End-of-the-year Craftiness and New Year Plans

I forgot to post at the end of November, so here's what I was spending my free time doing in November and December (when I wasn't spending it on the computer).

My Hero Man.  The layout was one of the classes at CK Scrap and Play, so all I had to do was find pictures to go with it.  These of Ian and his 'sword' worked perfectly.  He called himself Hero Man.  I finished the layout for a challenge on Club CK that involved using at least 3 different fonts in the title.

Meeting You for Annaliese's book. I have pictures printed to make basically the same layout, but for Ian's book.  I so love looking back at these pictures and remembering how Ian was the first time he met Annaliese.  This was for a challenge on CK to use punctuation as an embellishment.  I used periods in the bottom left corner and around the journaling.

Maple Leaf block for Linda in the Friendship Block Exchange. It was only a month late...

There would be a total of 36 half-square triangles for Jen in the Friendship Block Exchange

That's me showing my calf Beatrice in the Kiddie Calf Show at the Clayton County Fair.  This was for a challenge to scrap pictures more than 10 years old.  It was fun to scrap some from my childhood; I need to do more of that.

The colors look terrible in this photo (I need to get my layouts done earlier to get photos in the sunlight).  These are photo attempts to get a good family picture shortly after Annaliese was born, but the three that should be were never all looking at the camera at the same time.  Challenge was to display pictures as if they were in a film strip.

My Mother-in-law opening the Kindle Fire cover I made her (made myself one, too).  Basically figured the design out completely on my own; pretty proud of how it turned out.

Baby Bliss was finished just shy of the new year. It tells the story of Darrin and I holding Annaliese for the first time.  This was for two challenges- use an emotion in the title and use three different inspirations from the magazine. I LOVE this layout!

You can add to the craft list the costumes I made for the dress-up box, but that was about it. And I'm sure you noticed if you read all the captions that most of my layouts are for challenges, but without those pushing me to finish a page, I know I wouldn't get as many layouts done.

Things may change a bit in the new year. Instead of making a New Year's resolution, I'm focused on monthly goals (off to the right on the blog).  If you talk to me often or see me online, help remind me to get them done. A lot of times during 2011 I was having an internal conflict between whether I should quilt or scrap.  I think I've made peace with myself, basically giving myself permission to focus more on scrapbooking than quilting, so be prepared to see more of that in the new year.  It's the first day of 2012, and I can't wait to share with you all the things we'll do this year!

That weeknd list...

I didn't get everything that was on my to-do list done for the weekend, but I don't feel guilty about it because
a) there's a snow day today so I can get some things done, and I hope to do some things that aren't on there.
b) I read this post on Life as Mom on Saturday. Seemed a lot like what I was doing with my weekend to-do list. I chalked up not getting everything done to have too big of eyes and that I need to save some stuff for later.
c) I spent it with my family making memories.

Ian and I curled up on the couch Saturday and watched Peter Pan. I have not seen it since I was a wee tot and I do not remember it being as dark, the women being as catty, or Peter being as mean as it was watching it now as an adult. Ian enjoyed it, though he sat with the blanket on his lap, ready to pull it up and cover his eyes whenever he felt scared.

Saturday night we went out to my favorite restaurant, Lazlo's, for supper. Thank goodness we don't live near there because the smell alone would make me want to go there every night to eat (they have a hickory grill and the smell, mmmm). Ian's kid's meal comes with a scoop of ice cream. When our waitress asked if he still had room, he pointed to his back and said, "There's still room right here."

Sunday we went to church and got groceries. I'd like to say we were stocking up for the snow, but we really didn't know it was coming at that time.

And I did do a few things that weren't on the list, but I thought were productive anyway. I made the invites for Ian's birthday party (how can my baby boy be turning FOUR in 13 days?!?!), and prepared/froze one of the meals for our freezer exchange.

Weekend To-Do List

Yep, yet again I need to post a To-Do list on here. So blogosphere, keep me on track!

Saturday (green must do, blue if I have time):

- Find recipes for freezer exchange next week.

• Chicken Rice Casserole
• Chicken Bacon Ranch Macaroni and Cheese
• Taco Cornbread Bake
  

- Go grocery shopping
- Do 4 loads of laundry
- Finish figuring out pictures for last year's album
- Finish cutting out the rest of the blocks for the blue quilt
- Clean the house (I detest this!) kitchen and bathroom left to go...

Sunday:

- Review IEPs for work
- Make our dessert for the week I made our favorite granola bars
- Figure out scrapbook layouts for Annaliese's album
- Upload pictures and place order from Shutterfly
- Piece blue quilt
- Write Thank Yous


It's just after 9:00 am on Saturday. I would hope I can cross off a lot of these in the next 12 hours!

Reflection on the weekend

So I didn't accomplish everything I intended to this past weekend, but I do know that without posting that list to my blog, practically nothing would have gotten done on it. It forced me to think about the purpose of everything I was doing; Is this something I can cross off- if not, is it worth not crossing something off? By Sunday night I was pooped and didn't care about crossing things off, but oh, how it helped on Friday night and Saturday. So don't be surprised if you see another lengthy list in future weekends.

Here are some things the list didn't capture:
It snowed here Friday night (about 2 inches) and Ian was jumping up and down with excitement. He asked me if he still had mittens and wanted to know where the parts to the snowman were. Granted, by the time he got outside the next day, it was mostly gone, but he still got to enjoy it for a bit.

On Sunday I went to the quilt show at Lauritzen Gardens. They had some of the smaller quilts interspersed in their chrysanthmum show, and others on display in the adjoining room. The quilts all had to be nature themed. There was one quilt there that was entirely one sheet of fabric, but not a cotton. It had a metallic sheen to it and had the most amazing quilting on it.

My Two Monkeys

Baker's Assistant

Fascination

Forcing Myself to Get it Done! (edit Sun. morning)

I have had a mental to-do list for the last, oh.... 5 weeks. I just keep pushing the list to the next weekend, and when that weekend shows, I do a bit of it, but not enough (insert time on the computer, watching tv, etc), and promise I'll do it after work on Monday, only to push it to the weekend again. Enter me blogging about it, so that hopefully the 5 people or so who read my mundane writings will ask me this weekend how things are going, or will see me on Facebook and force me to get off. So, here's my list for the weekend (red is a must, green is an it'd be nice...)

Friday Night:
Clean the kitchen (sweep, mop , scrub, etc)
Finish freezer meals: 90% finished
Make some baby food peas are done
Find patterns for baby gifts

Saturday:
Pick up Darrin's Christmas present (thank you Craig's list)
Avoid playing with Darrin's Christmas present (yes, he's getting it early)
Meet Meeghan for lunch (YEAH!) I even ran into her again later at the mall :)
Shop at Younkers (send me your Christmas list now)
Shop at Target (I guess I could shop for Christmas here, too)
Install new car seats assembled, but not instlled
Get fabric for baby gifts
Sew fabric baby gifts
Vaccuum, dust
Laundry (UGG!) five loads down, 3 to go...
Clean bathrooms (Double UGG!) 50% done
Book Annaliese's pictures

Sunday:
Play bells at church (YEAH!)
Eat ham balls for lunch with great friends (YUM!)
Go to the Botanical Garden to see the quilt show
Sew!!! (I have really lacked all motivation in this department lately...)
Figure out Christmas lists

Finally

A Saturday with no plans and rainy weather. I love days like this. I've sworn off cleaning today (not sure how that's different than other days), but I'm looking to be productive in other areas. My goal for today is:

* Fix the faucet that's been dripping for three months at least.
2:30: Woo-hoo no more drips. Thanks to Google, Home Depot, and my hubby (who did all the work) the faucet is fixed. Let our water bill return to normal!

*Play cars with Ian, since he's grabbing the computer away from me to get me to play.
Played right away following the post, and then Sara came over and he forgot all about playing with mom. I had the rest of the day to work on my to-do list. The fact he took a 3 hour nap really helped.

*Read my library book. It's "The Lost Quilter" and those books are usually a quick read for me.
10:30 took longer to read than I expected (interrupted by grocery shopping, dinner, Home Depot), but it was a good read. A lot better than the other Elm Creek books have been lately.

*Make the latest recipe on Smitten: Cheesecake-swirled brownies
3:30: in the oven- only 35 minutes to go until I can try one!
8:30: after eating two, one fresh from the oven and one from the fridge, I've concluded they taste fantastic cold. Almost like a cheesecake-brownie fudge. MMMMMM, great recipe and very easy to make.

*Make a lot of progress on Moneik's prize for my 100th post. I haven't forgotten, just haven't had time to quilt.
I didn't get to this on Saturday, but I'm hoping to get my lesson plans done while Ian's napping today, and work on this while watching the Packers beat the Bears. Go Pack!

Sorry it's a pretty boring post for most, but if I post on here, I figure someone might hold me accountable, so I actually have to work on them. Hopefully I'll be able to update some progress tonight. Off to build a choo-choo track...

My To-Do List...

If you look at my to-do list, it looks like I've been completely lazy this month, which is only partially true (I have become addicted to Mafia Wars on Facebook- which is the primary cause of laziness). Some of the things listed I put on my list to force me to do (which obviously hasn't worked), and the others I really want to finish but things always seem to come up. Here's a picture of the ONE thing I've crossed off this month- Sara's birthday present. It's a small wall hanging/table topper that measures 16x20. I gave it to her Monday at guild, which was only three weeks after her birthday (not too bad for me).

During spring break, Ian went fabric shopping with me. As we wandered around the store, we made it to the kid fabric. He found fabric with tractors on it and went crazy. He was such a good kiddo there that I bought a fat quarter of the tractor fabric and another of farm animals and sewed them together into a blanket for his stuffed animals. It's currently covering up an animal in his bed, so I don't have a picture of it. I did free motion quilt on it for the first time. I definitely ended better than I started, but I still wouldn't enter anything I FMQ into a quilt show...

Tonight I finished up four red/white/blue blocks. They're being mailed tomorrow to Jen in Wisconsin. She's going to assemble them, along with other blocks from the Prolific Online Quilters, into comfort quilts. A member of our group had a son who died in Afghanistan.

I made the EASIEST thing for dinner tonight, using my favorite cooking technique- the crockpot. I got the recipe from allrecipes. You simply dump some dry onion soup on the bottom of the crock, put the roast (recipe calls for beef, I did pork) on that, and top with a can of cranberry sauce. It looks really dry to begin with, but it makes a delicious gravy. I threw in some sweet potatoes. MMMMMM

Ian had another first tonight- He said, "I love you" to Darrin and I without us saying it first. He also helped us solve a mystery. The other morning Darrin's alarm clock went off, which never happens because I get up first, so he doesn't set his. Today while we were in our room, Ian played with our clocks, and turned Darrin's alarm on. Mystery solved.

Darrin and I had another date night Friday night. Angie was unable to watch Ian on Friday, so Marlena and Noah babysat him, and just kept him until Saturday morning. We went to PF Changs (yum) and then saw the movie State of Play. It was a good flick. What was even better, though, was sleeping in on Saturday.

Happy New Year

Well, 2009 has arrived. I actually don't look forward to New Year's as it means my days of staying home with Ian will be over soon as I return to school. It's the same with Fourth of July- summer is half over when it arrives. We did have a good time at our New Year's Eve "party". Marlena and Noah came over. They were gracious enough to bring dinner, as we had just gotten home that afternoon from spending a week back in Iowa (recap of that to come). Marlena and I scrapbooked in the new year. I began working on an alphabet scrapbook for Ian. It has pictures of him doing something or with something for each letter (i.e. E is for Eat, H is for Hat). I've got a few pages done and it's turning out really cute. I can't wait for it to be finished and have him look at it.

As for my goals this year:

• Family: We do a great job of capturing moments on our camera, but I want to do a better job this year of capturing Ian on video. I also want to go on more dates with my hubby. As for extended family, I want to do a better job sending pictures and cards to my grandparents.
  
• Health: stop drinking pop and start drinking water, reduce my snacking, and be more active.
  
• Quilting: Complete all the "small" stuff I bought on the Iowa shop hop trip, learn how to hand quilt, and make the tree skirt I've been meaning to make the last 5 years.
• Scrapbooking: Complete Ian's 1st and 2nd year albums.

We'll see how that all turns out I guess. Hopefully I'll stick to them more than in years past since I've written them down.