Timmy's Scrapbook, Day 2

Dave Update:  With the kids at home to help Dave (most of the help he needs now is picking up stuff that he's dropped, by the way), I was able to go back out to the weekend crop on Saturday and take advantage of a few more hours of making pages.  Dave had a really good day, although he's really starting to get bored just sitting and watching TV.  He's having trouble reading with the drugs he's on, but hopes to get into reading a bit more once he's off them.

After I got home from the crop, we took Dave out to dinner -- his first outing since he came home from the hospital at dinnertime on Tuesday.  We just went to Vinnie R's, a local Italian restaurant that's right on the edge of our neighborhood (1.5 miles from home).

At about 8:30pm last night, Dave sneezed.  He typically doesn't suppress sneezes, and he didn't with this one.  The pain started right back up again and we felt like he was back at square one, the jolts of pain and muscle spasms immediately returned.  He was on a minimum of pain medications, so he felt every bit of the pain until he went back up the recommended dosages and could get things back under control.

This morning (Sunday), he's feeling better.  He slept a little funny and had a knot in one of his glutes that took a couple hours to relax.  But otherwise, he's ready for another day of sitting and healing.

Saturday's Progress: I did 9 more pages on Saturday: 5 more pages for Timmy's 1st year baby book and 4 pages featuring our October 2004 Bahamas cruise for our family vacations scrapbook.

Angela had proclaimed "This isn't a competition...BUT....".  We didn't mean to, but we girls were definitely counting the pages we made up over the weekend.  I completed 17 pages in over the two days, which is pretty impressive for me :-)  The other ladies will have cranked out anywhere from 25-40 pages over the weekend, but they were staying at the hotel and had 18 hours per day available...I did not.

One of the ladies gave me a ton of design help on Timmy's 1st Christmas pages.  I realized how far into the stone age I am with my styles.  I broke out my circa 2002 Coluzzle and you'd have thought I was breaking out Medusa's head, lol!

Things have come a long way since the days I last did marathon cropping, back when we were stationed at Patrick AFB and I'd get together with Angie, Kasi and Suzy for afternoon crafts about once a month or so.  For the first time, this weekend I was able to try out a Xyron sticker machine, a Cuttlebug cutter/embosser, and the electronic Cricut paper cutter system (with an infinite choice of cartridges!).  I could get lots of use out of the Xyron and should probably buy one, but the Cricut scared me to death!

Dave should be proud that I did all of these pages without paying a DIME for any new scrapbooking materials -- only a payment into the meeting room at the hotel, and about $30 worth of photos that I had printed up at our local Walgreens.  Although I now want to hit up A.C. Moore and stock up on some of the latest and greatest!  With a 40% coupon, of course!

I've completed 13 pages of Timmy's first year scrapbook and probably have about 6-7 more pages in mind.  They aren't chronological (I have a traditional baby book that documents his first-year milestones), but rather fun collections of pictures I had of him in his first year, such as eating, bathtime, and family gatherings.  Jacob has a similar book that I finished several years ago.

These title letters came from the Cricut machine.  We also embellished some of the Christmas trees in the header paper with glitter.

Some captioning went into the lower left.

We took a cruise in October 2004, just after Jacob turned two years old.  Dave's Mom joined us and we had a lot of fun.  We squeezed it in between all those hurricanes that hit Florida in 2004.

That pic of Jacob in the upper left is one of my favorites in the whole world, and Walgreens cut off the word "Pirate" that was written above "Jacob" on the hat (because these are digital prints being blown up into 4x6 size or something like that).  The Carnival Kids Club had the kids dress up as pirates and "attack" one of the restaurants and cause all sort of mayhem.

This was from our visit to the Nassau Zoo.  These were the friendliest flamingos we've ever seen.

I further embellished this page with homemade stickers of gas station pumps and tanks (hence the strange caption).  We have so many pictures of Timmy eating and drinking -- always so happy.

Just before I left for the evening, we got to watch a sunset beach wedding out the window.  We had fun coming up with our own stories of how the couple met and what their circumstance was for having a wedding with only a bride, groom, clergyman, photographer and three flowergirls.  We had two hypotheses: a husband and wife privately renewing their vows with their three daughters, or a servicemember quietly marrying a single Mom of three girls just before he takes a deployment.

Thanks to my maximum zoom on my iPhone camera, you too can watch a sunset beach wedding!  The bride is just off the picture to the left.  There are three flowergirls walking from the stairs to the aisle drawn into the sand.

The bride is standing right under the pirate flag.

It wasn't that warm (upper 60s), and it was rather windy, as you can see from the bridal veil.