Greetings from Alabama

We made it safely to Gulf Shores, Alabama on Saturday. When we got here Saturday afternoon it was sunny and beautiful. Unfortunately, Sunday and today are rainy. Yesterday we did manage to squeeze a few hours in at the beach between rainstorms. Today we are going to go up to Mobile and try and find some touristy things to do. It looks like tomorrow is suppose to be nicer, so we are hoping to spend the entire day at the beach. And it is Connor's birthday tomorrow!

The condo we are staying is really nice. It is located right on the beach. So we can sit on our balcony and look at the water.

Thanks again for visiting me!

Birthday Fun

So we held Connor's sixth birthday party last Friday, and I believe everyone had a fantastic time! We invited Connor's entire Kindergarten class and held it at Jump for Fun. What I love about this place is that when you book a party you are the only ones there. No sharing the bouncies.

I didn't get very many pictures of Connor out on the big inflatables. For one thing, I couldn't get my camera to cooperate with me in the horrid lighting there.
And second, this is how he came down the slides most of the time. I didn't really need more than a couple of shots of his backside. lol!
After bouncing for an hour and 15 minutes we headed to the party room. We had a Spongebob Squarepants Cupcake Cake. (Phew, say that three times fast!)
And then it was time to open presents. I was a little amazed at Connor's inability to show happiness at the presents he received. I mean really kid, could you show a little enthusiasm? Just a little. ;-)



As you can see, Connor had a wonderful sixth birthday party. He definitely knows how to show some excitement. He did that with every single present he received. And I must add that Kindergartners make the cutest cards and notes to stick in with their presents! So sweet!

And the goodie bags were a hit. A couple of the moms commented on how cute they were. :)

Thanks again for visiting me!

A little crazy....

So tonight is Connor's 6th birthday party. His actual birthday isn't for another couple of weeks, but we will be on vacation then, so tonight is the party. He invited his entire kindergarten class plus a few extra. I think at last count, we have 20 confirmed that are coming. Thankfully we are going to one of those bounce places. When I was a younger and foolish mother, I threw a huge party for Spencer at my house with about 10 kids and a rental bouncey Spiderman thingy. I learned my lesson on that one. Pay to let someone else deal with the preparation and the mess left over. Therefore we do not have big birthday parties at our house.

So you are probably wondering about the title of this post. Since I'm not having the party at my house for 20 five and six years old that would make me pretty smart, right? You would think so, but nope. I see on the Cosmo Cricket blog these cute gift boxes she made. The title says "Easy Folded Gift Boxes." That Cosmo Cricket post was on Wednesday. Two days ago. Are you starting to follow along with me on this? Yes? Here is where the crazy comes in. I decide to make these for Connor's party. In two days. For twenty+ kids. And since I'm not too good with angles and things, you will notice that Julie (from Cosmo Cricket) took pity on me when I asked her if she could explain that tricky fold to me again. Yes I'm the Christiee she mentions when she gives another round of directions so that I might continue on my crazy journey to make these little gift boxes for Connor's party. In two days. So I finally figured out that tricky fold and I was on my journey. Thank you Julie!

And if I do say so myself, I think they turned out wonderful!!!

I used up a bunch of old cardstock to make the boxes. Then I used the EK Success candle punch across the top. And the craziness continued because I stickled every one of those little candles.
Here is the inside with the little goodies.
And Connor signed his autograph on each of the cards I stamped and put on the front of the gift bags. I even told him he could take a break if he needed to, but he kept going and got them all done at one time.
I ended up making 24 of them. Yea, I know I'm crazy for making something like this when the recipients will just tear into them and they will end up in the trash.
But you know what? It was fun. And Connor loves them.

And that is what really matters.

Thanks for visiting me!

Busy, Busy...

That has been the story of the last few weeks. Busy, Busy, Busy! Which explains the lack of blogging on my part.

So what have I been so busy with? Our Scholastic Book Fair. Last year I volunteered to be one of the three Co-chairs to run our Fall, Spring and Bogo Fairs. We are all new to this and weren't really sure what we were getting into. Well let me tell you that it is a lot of work getting one of these fairs up and running. It started about 2 months before with us meeting and planning our decorations, getting volunteers to help man the fair, getting fair flyers out to all of the students, and a whole lot more.

Then came time to set up the fair. And this is what Scholastic delivered to us. I took this with my Iphone so the quality isn't great, but it will give you an idea. So we started wheeling those carts into the library and set up our little (actually I think it is kind of a big) book fair.
We decorated in the library and one of the co-chairs, Becky, came up with this cute door decoration! Our theme was Destination Book Fair. We hung up inflatable globes and flags throughout the library. For three people not really knowing what we were doing, the fair looked really, really nice!
Here is a small sampling of the cases we set up. I think we had around 12 of these throughout the library.
We also set up lots and lots of tables with books. I have no idea how many tables we set up.

And then we worked it. All day during school hours, and 3 nights last week. I haven't worked that many hours outside the house in a long, long time! I was so tired last weekend.

I do think the fair was a success though! The kids really enjoyed coming in with each of their classes to shop. It is always fun to see what books the kids are into. Especially the girls, since I have two boys here. I learned all about Goldilicious, Purplicious, and Pinkalicious. As a mom of boys, I had no idea these books even existed! lol!!!

So the book fair pretty much consumed all of my time the last few weeks. But now that it is over, we have Connor's birthday party this Friday and then we are going to Gulf Shores, AL in a few weeks for a little beach vacation. I can't wait!

Thanks for visiting me!

Connor Learning to Ride a Bike-Large

Connor Learning to Ride a Bike-Large, originally uploaded by cme37.

This is a slideshow I made showing Connor learning to ride his bike last weekend. I know that it looks like he has training wheels on the bike, but they don't touch the ground. Chris tried to move them from his older small bike to this one and they are too small for this bike. So instead of searching for new training wheels, we decided we would teach him to ride his bike. And we forgot to take off the training wheels before we went to the park.

We went to the same park that we taught Spencer. I always think it is easier to learn to ride in the grass at first. That way if you fall, at least the ground is a little softer to fall on. This park does have a paved trail around it too, so once he got the balance thing a little bit, we moved him to the trail to give it a go.

These pictures were taken last Saturday. We went back on Sunday and I took a video that day. It takes me a while to figure out how to get a video loaded on here and I haven't had the time to do it. That day we had taken the faux training wheels off and he did even better. I hope to get the video on here in the next couple of days.

And I made this little slide show on my new Mac. I'm having so much fun learning everything on this and I'm really glad that I signed up to take the one on one classes. There are so many cool things you can do here with photos and videos and I can't wait until I really get the hang of it!

Thanks again for visiting me!!!

Halloween Card

I found the cutest stamp set at Michaels a few weeks ago. It is by Recollections and is called "My Little Monsters". It was only $6.99 and with my handy dandy 40% off coupon, they only cost me approximately $4.20. I think this set has quickly become one of my all time favorites.

I colored the "monsters" with my Copic markers (which is becoming another favorite very quickly!) and then matted them on black cardstock. I matted all four of those on some purple cardstock. You can barely seen the purple, but I thought it gave the card a nice extra touch.
The Ghouls Rule stamp is an old Studio G $1 stamp that I had. The green glitter paper was cut with the Martha Stewart Goo punch. I pop dotted the sentiment so it stands up a bit.

So the card actually came together pretty quickly. The longest part was the coloring of the monsters. I will be making some more these. I just love those "Little Monsters"!

Thanks again for visiting me!

A final post on last weekend.

Last Saturday after Connor's soccer game, we went to the Festival of the Little Hills. This is located in Old St. Charles. I went there a few weeks ago and showed it in this post. It is located right on the Missouri River.

We ended up finding parking by the kid's area. They had a bunch of inflatables....
a tent to do some crafts....

which we probably should have waited until later in the day to do because the boys got quickly bored when we went to look at all of the crafty booths.
Chris and Connor leaving the kids area and heading up to what I came for: the crafts and bad food!
It was very crowded. With the weather being so nice I think everyone had the same idea that we did.
I thought these bird houses were cute. This booth had a ton of cute ones.
These next two items were my favorite. First up, a "Shutterbug". Get it? Isn't that just adorable! ?
I can't remember what this next one was called. But being a scrapbooker/card maker, I loved the scissors being used for the head. The body is made out a shovel and I think the name had something to do with the shovel.
I didn't purchase any of those because they were a little pricey, but I sure did like them! I actually didn't purchase anything but food. :-) The last time we went to this festival it seemed to have a lot more holiday items. I like to get my Halloween and Christmas decorations from these type of vendors so we can have some unique and different items to decorate with. Not this year though. There just wasn't that much there. The boys did get a puppy marionette. And I bought deep fried Oreos for the first time. They were okay. I had to force Chris and Spencer to try them, but I couldn't get Connor to try them at all.

So that is what we did last weekend! Thanks again for visiting me!