little house on the prairie

I grew up loving Little House on the Prairie! We've been reading through this series for our read aloud time everyday this summer. Have you heard of Across the Curriculum with Favorite Authors? We are using the guide for Laura Ingalls Wilder's books. The guide covers all seven books. It has questions to ask your kids at the end of each chapter and easy to involved activities and crafts to do for each book (you don't have to do them all). After we finish the Little House series, I want to get the Dr. Suess guide. They are loving this stuff!

Here the girls are in their bonnets. They are pretending to have mustaches like Pa. My great-grandmother made these bonnets in 1961 for a 75th year anniversary celebration in Douglas, Wy. The Wyoming residents of this town all dressed up in 1886 style clothing--bonnets and all. My mom and her sisters wore these fashionable bonnets.

The first book, Little House in the Big Woods, suggests that you made rag dolls. The girls picked out some fabric I had on hand (from my quilting days) and we went to work. They both got their first lesson on the sewing machine. Paige was pretty good at it! Sewing the yarn on for hair was not an easy task. I did all of Faith's (the blue dress), but Paige asked if she could do her doll's hair. I really didn't think she could do it, it was hard for me to push the needle through! But she did it, all on her own . . . her doll has a bit of face hair, but she was very proud! I don't think they had Sharpie's back in the olden days, but by the time I was done sewing hair and eyes, I was ready to be done. The girls were excited to draw faces on their dolls.

In the book, Little House on the Prairie, they suggest building a log cabin out of pretzel rods. This was so fun! Another day we built a chimney, with river rocks, just as Pa did. There is also some paper furniture inside the house, which the book provides the templates for. The wolves surrounding the cabin was all Faith's idea. At one part in the book an entire pack of wolves surrounds their cabin all night long. We found a picture online and made a bunch of copies and the girls colored and cut them out. So fun!

This last picture was a special request from Faith. She is very into "The Blog" thing. She wanted me to put up a picture of Carpet Bear all by himself . . . in the bonnet of course!

birthday album

My girls love planning the theme of their next birthday party. Faith, age 4, already has themes picked out through her 7th birthday party. We'll see if she sticks to her plans . . . As much as they love planning ahead, they really love looking at past birthday parties. Because of this, I decided a couple of years ago to pull their birthday party layouts from their personal albums and put all the parties in one album--this way they can find them all in one place.

I made this title page for the album a couple of years ago. Love the Creative Imaginations papers and accents! And painting on every layout was quite the rage a couple of years ago--thus the painted background. This title page was meant to be gender neutral and something bright and cheery. I still love these papers.

Have a great day! 

title page

Still working on the family album title pages. Here is one I just finished:

I saw this layout by Lisa Dickinson the other day and I liked the quick factor . . . I am just trying to get these title pages done so I can move on to some recent pictures I want to scrapbook. Since my local scrapbook store closed last February, I have been trying to use what I have on hand. This is some old Basic Grey paper and letter stickers. I know I will soon be lured into buying new stuff since the store is reopening sometime in the fall! Yipee! This exciting news is almost as good as the birth of my first child . . . hee, hee.

American Crafts challenge card

Up for grabs this week at American Crafts is their adhesive! I have been wanting to try out their new line of adhesive ever since I saw it at CHA in January. So, I'm playing along with their challenge.

 This is a card I have made before using different supplies . . . I just love it because it's quick and easy. I used all American Crafts goodies and popped up the flowers with some dimensional adhesive. I've had these flowers for forever!

Hope you are having a great day!

family update

My baby turned one yesterday! This is the last teddy bear picture that will be taken . . . thank goodness! It took me 40 shots to get one that wasn't blurry with all his hopping around.

This is the teddy bear picture when Seth was one month . . . he's so little! His hair was also a much darker shade of red. He is more strawberry blonde now, like his daddy.

Our camping trip this past weekend on the Yuba River was a hot one, but the kids didn't seem to mind. They had a great time in the river. It was fun camping with friends this time. The sites were small,  so we were all really close together, which the kids loved. Tim brought 6 fans and extension cords. We had the only site with electricity, and our friends enjoyed having a fan in their tents!

We brought along our raft which was a big hit with all the kids. My friend's husband is giving the kids a ride. They saw a snake on the river! Eeek! Glad I didn't see it. The kids all loved it of course.

Both of the families we went camping with had all boys. And they all brought their light-sabers of course. A few months back Seth began picking up anything that looked like a stick and waving it around like a weapon . . . my girls never did this. I guess it truly is a boy thing. Here he is in his first light-saber battle with Mason. Too funny!

Be back with some crafty stuff soon!

albums

What is your favorite scrapbook album? I am in love with We R Memory Keepers 12x12 3-ring albums. I made the switch from post-bound albums a few years back and haven't regretted it! We are currently in the midst of moving them to a new location in our house. Right now they are housed in my linen closet and we forget about them because they are behind a closed door. My girls LOVE looking at their albums, so I wanted to get them out in the open so they could actually be enjoyed . . . stay tuned for that . . . hopefully I'll have a picture of their new home within a couple of weeks!

For now I thought I'd show you how I label them. I'm a nerd like that . . . I love to see how other people organize their stuff, so I thought I'd show you how I organize my albums.

The black albums are my family albums. I have other albums in different colors that are for each child--they are personality pages or layouts only related to them--I don't duplicate the family albums for them! I'll show you those another time. I came up with a little template in PSE where I put the volume number, family and the dates--and of course a family picture during that time.

On the inside of each album I have a title page . . . I've fallen behind on the title page since I don't make one until the book is filled up. Then I pick out a few favorite pictures from that time period and throw a quick page together. Since I'm trying to catch up with the title pages, I am making them SIMPLE, like the one above. I love that the Collage Press patterned paper has the time and months printed out subtly on it, kinda fun.

We are off to camp again with some friends this weekend. It is smoking hot here, so I am kind of dreading it. Hopefuly we'll survive! Have a great weekend!

me and food

As with many women, I struggle with eating too much chocolate . . . oh, and too much cheese . . . and maybe a few too many carbs . . . and the list goes on. Why do I do this to myself? Especially considering I have a digestive disease and too much over indulgence can make me feel ill. Sometimes I eat because of stress . . . sometimes I eat just because I feel like it . . . sometimes I don't even realize that I'm throwing yet another goldfish in my mouth!

Why I am sharing this with you? Because I recently read something that changed my perspective on eating, dieting, the whole food/weight saga that I've struggled with all my life. And for those of you who don't know me and laugh when you see my picture, don't laugh. I really do struggle. I do not have "skinny genes" as some women do. I have to exercise 5x a week to stay the size I am and eat a fairly clean diet (and I still don't consider myself skinny). And even when I've been ten pounds lighter than I am now (only when I'm really sick), I still find flaws and don't feel skinny enough. Sound familiar? I know this is not how God intended for me to look at myself and that the only beauty He is interested in is on the inside. I also know that He wants me to take care of myself (and the body that he created) and be healthy--I can't do much for God if I am tired all the time or sick!

So, this is the story I read. It's called The Beautiful House. (It's a one-minute read.) It's a letter from God to Donna. It's comparing a brand new house to her body and how we would obviously want to keep the brand new house sparkling clean, why do we treat our bodies like crap by feeding it crap? Made me think a lot about all the things I "sneak" into myself and say it doesn't matter. And I'm not just talking about weight loss/gain here, I'm talking about being healthy so that I have energy to take care of my kids, be a better wife, etc. I know I don't get energy from eating unhealthy.

Anyway, disregard this pictureless post if you don't struggle with food. It just really hit home with me and I wanted to share. I'm not saying I will never eat chocolate or cheesecake again, but I will think twice and maybe only have half a slice and not be indulging daily! Here's to being healthy!

Feel free to share your thoughts . . .

road trip

Are you taking any road trips this summer? One thing I love about homeschooling is that we can go on a road trip whenever we want--including the off peak season! I did this layout last summer of a trip we had taken the previous October. My girls look so little!

I love this Becky Higgins sketch because it allowed me to fit a ton of photos about our trip. I wanted to include snapshots of everything we did, but I didn't want to make two layouts. Who has time for that!? The paper is from Making Memories and the cute little accents are from Little Yellow Bicycle.

Hope you are having a great time this summer whether you are staying close to home or road triping!

thank you card

I'm sending this simple thank you note off to some friends who hosted a great July 4th party over the weekend. We had so much fun! I used a CPS card sketch for this one.

Here we are decked out in our July 4th colors (well, except Tim--he was already in his swimming gear.) Thanks to my friend Kristen for getting all the kids to smile at once! Hope you all had a great weekend!

happy 4th of july!

This sums up what we did last year on the 4th. I was 16 days from giving birth. We kept with tradition and went to our local parade with good friends. (The parade was cancelled this year.) Then we went to our friend's backyard that throw an annual party. We are leaving again for that in a couple of hours--our 3rd year going, and we love it! The girls have been talking about nothing else all week.

Hope you are having a fabulous 4th with friends and family!