ew.

Ants in the bathroom
I think they're attracted to
the smell of diapers.

But in better news
our house is nearly finished.
We have toilets now.

Matt's back from the wedding.

We went and picked him up at the airport last night. Betsy was really tired and whatever, but Porter started doing the full body wiggle as soon as he saw his Daddy. Matt had to pick him up and give him a really big hug. All the people waiting in the terminal thought it was really sweet!

Of course, one of the first things I wanted to do after kissing my husband was see the pictures he took of the wedding. To my surprise he only shot, like, 20 pictures the whole weekend. I guess if you are not a scrapbooker, that seems like an adequate number! ;-) (Luckily, Jenny sent me more. Thanks, Jenny!) I had a lot of fun playing with them in Picasa and these were two of my favorites. Morgan and Maggie's wedding colors were pink and white... I'm thinking, Chatterbox Cottage?!

Matt also shot some video of the dinner the night before. Apparently, the whole family played Embarrassing Moments Charades. I wish I could have been there because it was freakin hilarious. I love the family I married into almost as much as my own.

Miss you, babe!

Matt has been gone for the last 2 days. His baby brother got married (Congratulations, Morgan and Maggie!) so he has been in Utah. We're picking him up from the airport tonight. I am such a baby about being separated from Matt! Unlike Emily (her man is still in Iraq), I've never had a long distance relationship. I think this is only the second or third time in our marriage that we have been away from each other. Waaaahh... On the other hand, he's been taking pictures for me to scrapbook!

I've entertained myself by watching movies that I wanted to see and Matt didn't. I went to Blockbuster and got Return to Oz (Has anyone even heard of that movie? I last watched it back in, like, 1987. Pretty trippy stuff.), Memoirs of a Geisha, and Elizabethtown. Now the kids are watching Veggie Tales becauase it's Sunday morning and we have the whole day to get through before Matt gets home.

Holy cow, I'm being published!

As Susan alluded to in the last post (wink!) I am going to be published! For those not currently addicted to scrapbooking... the scrapbooking magazines print a lot of reader submissions, but there are a LOT of scrapbookers out there. So it can be really hard to get published. I set a goal for myself for 2006 that I would submit like crazy, and if none of my pages were picked up by the end of the year I would quit. (Submitting, that is - I could never quit scrapbooking!) I did get accepted to be on a design team (which I love) but so far, I haven't had a nibble from any of the magazines.

So last night, I decided to check my Hotmail account one more time before I went to bed, and there it was in my inbox: a message from Angie Lucas, managing editor of Simple Scrapbooks magazine. They want my "I Feel Pretty" layout for their November/December issue! I think I submitted it for "Write from the Heart originally; it's going to be in the Reader Gallery section. In case you haven't seen the layout (I had to take it down from my online gallery)... it's one I did back in Jan. or Feb. with a self portrait of mine... the same picture that's on my blog, actually! I used Chatterbox paper (who would have guessed?!) and wrote about how I have come to have self-confidence and think of myself as pretty. One of my favorite pages I've done all year, actually! I was so excited, I started squealing and dragged Matt out of the bathroom to come and read my email.

I think it's kind of funny that out of all the pages I've done about my kids, it's a totally Joni-centric page that actually gets picked up for publication. Oh - and a shout-out to Emily, who I mentioned in the journaling because of the free haircuts she gives me. Thanks, Em!

Watch out, Picasso.

Betsy drew these people yesterday afternoon. The top one is "a guy" and the bottom one is "a mommy". You can tell that the mommy is a female because of her sticking up hair.

She has drawn faces occasionally before but this is the first time she has drawn an actual person. It was kind of surprising, actually: it was like she just got it. Betsy spent the rest of the afternoon filling her paper with heads and disembodied legs but these were definitely the most recognizable.

I was pretty impressed.

Dads and grads

Happy Father's Day! We made breakfast in bed for Matt (Okay, I made breakfast in bed for Matt) (Okay, it was cinnamon rolls from a can) which Betsy permitted her dad actually to eat a few bites of, himself. At church the primary kids sang "I'm So Glad When Daddy Comes Home." Betsy was suspiciously mute for a girl who sings constantly at home. Oh well. We made him a birthday cake for dessert - actually that was a matter of some dispute, because Betsy insisted it was a brown birthdaycake (her second favorite kind after pink birthdaycake) but Matt kept saying it was NOT his birthday. I think it was a matter of semantics, because it's the same cake.

My little sister Catherine graduated high school today. (Congratulations, Cath! Sorry I haven't sent your gift yet!) I would say that her graduation is a Father's Day gift for my dad, since he doesn't have to pay her tuition any more, but she still has 4 years of college to go. Ouch! When I called the folks, I found out that our former babysitter Tricia had flown up from Florida to see Cath graduate. (Catherine was practically her baby. Tricia was and still is the only person who has gotten away with calling her Katie!) That was a fun surprise for Cath and it was neat for me to talk on the phone with her.

Matt is talking to his dad on the phone now. (We call my dad first because of the time zones - it's way later in New York than in Utah!) So to all the dads in our life, have a good one!

He does all his own stunts

Porter can walk now
Staggering on chubby legs
Falling down a lot.

Betsy sometimes helps
Other times, pushes him down.
That's what sisters do.

(Thanks to my mom for the cool shirt!)

Can you tell me how to get to...

Sesame Street?!

The Children's Museum is opening this temporary exhibit. (It was created by the Strong Museum in Rochester... the fake flowers were in Wegmans wrappers.) We got to see it in a members-only preview day, and it was awesome! They were showing a video of the first Sesame Street that ever aired... pretty trippy stuff. It was a fun walk down memory lane for those of us who remember SS before it became 'The Elmo Show.'

Right on target

Red bullseye beckons

Like siren song to housewife

Good thing it's payday.

*

Household goods and toys,

Snacks and designer clothing,

Reasonably priced.

*

Girl doesn't even

know letters of alphabet

But she knows bullseye.

*

Despite shopping list

I always end up spending

way too much money.

Finally, I have pictures!

You know that cute Scenic Route paper that I got at my last Design Team meeting? Well, I picked those colors to match these pictures from Inlow Park. Pictures that I hadn't actually taken yet. Inlow Park is this great water park where water shoots out of pipes, bubbles up out of the ground, and rains down in showers. The kids love it and it's free! I've wanted to take them for probably a week, but it hasn't really been hot enough. Today I finally just said, The heck with it. I'm glad I did, because several of our friends were there too, and I got some awesome pictures!

What was I, like, twelve years old??!!

I got out this photo for a circle journal I'm doing. I needed a picture of something really fun that I've done, so I busted out the wedding/honeymoon album (thank goodness for UnDu !) and we had a really good time looking at some of the pictures. I can't believe how young we both looked.

Actually, I was 21. I think it's the overalls.

We had a blast at Disneyworld. I can't wait to go back there in a few years with the kids.

Has anyone seen my son?

Seriously, I am getting kind of concerned here. I can't find him anywhere and I have all these Cheerios that need to be eaten and/or smashed into the carpet.
Oh, there he is.

ExSIDING !

Oh yes, we do indeed have siding on our house. Matt went and saw it yesterday, but I had to go by today and see it for myself. It looks like a real house, doesn't it?! (It also looks crooked, but that's the fault of the camera, don't worry.)

The color is called 'Pebblestone Clay' which I guess is a classy was of saying 'brown.' I noticed that most of the houses around us are almond, pale gray, pale yellow... I wanted something that really stands out. Actually, I think that scrapbooking has changed the way I look at colors. I prefer really bold colors and contrast now. Also, I think I prefer symmetry and balance overall, so I love the elevation of our house (it's all rectangles). With black shutters and white trim (you can see where it goes but it's not all painted yet), I think it will look really nice.

Yes, I really cleaned.

No, that isn't the work of the Toy Fairy that your mom swore was nonexistent. I actually did that myself. And no one is coming to visit or anything.

I found Porter on top of the kitchen table today. The table that backs up to a ledge which overlooks the stairs down to the garage. I can't imagine why he thought it would be a good idea to climb up there (and I'm not even sure how he did it, I confess I was scrapbooking at the time). This necessitated the rearranging of some of our furniture. Which meant I had to clean, since I sort of couldn't walk from one end of the apartment to the other without stepping on 766420911 toys. So I picked them up. All of them. And I vacuumed (you probably can't see the vacuum track marks, but I am inordinately proud of them).

If I had known it would make me feel this good, I would've cleaned the place up ages ago.

The kids, I can guarantee, will be completely oblivious to my efforts; rather, they will view it as an obstacle in their goal of achieving perfect entropy. Matt will notice, though. He'll think it's his birthday or something.

That one soup, you know, with the spinach

I promised my mom this recipe a while back, only it doesn't really have a recipe, since I sorta made it up

from a soup I had at the Olive Garden one time. When I was making it for dinner tonight I remembered, I never did give my mom the recipe... So here it is, Mom! Enjoy!

1. Brown about half a pound of Italian sausage along with some sliced mushrooms and garlic. (I used chopped up sausage links this time, and I have the stains on my cutting board to prove it.) Drain off the fat. Ew.

2. Add 3ish cups of chicken broth and bring it to a boil. Dump in a bag of dried tortellini and a rinsed can of cannellini beans. Marvel at the fact that it took 2 years to figure out where the cannellini beans are in Meijer. (Answer: the regular ones are in the regular bean aisle, whereas the fancy pants Italian ones are with the fancy pants Italian foods. The ones with the label in English are about 20 cents cheaper. Huh.)

3. Bring it to a boil, then simmer for 18 - 20 minutes. During the last few minutes of cooking, add the package of spinach that you forgot to take out of the freezer this morning, so you've been trying to thaw it under hot water while the pasta was cooking. Alternatively, add a couple handfuls of the fresh spinach that is mere days away from turning into a bag of green slime down in the vegetable drawer.

4. For maximum effect, garnish with Parmesan cheese and some pepper. It makes enough for about 4 or 5 people, so that should be plenty for a family with less than 8 kids.

5. Make sure you use up any leftovers within the next day or so, before the tortellini turns into wallpaper paste. Enjoy!

(gasp) Not Chatterbox...

I had a Design Team meeting last night. Our challenge for this month is to use 8 or more eyelets on a scrapbook page. My personal challenge to myself was to use paper that is NOT manufactured by Chatterbox. (I really love their papers, they're so gorgeous... www.chatterboxinc.com) As you can see here, I managed to do it! Those papers are from Scenic Route - don't you just love the fun bright colors? I still don't have any photos to go with them, of course. (That's cute Mandy, the owner of Scrapbook Corner, in the background.)

The smell of honeysuckle...

I took the kids for a walk down the Monon Trail yesterday and it was gorgeous. There was honeysuckle growing right along the trail side (forgot to take a picture! d'oh!) and it really took me back. I remember when I was a kid, my mom taught me how to bite the stem off and suck out the nectar. We always had honeysuckle growing around the back steps of our house. Every few years my parents would hack it all down, but it always grew back.

Isn't it funny how a smell can take you back? I wanted to pick some of the honeysuckle blossoms and suck out the nectar, right there on the trail, but I think that would have been a bad example for the kids.

This is a blog about a tree.

Betsy has been making up little songs lately. My favorite part is that she sometimes acts as her own DJ. "This is a song about a tree. Tree tree, tree tree, tree tree." Then she will sing a song about flowers, rocks, sticks, and when she runs out of parts of nature she moves on to everyday household items. I think she sang a song about her sippy cup this evening.

She's called it a 'drinkcup' since she was about 2. I've actually kind of forgotten that that's not the actual term for it.

Watching 'The Office' on NBC tonight and they showed the 'fitness orb' bit again. Soooooo funny. I (heart) that show. I wish I was a volunteer sheriff on the weekends.

I did manage to squeeze in some actual scrapbooking tonight. Here is what I got done. This is from an Easter egg hunt we went to - I had thought to do a cute Easter page, you know, pastel colors, fluffy bunnies, but all the photos turned out kind of... full of personality.

Drywall!

So, I went by the new house after Target and McDonalds and before the library. (Porter likes french fries!) We had been told that drywall would be starting this week. Who would think I would be so excited over such an inherently dull substance? (What's next: Hooray for Spackle?!) From what I could see, they had most or all of the boards nailed up, and they were working on the mudding and taping. I took a few pictures while the kids waited in the car.

wheee! I'm online!

I've been meaning to start a blog for the longest time. Well, here goes nothing!