The Mason Sleep Journals–Nights 1&2

Remember when I said that my goal was to get Mason sleeping through the night, without nursing and in his own bed before he turned two? Yeah… that never happened. I started working on it, but then he decided to cut in all of those pesky eye teeth and, well, it ended up not happening. On his birthday we decided that it was time. It’s time to try this for real – no excuses – and get him out of our bed. Step one is getting him to sleep through the night without nursing. I figure if we take care of that first we’ll have better luck getting him to sleep in a room (or bed) without me.

signs of spring…

Last week I got this weird bug in me to clean and rearrange my living room. Call it spring cleaning if you like – I won’t – but the nice weather after the never ending winter had me feeling inspired. After all the cleaning and rearranging was done I realized that there was one sore part left – under the tv. While the pumpkins had all been taken down long before, our fall banner had ended up carrying on from the time we put it up to now. (Hey, the kids liked it, and I never got around to making a winter banner) So the day after the cleaning and rearranging I decided it was time for us to make a new spring banner to replace it.

Continue reading to see the supplies, get directions, and see our banner!

Patterns are scary when you have 4 kids.

Maybe I should clarify that and say that patterns are scary when you already have four kids, and you don’t want any more, and you notice patterns that go the same with your previous times of having kids.
(I’m not overthinking this at all, am I?)

THE PATTERN:

1. Someone gets potty trained. When I got close to having Ryan the little boy that my mom watched – Jared (also Zach’s best friend) was getting potty trained. Even though Zach was only about 18 months at the time, he too started potty training then. (Though he still wasn’t fully potty trained – daytime – until he was 2.) Then with Bella, Ryan started potty training at about the same time I got pregnant with her and made it out of diapers and pull ups about a month before she was born. Bella first started potty training a few months before I got pregnant with Mason and was fully potty trained right before I had him. Mason has recently started showing a real interest in the potty and has gone to the bathroom several times in the potty.

March Sketch Inspiration–Part 1

So I am going to tentatively try this idea out. I’ve attempted similar things, mainly in providing templates and offering prizes, without much success. Which makes me wonder why I would even think this would work… especially since I don’t plan on offering any sort of prize. But hey, who knows? Maybe this time you’ll all bite.

Each month I’ll offer a sketch version of one of my more popular recent pages for you to use as inspiration. I will also make a new page – but more than just that, I’ll do a video of me making it (sort of like I did on this post). If there’s ever a particular page of mine that you would like me to do just let me know in the comments, or email me.

The sketch (you can click on it to get the full 12x12 version to save):

And I will try to get my page and video up before next Sunday!

The inspiration page is my layout “Swee Sie” made with goodies by Jenn Barrette from Sweet Shoppe Designs.

“Why are his eyelashes white?”

The blog recently got the following email:

“Hey! I was reading today’s post on your blog and realized that your son’s eyelashes are different on one eye from the other. Are they white? If so, do you mind if I ask why?” (post in question)

Yes, his lashes on part of one eye are white, while the rest are all a dark brown/black. The reason for that is because Ryan has vitiligo.

Wordless Wednesday

This is not what our March – or heck even our winter - usually looks like, but hey, I’ll take a chance to get wintery snow pictures whenever so that I actually have some to work with next winter.

I was going to blog Saturday.

I was going to blog yesterday, but instead I spent a good chunk of my morning doing this instead:

I am, like, so totally and completely in love with that. In case you can’t tell, it’s Zach. I did it based on a current favorite picture that I have of him. Only in the picture he has an awesome mustache as well. You can see it at the bottom of the post. But no, in love. I keep coming back and staring at it. It captures him so well. And he loves, loves, loves it too. As I was drawing it he would offer the occasional bit of advice, and he was tickled that I remembered to add his curl between his eyes (he trained it to lay that way). His only request was that I please NOT make him look girly, what with the freckles and the hair and the lashes. He said his lips (which are really light and thin) made it look girly, so I left those off, but kept the lines I did for the boy’s super dry lips.

I did all of that to make this:

And that I made for the March 2nd Think Outside the Box challenge at Sweet Shoppe Designs. I used Studio Basic’s Go To Elements: Art Journal #3 and Beyond Basics Paper Pack #1 digital scrapbooking packs to create the page. I did the drawing, the hair coloring, and the writing all with my tablet and in Art Rage.

And here is the drawing with the original photo.