Sharing

I decided that today I'm not going to complain or even offer any explanation for my absence cause it seems like that's all I do when I blog!

Today I'm only going to share a couple of LO's that I've completed in the past month or so.

So, here we go:

2 x Christmas layouts. One of the treasure hunt and one of our little Chrismas Angel, Céline

I completed 2 layouts of our beautiful little Daisy:

This year Marco didn't have much of a birthday. They had an athletics meeting at school on that day. At least he did't have any schoolwork on the day. I took a day's leave to spend the day with hime. After atheletics we went out for lunch. The next weekend we celebrated his b-day with a movie and dinner.

My next LO was inspired by a digital LO that I saw on Designerdigitals - sorry - can't remember who the designer was.

I had a rougn 2 weeks both at home and at work.  I'm so glad I found time amoungs all the crazyness to scrap.  It's the only thing that kept me sane.

I'm busy with a very special LO.  Hope I can post it by Sunday.

Tomorrow is athletics again.  Marco is really doing so well with Javelin this year.  I'm so proud of him!  The off to a b-day party of a friend.  Sunday should be quiet so I hope to get a little scrapping and hopefully blogging done then.

The big picture

At last I took the time to figure out how to post larger pictures in Blogger! It's been bothering me since I started blogging that the pictures are so small. It was actually much easier that what I expected. So if anybody want to know how I did it - just ask.

First of all I want to show you this great kit that I won on Lynnette's blog a while ago. It's from My Minds Eye and was designed by Jen Wilson. Great to do some pages for my boys. I REALLY love this kit. Thanks soooooo much Lynnette!!!!

I actually managed to get some scrapping done between Christmas and New Year. Here are the 3 pages that I completed:

(Not so) New Year

I can hardly believe that the first month of 2010 is over and gone! I designed a new blog banner when I had a little break between Christmas and New year and intended to put it up on 1 January. Before I could do it, our house was struck by lightning and we lost a our PC (luckily motherboard only - hard disc is still intact), modem, hi-fi pre-amp, alarm system and even some of the lights went haywire! This meant no blogging, surfing and TV for a while. It's such a mission to get everything back to they way it was!

Last Friday, Leon left for a 2 week fishing trip to Namibia. He's so in love with that country and it's wonderful to hear the happiness in his voice over the phone. It's like he went home! I miss him so much but he deserves the break.

Ok - it's time to play catch-up again. Seems like that's all I do on this blog of mine!

Apart from the back to school rush, there's been a couple of highlights for me this past month:

Leon and I went to Clarens for a weekend getaway on 15 January. The mountains and fields were so green and luscious as a result of the lots of rain that fell in the area since the start of summer. The scenery were absolutely beautiful. We didn't really do much. Just relaxed and took in the beauty of nature around us. I did have some time to brows around the pretty little shops in town and spent a lot of time in the wonderful art galleries too. I especially liked these ones: The Gallery, Blou Donki and Johan Smith Art Gallery. We stayed in a little cottage at Bokpoort. Just up the road from where we stayed is this cute fantasy castle that you can rent. A bit pricey but I would love to stay there some day!

We went to watch Avatar 3D! What an absolutely amazing experience! Even despite the big hoo-haa about the movie I still didn't expect to enjoy it that much. I'm not a big science fiction fan but that movie was simply spectacular.

I went to visit my little baby girl Leeloo. It's so amazing how much she changed in the 5 weeks since my last visit. She is the most adorable little creature! I held her in my arms most of the time I was there. She even slept in the room with me. This little girl has crawled very deep into my heart already! I miss her so much!

Last Tuesday (26 Jan) was Marco's 12th b-day. They didn't have school that day as they had a Zone Athletics Meeting that day. He won the shot put and came second with javelin. I took a days leave to spend the day with him. To celebrate his b-day, his best friend came to visit this entire weekend. Yesterday, I took them out to Potchefstroom for gift shopping, movie and lunch.

We've had so much rain this past month! All the rivers and dams in the area are flooded. They had to open up 14 sluice gates at the Vaal Dam last week which resulted in the Vaal River (which flows through our little town) to flood its banks even more. Here are some pictures:

I won't promise that I'll be a better blogger this year. I've seen that life just gets in the way and somehow blogging just gets pushed down on my priority list. I'll do my best to blog as often as I can and even more important I'll try to visit my friends' blogs more often.

Christmas @ our place

Christmas has come and gone way too fast! This year we spent Christmas at home with no other family or friends around - just Leon, me and the three kids. We had so much fun and really spent a lot of quality time together.

This is my Goofy Teenage Santa:
And these are his little helpers:



On Christmas eve, the kids and I decided to do a nativity puppet show. Leon was the only human in the audience. Celine decided that all her stuffed animals had to come watch the show as well. I was the director. Michael was the narrator and Céline and Marco the puppet masters.

The narrator:

The cast:

The props and cast back stage (behind the bar counter):

The audience:

After the show we had Céline's favourite food - lasagna - for dinner. After dinner I took the kids out for ice cream and a drive around town to watch all the Christmas lights that the people have up in the gardens.

When we got back home it was time for Santa's little helpers to hand out the gifts.

I usually have sweets and an extra little surprise for the kids in their Christmas stockings on Christmas morning. This year I had an extra surprise waiting for them - a Christmas treasure hunt. I hid 17 different clues around the garden which they had to search for before they found their "treasures".

Céline got a new cellphone while the boys got a Wii. They had so much fun doing the treasure hunt and were over the moon about their extra gifts.

I feel so relaxed! Last night I even had time for a little scrapping. I finished this page that I started with a while ago at scrapclub.
Today I plan to do a little re-organisation in my scraproom and hopefully get a little more scrapping done too. I also want to pay a visit to as many of my bloggy friends blogs as possible.

I hope that all of you had an equally great Christmas with your families.

Catch up

I'm so not a good blogger! I don't even know where to start catching up. These past few weeks have been a big rush. Barely touching ground and feeling overwhelmed and stressed most of the time. Lots of good times in between as well, which kept me going though.

We had my moms 80th b-day party on 28 November. This is what the table looked like - we only had one loooong table, so all the guests could sit together.
It was a really special day for my mom and she loved seeing all her friends and family that she haven't seen in years.


This is me and the boys with the birthday girl.

As a birthday gift to her, I made her an album with photos of her with each of the guests as well as a handwritten message from each and everybody there. I did 24 pages. for the album. Unfortunately I never had time to take photos of the album before I gave it to her. Will do so later.


Then on 7 December, my god daughter Annalize's little baby girl Leeloo was born! I looked forward to this day sooooo much and despite everything on my plate, I just had to go and meet this little angel as soon as they got out of hospital.

Leon's birthday was on 13 December, and I wanted to make something special for him. I decided to make a painting of his idol - Mark Knopfler. I wanted to make it large, and ended up with a huge 1.5m x 1.1m canvas. If it wasn't for my art teacher's confidence in me, I never would have even attempted something as big as this. Unfortunately, even after I took an entire day's leave from work to work on the painting, I couldn't finish it in time for his birthday and only finished it yesterday. This is what it looks like:

He is very chuffed with his work of art in his bar.

This is the birthday boy on his b-day last week.

Since I finished the painting and wrapped most of my Christmas gifts yesterday, I feel much more relaxed. I even had time to make this wrath and Christmas tree that I wanted to make last year already.

And this is our Christmas tree .

Two weeks ago, we had friends over for Sunday lunch. Leon cooked some excellent food and I had a ball decorating the table. I found these old silver wine glasses in one of the antique shops in Parys a while back and since then I wanted to use them as individual flower vases.

For desert Leon made this absolutely gorgeous Amarula Cheesecake. I only helped a little with the decorating.

Unfortunately I'm one of the "skeletons" at work and business isn't as slow as we expected. I have to run around between three desks trying to keep everybody happy.


So there it is - what kept me occupied for the past couple of weeks. I'm looking forward to a peaceful Christmas with my family now.

I hope that each and every person who reads this post will have a wonderful Christmas filled with love, peace and hope for the future. Keep the real reason for this day in your heart and it will be filled with His love for you! :)