Photoshop layers and masks

make something cool: marshmallow shooter!

Things to make for christmas

I love being crafty, but things get so out of control before Christmas. Thought I'd make a big list of all the things I want to make before I figure out what I will realistically have time to make. Here goes (see how overwhelming this is?):

• christmas garland
• dinosaur play mat
• snow globes
  
• ornaments a la skunkboy or adorable felt toys
• fabric crowns or maybe felt?
  
• knitting projects: 5 hats and surprise?!?
  
• christmas card wreath display
• kids craft: gumdrop pops
• activity books for kids: coloring pages, connect the dots, etc.
• kids craft: Snowflakes and snowmen
• kids activity or gift: vintage paper dolls
  
• microwave caramel corn with chocolate chips added at the end (or nuts, white chocolate, coconut, orange zest, cinnamon, etc. depending on how i feel)
  
• peppermint cocoa or layered
• peppermint bark popcorn or peppermint candy brownies
• pin cushion gift with pinecone elves
• black apple dollies
  
• christmas countdown garland
• photo advent calendar
  
• christmas planner for gifts (another one made from index cards!), and printable forms for getting organized
• gift tags and photo gift toppers, as well as mitten clips

Other good ideas:

• sock or glove critters
• piggy mittens (pdf)
  
• drawstring bags using up my cute stash of fabric
• repurposed t-shirt pants
  
• christmas tree scrapbook
• gifts in a jar, including smores in a jar
  
• monkey bread
• christmas sayings, and kitchen gift sayings for cards
  

Things to do for christmas

In the spirit of celebrating family, here are some of the things I'd like to do this year:

• Put up the tree thanksgiving weekend and being decorating house
  
• Plan weekend in leavenworth
• Write letters to Santa
• Family game night weekly
• Christmas movie nights
• Bake christmas cookies and decorate
• Christmas stories with kiddos
• Picnic around the fire
• Fondue night
  
• Make a snowman
• Video chat with family
• Christmas eve at Grandma Peggy's with the aunties
• Christmas morning with Auntie Lindsey & Uncle Brett
• Christmas dinner with Grandma Maria & Grandpa Keith (and family)
• Hot cider and cocoa
• Christmas carols
• Family service project, operation christmas child
• Make peppermint cocoa to share with friends
• Eggnog french toast
• Craft projects
• Send out christmas picture
• Write a letter
  

December Daily Album

I've decided to create a December Daily scrapbook album before Dec 1 and got a great start on it yesterday. I am so inspired by Ali Edwards and love her sense of style and imperfect approach to capturing everyday life.

More links to projects and products for my, I mean your, inspiration:
Another December Daily album done in July in preparation.
Holidays in Hand class by Jessica Sprague - which I am also planning on doing this year.
Journal Your Christmas with email prompts

My goal is to slow down this year - be intentional about creating christmas magic, focus on experiences (not stuff) and savor every moment. I'm hoping these projects will help!

make something cool: pretty dresses

I would love to make this dress:
I love this dress. And I have lots of Jason's old dress shirts that I could use. But I've never sewed clothes before. I aspire to make this for Sabrina but fear by the time I get around to it, she'll outgrow the dress shirt!

Also, a sewing tutorial from Oliver + S that is great for those learning to sew.

My first digital scrapbook page

I made my first page today, do you like it?

Jessica Sprague taught me how. I took a free class online here.

Basic Photoshop stuff but I needed it. It's been over 10 years since I really used Photoshop! I'm very excited. Taking the next class now...

IMG00218.jpg

First fire of the season. Toasty! Kids enjoying picnic dinner on pirate plates. Bean bags are out for full lounging benefit. And paper bag lanterns that Carter invented. Good times.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Piano man

I came back from my trip to Nashville to discover that Carter learned to play piano while I was gone. See for yourself...


Here's the original Coldplay song he is playing:


And of course Sabrina couldn't miss out on the action...

Not bad for the first lesson - can you see how proud of herself she is?

Every time I leave my family, Jason does a great job with the kids. A little too good if you ask me. I'm not sure how he gets them to sit still for long enough to learn piano, for example. That just doesn't happen when I work with them. He is so incredibly patient and creative when teaching them that it is wonderful to watch. But it is starting to make me look bad...

make something cool: recycled plastic messanger bag

for another weekend when i'm feeling crafty, i want to make this!

Cricut Contest Entry

This is contest entry for those crazy folks at TodaysMama and Cricut. Be sure to check out Cricut's cool new cartridges and the chance at $30,000 in travel for you and your friends at the Great Gypsy Escape site!

Great Escape Meme
1. If you could escape to anywhere in the world where would it be? Hawaii
2. What song do you play when you are by yourself in the car? Viva la Vida

3. If you had a night to yourself, and money was no object, what would you do? Spa, hair, pampering generally
4. What is your guilty pleasure? anything baked, especially chocolate
5. What is the farthest place you have traveled away from your home? Munich
6. Last book that you couldn't put down? Edgar Sawtelle
7. When you want to escape into another time, what movie do you watch?
8. What is your favorite local escape? Point No Point beach with the kiddos
9. How do you escape on a budget? Parks, beaches, long walks, picking blackberries
10. Best food you've ever had while on vacation. Sushi in hawaii - so fresh and yummy!

I had to have these stamps

I'm in love with them. Can't wait for them to come!

It's like learning to ride a bike...

We had the best day on Sunday. It was the first day in over a month that Jason had the day off and we made the most of it. After church we visited with his parents and then headed to the ball field to try out the bike with no training wheels, something we'd been talking about all summer but haven't had time to do. Carter was convinced he wouldn't be able to ride a bike until he turned 5 (just a couple weeks away) and he was quite apprehensive about it. But Daddy knew best. He knew Carter was ready, but he just needed to want it. And he did. We took his bike to the baseball field and spent the afternoon riding and taking a break and hanging out in the shade and riding some more and just hanging out. It was really nice.

Here's a video for your enjoyment:

Carter learning to ride bike 4 from Michelle Anderson on Vimeo.

The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher

I just finished reading John Taylor Gatto's "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling." I was beside myself. It really helped me to think critically about the kind of education I want to give my kids. I'm not sure how much I buy into the Totalitarianism or conspiracy to dumb down our kids, but it did get me thinking which is a good thing. I'm consolidating my thoughts and need to talk it over with my husband before I publish anything here, but here is a copy of The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher speech that Gatto gave upon accepting an award for NY State Teacher of the Year in 1991. You should read it. And another chapter of the book, a speech he delivered in 1990 when he acepted an award from the NY State Senate for NYC Teacher of the year is entitled "The Psychopathic School."

Inspiring Layout: Hearts

I ran across this beautiful scrapbook page yesterday. Enjoy!

Gyoza!

The kids and I made Gyoza tonight and it was very fun. Missa taught us how to make Gyoza last year at our MOPS steering retreat and I still dream about them. I came across a blog post about Gyoza and it inspired me to make my own. It was a bit of work chopping and folding them up, but the kids got into it and I just made sure we had plenty of time this afternoon.

And here are the results!


If you want to make your own Gyoza you definitely should. I followed the recipe here, but added a little sesame oil and shitake mushrooms. I didn't mess with the cabbage, just cut up the leaves and mixed them all in with pretty good results. But I made a sweet and sour sauce that Missa gave me to dip it in. Can't find it right now but can give it to you if you want. It rocks!

Here are two different videos on how to fold Gyoza:

Silly Songs with Carter and Sabrina

As we were cleaning up and getting ready to go home from the Cabin, the kids started goofing off. Luckily I remembered to grab the camera!

GoFish's "Get Your Jammies On"



Sabrina Beat Boxing - Watch her turn into Action!



God You Reign



Mighty to Save

Magically clean inbox

I just found a cool trick for cleaning out your gmail inbox. When I started my gmail account the transition from folders to lables was akward and I had so much space it didn't seem like I'd ever use it. But now that I'm a GTD convert (sort-of) it really bothered me that I had 10k emails in my inbox. So I deleted some obvious spam and then archived the rest (see: http://www.ainotenshi.org/cleaning-up-your-gmail-inbox). Now my historical email is still there, and I can process the rest as it comes in by labeling and archiving if I want to save it. But I delete a lot more email than I used to and the satisfaction of having the Inbox at 0 messages is huge!

Time flies

wish I was having fun though. ParentMap uses word to keep track of employee time, and even excel is a bit annoying for this task b/c it doesn't handle calculations of time well. It can subtract time if i enter start and end times, but summing time becomes problematic when you get to 99 hours.

I looked for a free tool, because this is a simple task I want it to do. Start, end, date, project. Keep track for me and then add it all up at the end of the month, but break it down by day or project or both if I want.

I downloaded and started using HourGuard, and it is great except that I can't break down the report by day. Suck.

Other free tools:
simple - http://online-stopwatch.chronme.com/ allows you to keep track and export to csv
http://www.toggl.com/ - looks clean and simple
http://www.trackmypeople.com/ - seems fancy and am afraid they'll charge me to export csv or something
http://klok.mcgraphix.com/klok/index.htm - seems clunky to me. maybe just ugly.

I'm trying Toggl next. But I downloaded their widget for mac and setup an account and my login/pass failed so that is annoying. But it is nice that they have an online interface. We'll see how it goes. Any suggestions?

The new more efficient me

Ahh...the illusion of productivity. In an attempt to get organized, dump tasks out of my head and associate them with projects I went online looking for a good tool to keep track of my tasks. And I quickly discovered the world of Getting Things Done (GTD) and the cult of productivity that seems to flow from that. I hadn't heard of GTD before but some of the ideas resonated - that I function better when I get stuff out of my head and on a list. That there are some things I need my computer or the internet for that I can't do at the cabin on the weekend, but other things that I need to be able to sit and think which doesn't happen with the kiddos underfoot.

Anyways, I wanted to use the task feature in outlook/entourage. I like that I can assign categories to them, and due dates and priorities, etc. But I didn't want to pay for office. So I downloaded iGTD and I kind of like it. My only beef is when it comes time to process tasks - I'd like a view where I can see everything on my list grouped by project so I can sort it and still see everything in one place. Maybe it does this and I just haven't figured it out yet.

more GTD resources:
good place to start - http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/08/getting-started-with-getting-things-done
5 sentences - http://www.43folders.com/2007/07/12/five-sentence-email
Quicksilver - http://www.43folders.com/2007/06/19/buffington-igtd-01
http://blog.circlesixdesign.com/2007/06/21/my-personal-igtd/


Note: I resisted buying office for my mac b/c i didn't want to spend anymore money just so I could work. I already own 2 licenses for the PC and switching to a mac was pretty expensive already. But the home edition isn't really that much and I broke down. Open Office just didn't cut it for the excel data minipulation I needed to do (lots of data in many tabs, pivot tables, vlookup, if/then statements, etc.) - it choked or it just didn't work. I'll concede that it is possible that I didn't spend enough time learning the interface on a few of those, but the choking with big data sets (only 10k rows) was a big waste of time.