Happy New Year and some Scrappy Stuff

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

It's already January 2nd, but I wanted to wish everyone a Happy 2009. I hope you had a safe, fun and festive end to your holiday season, and I pray you all have a blessed new year. It will be an interesting one with a new president and to see where things go with the financial mess.

We rang in the New Year with a very small, casual party at our house with our friends, the Goves. They have 3 kids almost the exact ages as our 3, and they all played so well together and had a great time. Their youngest, Evie, and Owen were so cute together. The two oldest, Hannah and Gabby, weren't to be seen almost the entire night, up in Hannah's room drawing pictures, and Justin and Ian played the Wii and other boy things. Amazingly, all the kids made it until midnight and couldn't have been happier. I thought for sure, Owen would've melted down by then, but he was happy as could be. It's funny, because had we been in our respective houses alone, the guys wouldn't have even made it to midnight, nonetheless the kids. We watched the ball drop and did some poppers, and then the Goves headed home to get their kiddos to bed while we did the same.

My friend, Annaliese, and I

New Year's Day and today have both been pretty lazy. Now begins the dreaded teardown of all the Christmas decorations. Everytime I have to do it, I claim that I have way too much Christmas stuff, but I love it all and enjoy it while it's up. I just don't enjoy packing it all back away. Although, starting from a nice clean slate again is refreshing as I put the old decor back out. Over the past few years, I have definitely gained more of a minimalist approach to decorating and seems like I get rid of more stuff each year. In fact, my goal (not resolution because I don't do well at those) for this year is to purge of all the unnecessary stuff and get organized. I'm going to do it by taking it in small chunks. Hopefully by the end of this year, I will feel like we only have those things we really want or need, although I know the kids will always have too many toys--a lot of those will be going soon.

As for the scrappy stuff, I never did get around to posting the Dec. kit for Srapdango. Due to manufacturer shipping delays, we were late in getting it, but it was a great one and sold out pretty quickly, so unfortunately you can't even order one. The January kit is up now. I don't have it yet, but I can't wait to work with it. Here is a photo of the January kit (which I think they are almost sold out of already) and photos of the layouts I did with the Dec. kit.

Scrapdango January kit

Celebrate Each Day with Coffee

Little Cowgirls

Read

In other scrappy news, over at the blog for Leah Killian, you can enter to win $150 worth of Cosmo Cricket products, which I always love their stuff. Who wouldn't want to win that? Well, all you need to do is post a comment on the blog to be entered. Unfortunately, that comment needs to be posted by Jan 2nd (today). In fact, I need to go post my comment. Good luck if you enter.

And finally, I have a layout in the January issue of the Pagemaps newsletter. This is a site done by Becky Fleck who does awesome sketches (or Pagemaps as she calls them) each month and has people do samples for each map. I got an email last month, asking if I would like to contribute, to which I of course, said "Yes!" I even have a book of the same name (Pagemaps) that is one of my favorites. She gave me a 2-page sketch to work with, and I came up with this layout. I was extra excited when I saw the newsletter and saw that she pointed my layout out as one that caught her eye this month. You can see the newsletter here.