold, whacky patterns and some soft pastels, and lots of toile.  Not many solds and NO solid black.  Same with my scrapbook paper.  So, why so many black bags?  Well, partly because you don’t have a lot of choice in what you buy, and partly, because, for some reason, I gravitate to black with my clothes and my bags.  But, no more – from here on out, I’m going to go for the craziest, brightest bags that I can find.  Like check out this totally cool Kiwi laptop bag from Around The Block Products  Yep, I’m going to completely revamp my bag collection – no more black is my new mantra.  I will only have colorful bags, even if I have to make them myself.  At least then, I’ll have something cheery to look at when I fall down on my way to work.

I’m tired, just plain tired.  My muscles are tired, my bones are tired, and my eyes are tired simply from trying to keep them open.  It seems like work and my children have conspired to keep me from getting more than a couple of hours of sleep a night.  Abbie has decided that she likes to be awake from midnight to three; Gracie refuses to go down before ten; and I’ve been getting up at 3:30 to meet deadlines for a couple of programming projects.  And, of course, on the MSN homepage today is an article about how getting an extra couple of hours of sleep can make you thin.  Does that mean that the converse is true – that losing a couple of hours of sleep can make you fat?  Well, at least I have an excuse!  You would think that given the fact that I am running on sheer willpower (and a probably not too healthy dose of Diet Dr. Pepper) that my favorite time of the day would be when my poor, exhausted head finally hits my soft, sweet pillow.  Or maybe when I have a moment to myself and I can escape into a steamy hot bath.  Okay, that doesn’t happen – the steamy hot bath is shared with a 3 year old and a million bath toys, ranging from tea pots to finger paint.  Or maybe my favorite time would be that moment in the still of the night (between 2:45 and 3:00 am) when both girls are sleeping.  Nope, nope, and nope.  My favorite time of the day actually happens because I am running late for work in the morning.
Pretty much every day the past week, I’ve been about an hour late leaving for the office.  This puts me leaving at about the same time as Steve and the girls.  We follow the same route to work and school for about half of our trip.  Then, it’s time for me to turn left and Steve and the girls continue straight through a traffic light.  There’s a pretty long left-hand turn lane at this particular light, so every day, Steve stays in his lane and slows way down and I pull on into the turn lane. 
Then, I watch, with bated breath, as the dark, tinted back window of the Civic slowly goes down.  First, a little hand appears, manically waving.  And then it’s time for that smiling face.  Gracie is yelling out the window.  “Bye, Mommy!  Have Good Day!  I see you on the morrow!”  And she keeps waving and yelling until one or the other of us go through the light.  And that is the best part of my day, the part where I remember no matter how tired I am, I am amazingly blessed.

I don’t have much to say this morning.  Actually, I have a lot to say, but no time to say it.  Abigail is wide awake, watching World Animals – I swore I wasn’t going to start her on the highly addictive Baby Einsteins until it was absolutely necessary, but desperate times call for desperate measures.  I have a work deadline of 8:00 a.m. and I’m still finishing the code and have to run through it to test it, then compile it and upload it.  I have a good reason for why I’m not done, though.  I wasn’t really procrastinating this weekend – okay, I was.  But I wasn’t idle.  Here’s what I really worked on on Saturday instead of what I should have been doing.
Abbie’s Six Month Pictures