A Creative Life

Clone Required!

Oh yes, there are times where the mere notion of having a clone of myself has outstanding merit!!  When there is a pile of dishes staring at me from the sink, send in the clone.  When the floor under the table is covered yet again with food scraps after a meal, send in the clone.  When small children wake up after only 45 minutes sleep when I was hoping for 2 hours of pure quiet..... send in the clone!  See the fantasy of having a clone for all those jobs you are just so tired of doing over and over again.  Just imagine having a clone to send out to work to earn money but you are still free to do the things you enjoy doing.  OK enough of the fantasy, reality is that there will always be a BIG pile of dishes for me to do at the end of every meal, the floor will always need to be swept by me after a meal, the 7-10 loads of washing will still need to be done by me each and every week, not to mention putting all those clothes back in their respective draws, bathrooms will still need to be cleaned, baby butts will still have to be changed, food will still need to be cooked to feed the multitudes.  There is a certain rhythm to being a SAHM and most of it revolves around doing tasks that will be undone before the day is out, no wonder there is so much appeal to having a clone to do all those jobs!!

Now Steph and Madison came over today and there was certainly a "send in the clone" moment when two little girls decided it would be a fantastic idea to "trash" Kaitlyns room!  In fact I have never seen it, in quite this state before.  Unfortunately for us, there was no clone, nor were there two little girls around at the time of clean up, they had performed a disappearing act!  So the task fell upon Steph and I and it took some time!  But of course we did capture some cuteness on video prior to the clean up!

These two girls had a fantastic day playing together.  I also took a couple of quick shots of the two of them together as well. Love the affection this shot portrays.

 

Seriously, how cute are these two little girls!  They played so well together, the biggest tears coming at the end of the visit when poor Madison objected strongly to having to go home!  

I have actually been taking a few photos lately but have barely had time to edit any of them!!  When Ashton was a newborn baby I used to have the laptop by the chair I fed him in and would sit and edit pics while watching TV and feeding him.  Now he is older and upwardly mobile, trying to find time to edit pics has become quite a task!  Here are a couple of those cute little critters I call my kids! LOL!

 

Then there is this cute little chap! 

 

  Last post I shared with you how he had taken his first steps towards walking. Well look what a little over a week can do!  Now he chooses to walk everywhere!!!!

Soon this little guy will be running!!!!

Going back a couple of weeks ago, Paul had a Family Day for work, they had it at the Adelaide Zoo and there was face painting for the kids as well.  So the little ones decided to get their face paint on!! Kaitlyn chose to be a pretty butterfly.

Ethan decided to stay in keeping with the Panda theme at the zoo.

Paul took this photo and entered it into the contest at work that was run in conjunction with the Family Fun Day. Guess what he WON!!! Ethan was very excited, he thinks it is all about him!!  Funny thing is that the prize was a "Family" pass to see an A League game, but their definition of a family is 2 adults and 2 kids! Haha, that doesnt even get half our kids through the gate!  I guess it will just be Paul and the 3 eldest boys going!

Now going back a couple of weeks ago, my best friend Kym sent me this most adorable gift!  It is so totally gorgeous, sentimental and too top it off my kids adore it as well, since they have their names on it too.   So a huge thankyou to my best friend for being so very thoughtful and kind!

OK, enough family stuff now and onto the scrappy stuff!!  I am starting to get a little behind with my Color Room posts!  But this was my take on Palette #20.  I have been feeling a bit creatively blank lately, usually I get strong visual images in my head of what I want to create, but of late, there has been a void.  So I decided to try playing with lots of techniques on this LO in order to create something.  Taking a different tack, to help with my creative block and this was the result.

 

I also had a LO up on the Prima blog.  I dont do a lot of cutesy girl LO's. I usually create feminine, girly stuff with lots of flourishes and flowers and swirls, but I have to extend myself with the new ranges by Prima. So this was my take on the "So Cute" range using the girly side.

 

   

It really is such a cute line and I have really enjoyed working with the boy side of these papers, but you will have to wait to see what I did with those.  It  is now late, and I still have things to do! If only I could send in the clone!!!  But that is my fantasy world and reality is, it is up to me!  So thanks for stopping by and reading my ranting!!!

Milestones

I had done a whole blog post on Thursday, it was smart, witty, and rather amusing.  The type of post you spend ages working over, deliberating each and every word you write.  The type of post you can be proud of.  Then I went to save it, the correct thing to do.  At this point my internet service provider decided it was time for a reminder that the bill had not been paid.  There was no polite email suggesting I pay it right now, reminding me I had overlooked the payment, no it just suspended my service with total disregard to the witty post I had laboured over!  Clicking on "save" was my downfall!  Woosh, gone into cyberspace, all that work.  All those words I had pondered over, all the proof that at one point last week, I was clever, and humorous in my blog post.  Now you have to take my word for that, as the evidence is lost, forever, and finding the mental fortitude to soldier on and create another post has taken almost another week!!!

So, what had I waffled on about in the aforementioned post......Ashton has reached a new and exciting milestone!!  At the tender age of 10months and 1 week, this little guy, in all his scruffy cuteness, has decided it is time to take the next big step.....literally.....well, almost literally, they are more like tiny, penguin like, jittery steps!  But a step is a step and not just one, but a succession of them.  None of this one or two steps to start off with for this little guy, he believes in branching out to 5 or 6 on his first go!!  I presume it is that inate desire to keep up with the rest of the fast paced family!  There is evidence, actual video footage of one of those first attempts at walking!!

 

Paul was working lates when Ashton decided that he would take flight, so I emailed this video to him.  His response summed it up very well......."we are in trouble now!" 

While we are on the topic of this little guy, I am sure you remember me lamenting about his lack of actual baby babble, well he added some babble to his repitoire this week and guess what it was?  Much to my delight, it was not the usual dadadadada, but instead those sweet little words of mamamamamama fell from those cute little lips!!!  So we had to wait a while, but at least I was able to claim bragging rights to mama coming before dada, just the way it should be!! LOL!!

Now let me say that I am really learning by experience the difficulties in raising a teen and he is only 12!!  Still another year before he is officially an actual teen!  I have covered some of his outburst in previous posts, but this time it is the nature of other difficult children (actually change that to singular, child) who has taken it upon himself to bully Lachlan.  I am usually a pretty relaxed Mum but when it comes to kids bullying my child, well that just makes me cross!!  In fact if it was just verbal I would probably advise Lachlan to rise above it, but this child has taken to shoving him, kicking him..you get the idea.  Well I was all ready to go and see the principal last week when the bully child ended up being suspended over an incident with another child.  The school takes a rather dim view when a child repeatedly kicks another child in the shins and shoves his head into the ground!!    Maybe the bully will learn his lesson, maybe not.  I guess it is just wait and see when he returns.  So I guess these are just more of the challenges i will be facing over the years, so I had better get used to it and work out how to handle it all!

Now onto the scrappy stuff!!  Lots more to show again!  I have a LO for palette 19 on the Color Room.  Loved this palette but was time poor, so I did something I never do, a stick as you go LO!!

 

 

 

Then there was the Prima BAP for August! I had quite a few purple flowers in my box for creating for CHA and I wanted to use some, so I decided to mix it with teal for a really pretty mix. 

 

 

I wanted to change the colour of the felt gate, so I covered it with a couple of coats of gesso before spraying with Glimmermist.  I really liked this LO when I had finished it.  Dont you love it when you complete a LO and feel good about it!!

OK that is enough for this post or I will never get it done!  Hopefully I wont have another upload disaster next time and I should keep on track with my blog posts.  Thanks for stopping by!

 

 

How on Earth

Seriously how on earth did I manage to do this to poor little Ashton?? 

 
Contributing factors were:

a)    Trying to rush to get out of the pouring rain.

b)    Child sleeping so trying to hold horizontally instead of vertically

c)    me totally miscalculating the length of horizontally lying child, he is no longer a tiny baby.

The first thing I noticed was the sliding car door did not shut with its usual intensity.  I didnt really think about that so much until a second or so later there was an almighty scream from Ashton, who up until that moment was asleep in my arms.  I should have been paying more attention to where his feet were and less attention to keeping the rain off him!!  I ran the 50m to the friends house we had arrived at, the whole while trying to soothe him but he just kept screaming.  When I got inside and removed his sock, I just began to cry when I saw his poor little foot with a big reddish blue line across it.  It was just so heart breaking that I could be responsible for such an accident.  It swelled up so quickly and it took so long for his sobs to subside, it really was heart-breaking.  It was so swollen that I took him to accident and emergency and his foot was x-rayed but luckily no broken bones.  They wanted to keep him in overnight to make sure that the swelling did not affect his circulation but I got them to show me what to look for and managed to talk my way into going home.  Due to the heavy duty pain killers they gave him, he slept the whole night through (well what was left of it since it was past 1am before he was tucked into bed.

If you saw him now, furniture surfing around the house you would have no idea of what had happened to the poor wee soul!

So how about pics of him being his cute little self!!!

 

 

 

See that cute little curl around his ear?  I love that little curl, but I do think he needs a hair cut soon as he is looking a little scruffy these days, but I will miss that curl!!!!

My brother, SIL and my niece and nephew were down from the Gold Coast for a few days and we got to catch up.  I tried to get a good shot of them all together.  Well lets just file that under a complete failer if you wanted it to be serious.  But when I told them to go "crazy" for a photo, the results were quite.....well......you can decide that for yourselves!  Lets just say their characters shine through!!

 

You get the idea.  There is no shortage of "crazy" amongst this lot of kids! I do think that Lachlan may be thinking he is too "cool" for "crazy" these days!  It was wonderful to catch up with my brother and SIL as I hadn't seen them since November when they moved to the Gold Coast!  I think my brother is really enjoying his new job up there and is so much more relaxed! My Nephew Ben came out with the funniest comment when he first saw Ethan, proclaiming in a most perplexed voice "your still bigger than me!"  I think Ben expects that he is the only one getting older/bigger and therefore he should be catching up to his older cousin!  It really was quite funny!  Ethan, Ben and Kaitlyn were as thick as thieves, going off and playing together, they were so quiet at one point we actually went in search of them, but they were just happily playing "angry birds" on the i-pad together!

Love this photo that Paul took!  This is Ashton "hunting" you down!!!  The moment you sit in front of him to take a picture he is on the prowl to "climb" up you like you are his own personal play gym!!  So from family antics to scrapbooking stuff.....

This week we were back in "His Room" on The Color Room.  At first I was dubious of the two blues in this palette, but in the end it came together quite easily.  I find it a good way to keep up with Ashtons album when a "his Room" comes around!

 

 

 

 

The journaling on this LO is all about Ashtons giggle being a lot like crying, so I have included some video footage!!!

Going back a while ago, I also had a LO published in a Russian magazine for a Prima article in it.  So here is that LO to share.

As a part of the article I had to do a step by step on altering a flower and I chose to show how to create my own puffy velvet effect on flowers using the Marvy Velvet Puffy Markers.  They really are just so much fun to use when you heat set and watch the "puff" erupt!

1. Original Flower        2. Create Pool        3. Dip Edges

 

4. Heat Set                5. Final Result

So there you have a very quick little pictorial of how to achieve those velvety tips on flowers.  It is super simple and lots of fun.  You can also use it on the actual petals.  I often use my fingers to swipe it over the flower petals and then heat set.  I know I am going on about how much fun it is watching it puff up  but it really is, and the velvety texture is cool as well.

I hope you all had a great weekend and I will try to get this little blog updated quicker next time!  Haha!!  Just don't hold me to that as I seem to be getting more and more behind in the updating department!  Thanks for stopping by!