Santa Beard Advent Calendar

A paper mache tree decorated with box ornaments!

When I was growing up, we never really did any kind of Advent calendar, except for maybe a paper chain or the cotton ball Santa beard that we brought home from school. Maybe that’s why I have had a recent interest in Advent calendars. In fact, I have a whole pin board full of fun ideas for them on Pinterest. A couple of years ago I even designed and made my own. I didn’t use it last year because I did the Christmas Adventure Box thing with the kids last year. I liked how each day had a special activity that helped tell the Biblical Christmas story, but I’ve already let the kids put out their nativity this year, which is a big part of that one. I actually got a really good clearance deal on the Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar last year and bought a Lego Friendz one for Carly this year. I alternated days putting one mini set of Legos in each box so every other day they’ll each get to put together a little trinket, and that way I’ll have enough of them to do two years of Legos without having to buy more.

Last year I was going to wrap a Christmas book for each day too, but I got too busy and ended up just putting ours in a suitcase in the living room, which worked out well for us. We’ll be doing that again this year too.

I have a Santa candy cane calendar that I got from the boy child’s school fundraiser this year, so each day they’ll get one of those (they don’t usually finish a candy cane if I let them eat it, so we’ll just decorate the tree with ours). I also found a cute paper chain that our elf, Christopher, will be bringing. It has the more spiritual spin to it, with scriptures for each day.

I still wanted to do one that was more activity based, but I know it’s hard to plan what day we’ll be able to do which activities, so I wanted it to be more flexible. That’s when I remembered those cotton ball Santa beards from my childhood. I thought, what if it had activities instead of numbers? Then it works more like a winter bucket list (I also have a thing for all the cute variations of seasonal bucket lists out there too!)

So I found this traditional Santa Beard here, erased the numbers, colored it in, and added some text. Feel free to download whichever version you like!

Activity Colored Page

Blank Coloring Page

End of Summer Review

I’ve obviously been pretty busy this summer since I’ve hardly blogged at all. Here goes another massive update post though. It would appear that I haven’t done any real posts since May!

May

Jonah’s first soccer class. We accidentally went to the wrong class the first day, because he was apparently supposed to be in an indoor class, but he did great in both. I got my first taste of being a soccer mom I guess.

Birthday party for both/Mother’s day at Mamaw and G-Pa’s house with the Marshes.

Birthday for him at Nonna’s.

Their birthday hauls. It’s about time for a playroom clean-out before Christmas I think

Jonah and Carly’s Joint birthday party with our playgroup friends was a big hit. We managed to pull off a dual theme with Hot Wheels and the animals from the movie Bolt (Which we still haven’t seen yet!)

She threw a fit in a store and tried to pull away from me which popped her elbow out of place, known as Nursemaid’s Elbow. They thought it might also have a fracture since it still hurt when they put it back, so they put her in a cast for a week. No break though. She did ok in the cast, all things considered.

On the day Carly turned two, we moved her out of the crib and turned it into her big girl bed. A few weeks later, I finally got most of the finishing touches done in her big girl room.

Sarah Jenne had her 30th birthday party at a skating rink, so Jonah got to try out skating for the first time. He was a little shaky. I won’t say he loved it, but he tolerated it for the most part. That was the longest day ever it seemed. Jonah had his last soccer class that morning, then we went to Irving for her birthday, then we went to Aimee’s grad school graduation party at a park in Fort Worth, then dinner with the group. We were all pretty hot and miserable by the end of it, and extremely tired by the time we drove to Tyler that night!

All during the month of May, I’d taken my 2nd round of belly dance classes and I actually got to perform with my class that time. With all of the running and such, I was amazed to be able to fit into my friend’s mom’s size 6 outfit! I’m not that small currently, because… well… summer happened. Lots of travel, lots of parties, and it’s too darn hot to run outside! Maybe I’ll fit in it again soon though.

June

We had our McCarty Reunion and got to go hang out with some of our cousins at the Caldwell Zoo in Tyler. We even managed to drag my mom to the zoo for the first time since they started charging admission! She used to work there when I was a kid, as the veterinary technician. I always thought it was cool when she’d meet up with our class on field trips and show us around.

We went to a playgroup at our friend’s house and it became apparent that Jonah was way outnumbered with the big kid girls. There were two other baby boys, but Jonah was all on his own with the bathing beauties for the most part. I was just tickled that Carly was able to wear the little swim suit I had worn as a kid. She got lots of compliments on it!

We got memberships to the Heard Museum and Nature Preserve, which was a neat place to go, but we’ve only gone once since the heat has been relentless this summer. I’m looking forward to going again in the fall. Same goes for our Dallas Zoo memberships, bought them a couple of months ago and haven’t even had the chance to go once!

Random side note that I got new curtains for our bedroom. I really want to paint the walls in there, but I’m NOT looking forward to moving our massive furniture around to do so.

July

We let Jonah go on a bike ride while we were in Tyler. He’s doing pretty good on the big kid bike, so maybe that’s in his near future… to have one at home.

We took the kids to see the 4th of July parade, and I think they both enjoyed their first parade experience… especially the new flags they got.

After the parade we went to help out at our church’s block party. Jason helped with the grilling, and I helped on the water slide. I hadn’t come prepared to get wet, and that’s how my iphone 3 ended up dying. I feel bad that I messed up but then got rewarded by getting a new iphone4. Jason will probably want to upgrade pretty soon too.

Jonah and Carly got invited to their friend, Logan’s, birthday party at Little Gym and had a blast running, jumping, climbing, and rolling all over the place.

Nonna came over to our house for a little birthday party for Jason too. We managed to keep her from bringing cake, but ended up eating too much at Red Hot and Blue instead.

I helped out in the arts and crafts room at the Pandamania VBS at our church. Jonah and Carly both loved getting to play at church all week and stay up past their bed time a little.

I created a chore card and allowance system for the kiddos with give, save, and spend jars. We’ve been doing it for 3 weeks now and it seems to be going pretty well.

After having spent some time at my scrapbooking retreat last weekend, I came home and got all crafty on the Back-to-School playgroup party I was hosting. I had fun making little buffet cards, and ice cream cone wrappers and just making the table look pretty with all of my pretty toys, I mean serving ware. I got a lot of cute ideas from Pinterest… it’s been a summer-long obsession of mine, but it’s led me to lots of great ideas of things to do with the kids too.

So aside from the Michigan trip in June (which is a whole shutterfly book unto itself at this point) that pretty much wraps up our summer.

Coming This Fall

Jonah gets to meet his pre-k teacher next week, then he starts school on the 29th. He’ll be going 3 days a week, MWF 9-2, at the preschool at our church. While he’s at school, Carly and I will have some much needed one on one time that I’m looking forward to. She’s also going to have a chance to take a dance class with one of her little playgroup friends and a small studio in this lady’s house. She is super excited about it! We’ve got her tap shoes and her ballet outfit. She couldn’t be more tickled! Jason’s going on his Dude Fest next week, where the guys from here meet up in the middle with the ones who moved out east for a weekend of “dude” activities. They’ve got a cabin in Pigeon Forge this year, which is the area we went to as a family 2 years ago. I’m sure he’ll have a good time. Then after that, he will start making regular trips to NM for work. That’s not going to be a lot of fun, but they did approve overtime at least. While he’s going to be gone, I’ll be spending a lot of time getting baby clothes and toys ready for the big consignment sale at the end of next month. I hope to make enough money to buy some sort of hutch/china cabinet for storing my serving pieces and china. Into October we’re flying out to CA for Brent’s wedding, and then we’ll also go to Austin for Murat’s wedding a week later. I’m hoping all of these trips to NM for Jason can get us some more free hotel stays. Believe it or not, I’ve already started planning for Halloween too. We’re hosting a star wars themed halloween party, so I’ve got to figure out costumes so I can start making them soon. thankfully, Halloween is about as far out as I’m booked at this point!

Seasons of Change Blog Hop

It’s that time again! Time for a season of change at Scrapbook Challenges. I’m excited to be starting my 3rd term on the design team, and as you travel through this blog you’ll get to meet some of the new faces and say goodbye to some of the old ones. As for me, yep, I’m sticking around for a little while longer! Hope you enjoy the hop!

If you’ve just joined in, start over at Brynn’s blog to get rolling! If you came over from Bev’s blog, you’re in the right spot!

So I’m Amanda, as you may have gathered, and like I said, this will be my 3rd term on the DT. I live in Texas around Dallas and I’m a stay at home mommy to Jonah, my 4 year old who acts like he’s 2, and Carly, my 2 year old who thinks she’s 4. hehe I have been scrapping since 2004, and went mostly digital in 2007 (though I went back and made digital albums for 2006 too). You can find all of those up in the tab under my name at the top if you want to see my style. I’m mostly very neat and organized about my layouts, as I’m a little OCD and don’t do random well. Since becoming a member of the Creative Team at Raspberry Road Designs last year though, I’ve expanded my style to be a little more clustered and vintage, as that’s the style of elements they have at RRD.

So here’s the sketch that will be kicking off our Sizzlin’ Summer of Sketches! Stay tuned to the Scrapbook Challenges site for a lot more sketches in July than usual!

Here’s my take on it, with Pepermint Creative’s LATEST FREEBIE KIT “New Do”. It was the perfect kit to go with the perfect sketch to document my daugther’s first hair cut. There were lots of fun elements and papers to choose from just for the occassion!

She liked it so much that now she asks for a haircut everytime we give Jonah one, and we have to give her a fake haircut to appease her pleading.

Now check out the prizes for this fun little hop!

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Once you’ve stopped drooling, hop on over to Sharyn’s Blog! Nice seeing you!

Money Saving Adventures

I’ve always been a bargin shopper. Generic brands, clearance racks, and deep discount stores have been my friend. I dabbled half heartedly in coupons and price matching before, but after watching the Extreme Couponing show a few times I decided I wanted to learn more. I signed up for the email newsletters from moneysavingmom.com and I’ve gotten my coupons organized in a big binder, just like the pros.

 Now I don’t spend crazy amounts of time on this like the 20-40 hours a week that some of the people on that show do… at most maybe 8 hours a week looking at ads, planning trips, clipping/printing coupons, and studying up on how to get better deals. I don’t spend any more time in the stores than I did before, maybe even less time since I usually have a very detailed list of what I’m there for now.

Now that I’ve been doing things “extreme” for about a week or so, I’m starting to find my groove. I get SEVERAL food store circulars in my Wednesday edition of the briefing (free mini paper from the dallas newspaper, which also has the coupon inserts on saturday and sometimes sunday) I get ads for Albertsons, Tom Thumb, Kroger, Sprouts, Aldi, Terry’s, and Fiesta. I get another one from Market Street, but it’s just 1 page and usually still high on the prices so I don’t really count that one. I used to just look at the first 4 because I knew I’d never make a special trip to go all the way out to Aldi and I’d feel a little out of place shopping in the hispanic stores. However, now that I’ve started paying attention, I’ve discovered those 3 have some of the best prices on things that Wal-mart will match! Wal-mart will match one store’s generic for theirs, and they will match produce prices, aside from the obvious same brand price matches.

Here’s a little example from my shopping trip today of what I would have paid/price matched/ad it was from:

Milk – 2.38/1.89/Aldi
Pringles – 2.58 ea/.99 ea/Albertsons
       (-$1/2 coupon = .49 ea)
Seedless Watermelon – 3.88/1.99/Sprouts
Red Leaf Lettuce – 1.78/.88/Sprouts
5lb Potatoes – 2.17/.88/Terry’s
Canned Veggies – .68 ea/ .33 ea/ Terry’s
Onions – 1.68 lb/ .33 lb/Terry’s
Red Grapes – 1.98 lb/ .99 lb/Albertson’s
B&J Drinks – 3.47/3.33/Fiesta
18-ct Eggs – 2.46/.99/Fiesta
1lb Block Cheddar – 4.38/3.99/Sprouts
Sliced Cheese – 3.38/2.50/Tom Thumb
Red Bell Pepper – 1.64/.49/Fiesta

TOTAL:  49.39/28.49 (saved 20.90 – 42.3%)

Moral of the story? Check ALL of your adds, make a well organized list, go to wal-mart during non-peak hours, keep the cart organized by sales ad while you shop (as much as your two and four year old will allow at least) and warn the cashier/apologize in advance for all the price matching you’re about to do. Don’t forget your coupons!

My next big task for this weekend is to try my hand at Freezer Cooking Day, where you make a bunch of meals at a time so you can freeze them and cut down on time in the kitchen for the rest of the month. We’ll see how that goes, but I plan to put away a lot of breakfast burritos, quiche, casseroles, and some baked potatoes. Fingers crossed!

Scrapping Olympics

It sounds silly to the non-scrapper I’m sure, but we have been having a fun weekend on the Scrapbook Challenges site, with a fun little set of challenges just for us on the Design Team. I was the 3rd “runner” in a baton race for team b! I don’t know who the winners are yet, but I think my team did great!

 

Jolanda was given this inspiration sketch on Friday to scrap as fast as she could.

Then on Saturday the baton was passed when Jolanda’s play time layout was send to Jowlina!

So this morning I received Jowlina’s layout as inspiration for my page. I had no idea until it arrived that we would HAVE to do a paper layout. Until that point I had been planning on doing a digital page. This was no ordinary baton race either… it was the HURDLES! Sookie, who was the one who started this whole thing, had 5 hurdles for us to jump:

1. Journal is a must!
2. Spray some mist
3. Use an altered chipboard on your layout. 
   Please don’t use a previously altered chipboard.
4. Sorry, no digitals please 
5. Must be 12×12

Boy what a challenge! I only have one scrapbook that has anyspace left for a 12×12, so trying to come up with a page that’d be relevant to my daughter’s first year was also a must. I only have one color of mist… orange. o_O And the only chipboard I have is an alpha with pink grid lines on it. With not very many photos laying around to choose from and only an hour and 15 minutes to work on it before church this morning, the adrenaline was raging full force. I can’t believe I got it done in time.

Orange mist on pink paper makes it less orange.  A few scraps of corogated cardboard, some sanded and inked chipboard letters, and a few pieces of scrap paper cut into banners were the details that pulled it all together.

Both of my team mates did stitching around the circles, but with limited time and zero experience on that, I decided to go with some sketchy doodles instead. it’s more my style anyway. I’m certainly glad I had this picture of Nana because this will be the perfect page to go at the end of Carly’s book.

Among the other events we’ve had this weekend was the Gymnastics Challenge, to create a romantic-style page with flowers. So I went ahead and did the letter R page for my ABC’s of Me album:

And the Pentathalon, to create a page using 5 different techniques of our choice, for which I did Ghost Journaling, Recoloring, Mock Layering, Fussy Cutting, and Drow Shadowing:

Today’s event is Swimming, to use swirls and transparencies on a page, but I’m going to wait to do that until tonight since Jason’s getting on a plane to head to NJ for the week in a few hours. I’ll have lots of time to work on it after the kids are in bed I guess!

These great challenges and the prizes that come with them were made possible by some very generous sponsors: Nikki Sivils, The Paper Trail, Lawn Fawn and The Cutting Cafe. Maybe if I’m lucky, I’ll win one of the events and get one of the cool prize packages!

National Scrapbooking Day / Mother’s Day

This weekend, my friends and I at Scrapbook Challenges are celebrating National Scrapbook Day and Mother’s Day with this blog hop, paying tribute to our scrapbooking “mother” Pamela, who founded our site several years ago and has encouraged us and kept us motivated all along the way. As Pamela has stepped down, as our fearless leader, to focus on her family life, and Brynn is now behind the steering wheel, we’d like to take a moment to thank Pamela for all her hard work!

If you’re arriving here from Carmen’s blog, you’re in the right place! If you just popped in here first, hop on over to Brynn’s Blog to start at the beginning! You might ask yourself, ”Why would I want to do that?!” Well, aside from gathering tons of inspiration along the way…

The prize for one lucky person who comments on all of the blogs in the line up is Chipboard Borders, 12×12 Collection Kit and a 6×6 Paper Pad from To The Moon by Fancy Pants! Loving the colors on this one!

Also, everyone who creates a new layout with one of Pamela’s old sketches and posts it in the HOP ON section of the forum will be in a drawing for a mystery prize pack of goodies from Tim Holtz! I like surprises!

One random winner from those who join Scrapbook Challenges this weekend will get the We R Memory Keepers’ Sew Easy Piercer, 4 Piercers, a mixed assortment of Divine Twine and 15 colors of DMC Embroidery Floss.And last but not least, everyone who leaves me some comment love on MY blog will be in the drawing for this cute little Mini Scrapbook Album with stickers by Colorbok!

And last but not least, everyone who leaves me some comment love on MY blog will be in the drawing for this cute little Mini Scrapbook Album with stickers by Colorbok!

Now for my contribution to the blog hop! I’ve been with Scrapbook Challenges for a looong time, like ever since they were a group on MySpace. When I first discovered them, they were on about sketch 40 or so. With a new one posted, by the lovely and very talented Pamela every week, and with us now approaching 253, I guess that means I’ve been around for about 4 years! (which is how old my son will be next week, so I guess that makes sense! haha) I started saving every sketch she posted so I’d have a collection to choose from. When we moved the site to ning.com, the old sketches weren’t as easily accessible anymore so I’m glad I saved them! So for my post I’m going with the very first one. Sketch number ONE!

So with our theme of hope, I put together this digi page to remind myself that God has great plans for us, even when we think the path is getting too difficult.

As some of you know, I am also on the Creative Team at Raspberry Road Designs, and so most of my digi pages these days come from the kits there. This one is called Feathered Nest. The photo is from morguefile.com because I don’t have any idea where I could find some cool old stairs around here to put in my LO and that’s just what I felt like it needed. Something steep and seemingly neverending because life just feels like that sometimes. Now I will admit, I made a goof when I was first signing up for this blog hop, and said that I couldn’t decide between Sketch #1 (for nostalgic reasons of it being the very first) and Sketch #2 (because I’ve actually used it before.)

So without posting my final decision, I made my Sketch 2 page first, only to discover that someone else had claimed it! My bad! So I switched it up a little and made it work with Sketch 1 as you saw above. But I figured, why keep it in hiding? I decided I’d go ahead and post it too! This is the one I posted on Raspberry Road Designs, to showcase their kit, because I am offering up the frame cluster as a freebie there, so be sure to go grab it!

The fun little trick I pulled on this one was using entire background pages shrunken down to serve as the tiles, instead of just cutting out pieces of the papers. They kept their pretty distressed edges that way. Anyway, that’s all I’ve got for you today, so now it’s time for you to hop on to your next stop…

Natalie’s Blog!

May?

How it is already a few weeks away from the year being half over?! Crazy. I’m sorry I’m not the best about keeping the blog up to date. Facebook just makes it too easy to post pictures and quick status updates, to the point that I just don’t bother to sit and write blog posts much anymore. For those of you not on facebook though, I apologize! Here’s a quick run through the past month or two!

Our virtual garage sale (posted on craigslist and facebook) went pretty well and I sold over $250 worth of stuff. I even made a profit on a few items that I had bought used in the first place! The money went to fund the kids’ swim class and the soccer class that Jonah starts this month.

 

The kids had a great time at our playgroup’s St. Patrick’s Day party. The bounce house, tricycle and mini golf were all a big hit! I think Carly was chanelling her great-grandpa’s pro-golfer spirit!

The kids and I drove up to Oklahoma City for a weekend with 3 of my Pea friends. There was a house full of kids, but we had a great time and the kids had a blast playing with their new friends. I think we may be going back to visit again in June.

Before

After

While we were there, Bethany offered us all haircuts if we wanted one. I couldn’t decide what I wanted to do with mine, but I did decide it was time for my baby to have her first haircut! Her bangs were always hanging in her eyes! So she got a little trim all over and now it seems like the curls are even curlier! She really didn’t mind the haircut either. She likes getting her hair brushed, loves her bows and even asks me to put it in pig tails sometimes. I have no clue where this girly girl came from, but it’s cute!

That darn momma bunny keeps making her nests in the big part of our yard, and then I feel like I can’t let Penny out of her side of the yard cause I don’t want a baby bunny massacre on my hands. Once they got big enough that we’d seen them leaving the nest every once in a while, we thought we’d put them in a box so the dog could run around and stretch her legs. Unfortunately, there were actually 3 bunnies. Yeah…. Penny found the 3rd one for us. So sad. Darn bunnies. We really need a new fence so they can’t come in here and make babies in our yard. They are so gosh darn cute though. We returned them back to their nest, but they didn’t stay. Guess they were ready to move on finally.

We celebrated Samantha’s 2nd birthday with her at the coolest city park I’ve ever been to. The kid’s had a blast and I can hardly believe that Samantha and Carly are turning 2 already! 

Warrior Dash!!!

A 5k muddy obstacle course adventure that we’ve done with our friends 3 times now (technically one of those was the Jail Break race, but they’re the same thing) This was our first year to finish with a halfway decent time. We were done in 48 minutes. Oscar was the fastest of our group, finishing at 32 minutes. Given all the obstacles and having to wait in line for some of them, I think we did pretty good. We actually ran everything in between, unlike last time when there was a lot of walking going on and we finished in an hour and a half or more.

Before

After
(I ordered a copy of our after shot of the group from the professional photographers there cause I ran out of film on my waterproof camera… it’s just not here yet)

 One of our favorite obstacles: Road Rage… the picture doesn’t do it justice though. There were about 3 rows of cars to climb over with about a 30′ l x 20′ w field of tires on either side of the cars to navigate yourself through, football drill style!

This obstacle was the one that gave me, and Sarah Jenne both, a big dessert plate sized bruise on the inside of our thighs! You had to climb over a 4′ wall, then under a 4′ board with barbed wire over the top of it. Wash. Rinse. Repeat 4 times. The under part was easy, but since there were so many people crowded together, it was hard to find space jump the wall properly and it resulted in poor form and the war wounds we came home with. Didn’t really hurt at the time though!

The 12′ wall was a lot easier to climb than I thought. This is the back side of the wall, but going up you had a rope and rail on the wall about every 2′ for footholds. Unfortunately we had to wait in line a long time for this one cause people were scared of the height and going slow.
  

Jason said this one was the most challenging for him, but only because the lady in front of him was slow, keeping him up there longer than he wanted to be. He did a lot better than he expected though.

The Spider’s Web (made out of bungee cords) was a pretty fun new obstacle too, just gotta watch out for other people letting go of their bungee carelessly and popping you with it.

I thought the log roll this year was a little too easy. Last year the water was deeper and the logs were bigger so it was actually a challenge to get over them. I love the water obstacles though. Gives you a chance to swim if you want, cool off and give those legs a bit of a break.

This is just one of the two cargo net obstacles on the course. There was another one that was super tricky. The cargo net was horizontal and you had to scoot across it or roll. Ouch!

There were a few other obstacles that I didn’t get pictures of  but jumping over the fire was the next to last one. With the wind whipping around at 20+ mph, they had to keep the fire pretty small this year. Some of the other obstacles: the haybale mountain, the “tent” which was a little structure built out of 2×4′s about 2.5′ off the ground covered in black tarps that you had to crawl through (very hot and very dark), the “village” where you were running through delapedated looking buildings and such, and the giant mud pool at the end that you had to crawl or swim through to stay under the barbed wire canopy. I think they did a much better job with their obstacles than they did last year, and definitely better than last fall’s Jail Break. I don’t know why we do it… it’s just fun playing in the dirt! we’re already registered for this year’s Jail Break in Spetember!

Easter

The kiddos in their Easter outfits for the Texan’s obligatory kid-in-the-blue-bonnets shot.

Jonah and Carly both really seemed to “get” the idea of an egg hunt this year, so that was fun watching all the kids scramble at our playgroup party. It was also the first year I attempted to explain the meaning of Easter to Jonah.