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.