Boys, boys, BOYS

Here's a little peek at Travis & Jess' baby number 2! It's a boy! He's a wiggler.

Tootles,
Sharon

School Days

Well, I always have mixed feelings about school starting. On the one hand, the boys do better with a schedule but I love the mostly carefree and fun days of summer. Sure, not having them home during the day will make my job easier, but then who will tell me funny jokes on my work breaks? And my kids crack me up! Here's a pic of Ran & Chan yesterday, the first day of school. For Ransom it's the first day of high school and Chandler starts middle school. No more elementary days. That does make me a bit melancholy...

*Wannabee* Ace of Cakes Part 2

These pics are from Course 2! We start Fondant and Gum Paste class on September 8th! We can't wait! The last cakes are our Grand Finale cakes with the basketweave!

*Wannabee* Ace of Cakes

Ever since I was a little girl I have always wanted to learn how to decorate cakes. My mom had this neat book on all these different kinds of cakes to decorate. I can't tell you how many times I just looked and looked at that book. I remember for my 9th birthday that she made me this special cake that had poodles made out of sugar. I loved it!

So as my life has gone on I kind of gave up on learning cake decorating since I had so many other fun hobbies and felt that I didn't have time or energy for another one. Then I'm in a position now for free Wilton cake decorating classes at Michael's because I work there. I resisted and resisted for months and then July I decided to give it a try. What's really fun is that my sweet Jess is taking the classes with me and my friend, Wendy, is the Wilton instructor! Jess and I have had lots of fun learning together. Some of it has come really easy, others really hard like it took 'til Course 2 to realize that I had been doing the rose BACKWARDS...no wonder it felt so difficult. Jess has a real flair for it. Not surprising since she's so artistic. I'm including some pictures so you can see our creations. Oh! I even got Chandler to come one day when we were creating cupcakes! Enjoy the pics and YES the cakes were divine!

See the next post for more pics!

Happy Mother's Day

I look forward to Mother's Day because I get to get pictures with each of my boys for the scrapbook. It's a tradition that started a few years before my mom passed. I'm so glad I started it! So I actually have pictures of me and Mom together that I can cherish. This year we chose the front yard for the location. We were too pooped to party anywhere else and hey, we have the built in bench (aka. the tree that we felled like 2 MONTHS ago. Haven't gotten rid of it yet so why not use it?!). We have this group shot and then Dan had the boys each give me a kiss when he took the picture! Love, love, love it! The only thing that would have been better would be to have Jess and Thomas with us on Mother's Day but they were on a little vacation, seeing her folks in Idaho. Travis was happy to come hang with us.

I started my day with Chandler waking me with breakfast in bed. He has piles of scrambled eggs for the eyes, a spot of syrup for the nose and bacon placed in a happy face smile. He also made me this really neat heart shaped dish out of clay. I have to find a good spot for it on my desk. Ransom made me a card that was so sweet! Trevor made us dinner of bacon wrapped hot dogs with chili over it. Not my fav. but he made it so happily, I wasn't going to argue about that. We played Apples to Apples after that. I never win that silly game! The boys play it the way you put the most outrageous things for the category. How can I match that? Still, it was fun and I love hearing my boys laugh. Poor Dan had a wicked headache so he wasn't feeling so festive. Oh, lest you think my honey forget to get me a gift, he got me an iTouch a bit early!!! It's so cool. I can even surf the net and watch youtube while in bed. Love wireless internet! I guess I could put movies on it too but I haven't figured out how to do that yet. Hope your Mother's Day was good too!

The Latest Project

Okay, for the last week or so Jess and I took over the kitchen table to work on an album for my cousin, Kelley's daughter on the birthday of her first son. Jess is oh so talented and it was such fun creating together. She can come up with these adorable ideas out of her pretty little head. So this album is one of our collaborations. Oh, the scrapbook already made it's way to Kelley's house and she's thrilled! Can't wait to tell Jess. Here are pictures of our layouts. Kind of hard working layouts without any pics, but it can be done! Oh, and have I mentioned how much I love the Cricut machine?! Made our titles much easier. To think I used to cut every title from hand!

Fun

Trevor's letter of acceptance came this week from Central Washington University. He is so tickled and so are we! I'm not looking forward to him being gone come fall, but they have an excellent metal working shop there and will give Trevor even more experience. He eventually wants to own and run his own metal working business after mission and college.

I could go on about the adventures of my tooth but instead I'll talk about the value of having fun as we go. Last night I went to scrapbook at Krista's. Jess and I rode up together. It took us awhile to get going because we started out the evening with a jewelry party. Nice stuff but I didn't decide to get anything. I usually wear a lot of my jewelry as an afterthought. So I didn't think it was a good idea to spend some more money on it just because. Connie was so tickled that she won the door prize of some cool earrings. Jess and I worked on making explosion boxes to eventually go on our Etsy site. We had some fun with the Cricut. Jess got quite a bit done on the baby boy box and I couldn't get rolling on mine. So I had some fun helping Krista with her layout. Love her idea of her and Connie buying new cartridges for the Cricut and pitching in with a mat here and there! I'm so excited that I get to share this new, cool tool with everyone! We decided that at around 12:30 am or so Krista was out of adhesive and we needed to make a WalMart run. What really happened last night was that I had fun and laughed a LOT. Always worth a bit of lost sleep when I've been able to do that and forget my cares for a time.

Can't wait until May 3rd for my National Scrapbooking Day party! If you're in town, come on by, make sure to bring the chocolate!