Playing Catch-up

I knew I would be spending the first two weeks in December in WY, and had planned pretty well for that, so it was not hard to finish last-minute details for Christmas when I returned. What I had not counted on was having to take my turn entertaining a respiratory bug when I got back. That put a bit of a monkey wrench in the works. I'm thankful that I'm feeling well now and am trying to catch up on a few things. Holiday decorations are finally put away and, with the exception of my office, the house in in good shape. My office is a bit of a disaster but it's coming along.

Sometimes one has to make a mess to get organized and I'm in that reorganizing stage. That's the down side. The up side is that I'm reorganizing in an effort to make more efficient use of my space to accommodate a new hobby: scrapbooking.

Writing our family history and scrapbooking for our grandchildren has been on my list ever since I became a grandparent (well, maybe a parent!), but with working full time, and with family and church responsibilities, it simply wasn't in the mix. I made it a goal for 2010, and got off to a great start when, on New Year's Eve (no less!), Miss Ky and I completed THREE scrapbook pages, one for each grandchild. She designed her own page and completed it with just a little help from me, and I made a page for Britt and one for Reed.

Santa (bless him!) brought me a Cri-Cut Expression for Christmas and I was determined to learn to use it as quickly as possible. Our first little project was "BOO!" which Ky used on her first scrapbook page.

Ky wanted the word "BOO!" to match the BOO! on the Halloween dress I had bought for her when she was four. She wanted to cut it out of "candy corn" paper, and I ended up using the insides of her Os for the "photo corners" on Reed's Halloween-themed page.


The scrapbook page I did for Britt was based on photos from her first Smith Family Reunion which she attended in 2007, in Island Park Idaho. Because Britt was "adopted" into our family rather than born into our family, this was her first exposure to just how big our family actually is. Britt had met her Grandpa and Grandma Smith and her Aunts (Donna, Jan, and Lynda) at her parents' wedding--and she adored them--but she learned that they were but a "drop in the bucket" as far as numbers go.

We had so much fun scrapbooking that we're committed to just keep on goin'.