Belly Shots

We began our third trimester this week and wanted to take advantage of this beautiful day to snap some pics.  Annabelle, your Mama Shanni is such a dork! :)

*Horf*

Enjoying a lazy Sunday evening after a whirlwind weekend of shopping, shopping, shopping!  We finally got the right chair for Annabelle's room, one of $392 worth of IKEA purchases, three rugs for Shannon's show room at The Dump (h u g e store, cool stuff), groceries at Safeway, multiple stops for multiple items at multiple Targets, some camis and long pants at Lane, a few more frames for nursery art at Michael's, and a desperately needed bottle of water at Circle K.  We are now relaxing in the craft room, Shannon creating precious colored pencil art pieces based on the book Hug Time by Patrick McDonnell.

And I created this little quickie.  Had fun embossing the woodgrain background with a stamp from All Night Media.  The paper and stickers are part of the Blackbird collection from My Mind's Eye - love love LOVE this collection.  The foam letters and the green cardstock were in my Studio Calico On The Easel kit, and the punch is Martha.  I'm hopelessly in love with so many of her punches.... *sigh*

Scraps still on the table... off to see what I can do with them. :)

A Smidge of Fall

Today is the last day of my Fall Break, so Shannon and I decided to squeeze in a mini-road trip upstate to see if we could find some foliage.  I checked for scenic drives on the Arizona Highways website first, we grabbed some road food, filled the tank, and were on our way.  We headed up the I-17 to the Camp Verde exit, drove east in search of Forest Road 618 (which we never actually found), and ended up continuing to the 87 to come home through Payson.  We stopped off a tiny antique store to browse, ate lunch at Macky's Grill, and discovered that taking photos of trees from a car going 70mph isn't easy.  It wasn't exactly the drive we planned, but it was lovely nonetheless.  A fitting end to a restful week off.

Thank you, Restoration

I've had this picture of my niece and nephew since last Christmas. I love the photo, and I've desperately wanted to work with it, but it was presenting quite a challenge. Obviously, they're a bit older now and the cutesy red and green Xmas pajamas don't fly anymore.  So they're wearing clothes of their own choosing that completely don't fit any holiday paper color scheme at all!  Jeez guys, you *know* I'm a scrapper.  Couldn't you have at least matched each other, if not the rest of the decorations??

Enter Restoration, a  non-holiday collection from Crate Paper with all the right colors for this photo, and this particular pattern feels celebratory enough to work for a Christmas layout.  And voila - this simple, pretty project.  I inked a Martha doily black, used an SC stamp, did a little handstitching, and it all came together rather well.  Thanks, Restoration.

Little One

Boy, it's been a while!  The first quarter of a school year is always like this.  For the first month, you're getting your class settled, teaching routines, organizing and communicating constantly!  The second month and a half, you're preparing for conferences and report cards.  I swear, I work enough overtime in the first nine weeks to cover all the weeks off we get in the summer.  It's not a vacation, it's comp time. :)

We've been crazy busy prepping the nursery, registering, making invitations to the shower.  It's all coming together so beautifully.  I'll take pics and share soon.  Shannon has been feeling great, thank goodness.  We're just so excited and having such fun waiting to meet our Annabelle.

Speaking of which, I created this layout today with our 20 week ultrasound that told us we're expecting a daughter.

This is my well-deserved fall break, and I've been scrapping it up!  Made a love l.o., the invites, and this.  My Studio Calico October Kit - On the Easel - and the Watercolor add-on arrived yesterday afternoon, so I busted into it first thing this morning!   In fact, I'm heading back into the scraproom right now! :)