Things are improving

So surgery was LONG and LATE last night I finally got home from the hospital at 2:10 am!! He ended up needing surgery and do to the fact he has a urine bag the surgery was harder, it was also harder as he is on a chemo drug for Leukemia and the drug has turned his insides into fused together mush!! The Dr is VERY concerned and wants to take him off the drug. They also found a mass in his testicle that they are unsure if it is new or not and it was too late to get a hold of his cancer Dr to find out. So today all of his Drs will be getting together to discuss what to do next. On the positive side the tumor was soft so the Dr doesn't think it was cancer and if it is it will be in the EXTREMELY early stage. He has a bag for 8 weeks and then they will hopefully be able to put his colon back together. It was VERY sad and scary last night when we finally got to see him he looked SOOO bad and was on a ventilator and all kinds of tubes and hook-ups!! He wasn't doing good so they sedated him while we were there and kept him sedated through the night. THANKFULLY he was able to come off the ventilator this morning and is no longer sedated and is in good spirits!! I will be going to the hospital in a couple hours to see him. Now hopefully we continue to get good news and he continues to improve and comes home soon! He is in the surgical intensive care unit, but there is talk of moving him to a regular room, so that is good too! Thank you for all your kind words and prayers and I will keep you posted with more info when I know more.

You know when it rains it pours...one of my VERY close friends told me today her grandpa died the other day and one of her friend's grandpa died as well!! Too weird! And my husband's friend's mom was having the surgery to reconnect her colon yesterday as well. Enough bad news!!! The black rain cloud needs to leave!!! There are several people from MB's who have tragedy/sickness in their life as well. Its VERY sad and its time for some good news for a change!

Blessings to everyone and warm wishes!
Thank You for your thoughts and prayers!
Valerie

Please keep my grandpa in your thoughts and prayers today!

My grandfather is close to 80 years old and he is going in to have a tumor removed from his colon today. The tumor initially tested cancer free, but it is SO BIG that they have to test the other side of it after it is removed. The tumor is also half inside the colon and half outside, so they won't know till they start if it can be done with lasers or if they have to totally open him up and do major surgery. Its scary not knowing and he had bladder cancer about 20 years ago and has been fine since. So please just keep him in your prayers today as I have a bad feeling about this. Thank you!

Here are my grandparents last December at our family's annual trip downtown to Macy's on State Street to see Santa and have lunch in the Walnut Room.

Thanks!

Valerie

Knock, Knock!

So on Saturday morning while the boys were watching cartoons and dh was sleeping in I was sitting at the computer when all of a sudden I heard this tapping sound. It was a sound I had never heard before and had NO idea what it could be! As I turned in my chair to get up I glanced at the playroom window and there I saw......

It was the cutest thing he was looking right at me and would tap his beak on the window as to say let me in! I was lucky enough to have my camera sitting on the computer desk so I picked it up and was able to get some pics of my visitor. He hung out on my house for a few minutes, he was not scared when I walked up to the window and made me wonder if he had gotten out of someones house???

I know I had seen these birds wild in the neighborhood so I wasn't too worried when he flew off. Later on I was telling my sons and dh the story and dh looked at me like I was crazy and guess what? Not even two minutes later I looked at the front room window-right where dh was sitting and he was back!! It really was the strangest thing as I had NEVER seen a wild bird come on a window like that!! So I now plan to scrap this event, and I guess I will break down and buy some scrappy stuff with that darn trendy bird!! I'm not a fan of the bird trend, but how can I NOT use it to make this page??

So the weather is here is SOOO DRASTICALLY different than it was at this time last year!! I had my flowers planted by now, the lilacs had bloomed and gone by now, and the boys were playing in the pool!! This year I don't have plants yet, the Lilacs have NOT bloomed yet (I am happy about that!) and the thought of going in a pool outside sends chills down my bones! We have been stuck in the 60's with a COLD North wind, and at night it gets down into the 40's!! HURRY UP SUMMER!!!

Well I better go, I've got a million things to get done!

TFL!

Valerie

The First Time I Scrapbooked

So over at Scrappy Girl Designs it is a month long celebration for National Scrapbooking Day, and each day a new challenge is posted and you have the ENTIRE month to complete as many as you would like. Each challenge is worth a certain # of points and at the end of the month the 3 highest point totals will win a prize! :) There's PLENTY of time to come over and join in the fun!!

One of the challenges is to blog about your first time scrapbooking. Well it has been SOOO long I will try my best to tell the story.

I started Scrapbooking in my Senior year of high school. By scrapbooking standards today that was the caveman days!! :) I was up in Antioch IL with my grandma at the summer cottage and we went into town to our favorite store Ben Franklin (I'm pretty sure it was still that) it has since changed into my FAVORITE LSS Hannah's!!! Well they added a craft section and they had these BEAUTIFUL fabric covered photo albums there and the coolest pages with pictures and decorations inside. Well I HAD to have one, so I bought all the pieces (yes you had to make your own album!) and stickers, cardstock, and some templates. Several days later when I went back home I opened all my goodies up and the magic began! I decided my first book would be for my boyfriend (now dh) for our 1 year Anniversary (now married for 5 yrs Sat!) I began by covering the covers with blue contact paper and then embellished it with stickers and laced it together with a ribbon. Inside you will find fabric contact paper on the covers and pages FULL of shape cut and zillion matted pics, more Mrs Grossman's stickers than you can imagine, decorative scissor cuts, doodling and dare I say it rubber cement!!! YIKES!!!! I poured my heart and soul into this book and well he loved it, so I then moved on to one (STILL unfinished!!) for my cousins, then one for bf/dh dart accomplishments, and from there we move closer to present day and more recognizable scrapbooking! It was an addiction from the first moment I laid my eyes on those scrapbooks and I have NEVER stopped since!! The excitement of all the fun stuff to play with is something that has never changed! I love saving memories and I want to remember EVERY moment of my life and want those memories saved for my children as well. And that is another reason I find this SOO addicting!

So here come the pics so you you can see how crazy it was in "the old days"!

Here is the "stuff" to put together an album.

Here is the outside cover. Where the space in the center is use to be a cute puppy with a red heart in its mouth! I called dh a puppy dog, he loves music and plays the guitar. Thus the stickers I chose.

This is my first page ever!! Don't mind the sappy stuff! Nice clean lines on the inside cover huh?? What was I thinking???

Gee aren't those pages just lovely??? ARGH!!!

Yes pattern paper is beginning to be popular! I must have been nuts as I used stencils and colored on my pages and I doodled my own background designs on almost EVERY page!! YIKES!! No winder it took FOREVER to do a page!! The little Winnie the Poohs everywhere is because "Pooh Bear" is dh's nickname!

Well these are from my niece's book and well its getting a little better...NOT!! Its funny to look back at these and see that these were SO COOL and that's how we scrapped back then. WOW!! Just think in 10 years we will look back at some of our prized pages from now and say "what were we thinking"!!!

Going back and looking these reminds me of a challenge Dixie Pieces had a while back to scraplift your fisrt LO!! Hmmm... I might have to try it.

TFL!
Valerie

Where has the time gone????

I can't believe we are already half way through May!! It seems the days just slip away BEFORE I get a chance to do half the things I plan to! I have SOO much I wanted to post and just NO time to get it done! :(

I hope everyone had a good Mother's Day! Mine was just alright-nothing too exciting or special! Highlight would be hubby gave me money to spend at LSS!! The boys had a great time making picture frames to give to their grandmas, great grandmas and godmothers! We got these great wood frames at Joann's, acrylic paints, and scrapbooking flowers and brads. I made the flowers and put a glue dot on the back of each and the boys picked the colors to paint each person's frame and the put the #'s and flowers on the frames. I think Joseph has an eye for art as he picked only flowers that would coordinate with the frame and then he did a fancy design. Can you guess which are his? He did 2 of these.

Nicholas was not as interested and he was coming up with some creative ways to paint his frames! I have to say this was VERY hard for me to sit back and let them do it their own way and not fix them or their mistakes! And I have to say they did VERY good for me not interfering! I did tell them the correct order to put the #'s though!

I had an interesting National Scrapbooking Day! It started with my friend had to go to the Dr that morning before we left for the 12 hour crop at the LSS so we got there a little late, but we GOT THERE! We then thought we were going to have to share a small table with more people and then after we went shopping to see all the new goods we found we didn't have to share! :) But it was the joke of the day that we were in solitary confinement as we were the last table in the WAY BACK CORNER! The crop was a blast as always, though I felt bad for my friend as she was not feeling good at all! Well I actually was starting to get on a roll and get some LO's done when dh called and was having issues with the boys, well then I was upset thinking about what was going on at home and lost my groove. Then I got a phone call that something was wrong with Nicholas! Apparently he was constipated, and we didn't know as he was pooping several times a day, and he was pushing SO hard he made his insides come out! I told dh to call the Dr and he called me back and said he ds needed to stop pushing and it should go back in and if it doesn't go to the Emergency room!! And if it did go back in we needed to give him an Enema and Miralax, so dh was freaking out about how would he get to the store with them and I NEEDED TO GET HOME RIGHT NOW! Problem was I had a days worth of scrapbooking mess to clean up AND I was 1 hour away! I called my brother's girlfriend to see if she could get to my house faster as my mom was far away the day too and she was the first person who came to my mind! Well she got there and helped dh out, when I got home Nicholas was back to normal and we could wait till the next day to give the enema, and that was NOT a pleasant experience! Well he is fine now and we just need to give him Miralax once a day for 2 months. Definitely a day I will NEVER forget!! So here are my 2 creations I did get done that day.

The first one is made with my prize from Scrappy Girl Designs and the second one I finally used some of the Thomas paper I have had forever now! I still have to finish the journaling on the second Layout. I also just had some fun completing a layout for a Dixie Pieces color combo challenge, I had to use orange, brown and blue. So I finally got some of my Basic Gray Archaic chipboard and a paper pack I have been wanting to scrap the pics from the Dinosaurs at the Field Museum.

Well I could go on forever it feels there has been so much, but the natives have gotten restless and the upstairs has become a race track, so I better go attend to them! ;)

TFL!

Valerie