Simply Jennifer

Christmas Success

Christmas was a huge success at our house! Christmas Eve was wonderful. We had a beautiful Christmas Eve service at church and came home to do milk and cookies for Santa and read our Christmas books. The kids fell right to sleep and were perfect angels. At some point during the night, Santa came!!!

The kids loved going through their stockings. There were so many goodies to find!

Both kids got scooters from Santa! What fun!!!!

Opening gifts...

Karaoke machine with 2 mics:

C's first "Fur Real Friend:"

More blocks:

There were so many wonderful things about Christmas. We're so thankful that we got to share Christmas morning with our family. We are so very blessed.

New Pics and a Couple of LOs....

>> Thursday, December 11, 2008 – CT, Family, Layouts

Time is just flying. I'm trying to keep up with it all. I want to share some newish pics of the kiddos. :) These were all taken before Hanging of the Greens at our church last Sunday. We got to participate in the service quite a bit as a family. It was my favorite service of the year...as usual! Shane did a reading and did a wonderful job. Then our family (Ry and C, too!) hung the garland at the front of the church. The kids did a great job carrying the bows down and standing and helping. Then, Ryan's group sang a little song that was just adorable. Finally, the kids got to carry poinsettias down for the poinsettia tree...C is too little so she just walked holding on to Ry's arm...they stole the night. It was just the cutest thing ever. I so wish I had a photo of it, but I'll always remember.

Here are a couple of great new releases from Krystal Hartley. The first, Happy Feet, is a collab with Ziggle Designs for Krystal's Guest Designer Spot at Scrap Orchard! I just love this kit...the colors are fun and I love the little sparkly elements. Kit is linked, so go check it out!

Here is a layout I did with this gorgeous kit. It's linked for full credits...If you check it out, please feel free to leave some love!

Here is another new release from Krystal. This one is called Heaven and Nature Sing. I just love that title...It's available at Funky Playground and is linked, so rush over to check this one out, too!

Be sure to check out Krystal's BLOG for some other great stuff and maybe a freebie!

Have a happy Friday, everyone!!!

Lots of Layouts and Some Fun News

>> Tuesday, December 2, 2008 – CT, Layouts

It's been a while since I've shared layouts and today seems like a good day to do it! Each layout it clickable for full credits.

First up is "Sad Santa." As you can see, Miss C just wasn't into posing for the camera. The awesome Christmas kit is Penny's Holly Days.

This simple layout is one of my faves. I love Caroline's sweet face and just the overall simplicity. The kit is Christy's Countdown to Christmas.

What an old photo! Here is Baby Ryan, meeting his baby sister for one of the first times. This photo was taken during her stay in the NICU. This kit is Christy's Get Real Baby.

I don't use photos of myself often in my layouts, but I really wanted to remember the closeness Caroline and I share. This layout uses goodies from Kristin Cronin-Barrow and Christy Lyle.

I absolutely LOVE this photo of Ryan and couldn't wait to scrap it. I used Bree's new Inspired by Kristen Launchpad as my starting point. I used kits from Eva Kipler, MandaBean, and Libby Weifenbach.

Finally, here is my brand new favorite layout. Again, I started with one of Bree's Launchpads. I used a fab kit by Kristin Cronin-Barrow and Scrapkitchen Designs.

Each of these layouts use fonts by Darcy Baldwin, Sweet Shoppe's go to font extraordinaire. You can find all of her products here.

I'll close out today with some pretty exciting news: I got published!!! One of my layouts was chosen to appear in the December issue of The Artisan Notebook. I'm really excited! You can find that issue here.

I think that's all for today. If you choose to visit any of these layouts in my gallery, feel free to leave some love! Have a happy week!

A Sad One...

>> Sunday, November 30, 2008 – Ramblings

I've been going back and forth about whether to write about this. I know that I'm having a hard time processing it. I didn't sleep at all last night and it hasn't been far from my mind all day today. I know writing about it will help me. But it's sad...very sad. So this is your warning. If you have any issues with super sad stuff or death in general, stop reading now. Because this is pretty graphic.

Yesterday we went to ASU's first playoff game. Great game, lots of fun even though it was freezing and drizzling the whole time. After the game, we go back to the car as usual. We have a couple of friends with us and we are just talking about the game and having a good time. We park in a lot that is way up on a long, steep hill. More like a small mountain. As we're pulling out of our lot, there are a couple of cars stopped in front of us. As we look around, we see an older gentleman lying on the sidewalk. His sons (we assume they were his sons) are around and some student national guard people just happen to be walking by. One quickly starts CPR...the entire breathing/chest compression combo. We're sitting in the car just watching, completely stunned. We can't move. We didn't want to be an audience, but there was no where to go. A crowd begins to gather as more people are walking up the hill to their apartments/parking lots/whatevers. Can you believe more than one family with young children stopped to watch? Through all the horror around, it really struck me that any parent would stop and let their child watch something like that. It seemed as though hours had passed...our car was completely silent. I know we were all praying. Finally an ambulance roared in and paramedics rushed out. They took over CPR and actually seemed to know what they were doing, but it was obvious it wasn't working. Before long, they brought out the defibrillator bag. They shocked the man three times, lying right there on the sidewalk, with his sons looking on. We knew. We could tell. After the third time, they never resumed CPR. They brought out a gurney and put him on it. No sheet to cover him yet, nothing being done, just trying to get out of there. As they lifted the gurney, both of his arms fell off, hanging limp at his sides. That's the image I can't shake. Every time I close my eyes, I see it. I see the looks on the faces of his sons, I see the paramedics shaking their heads. I see the looks of horror on the faces of people passing our car.

I'm having such a hard time processing what I witnessed. I feel almost personally involved, though I don't know who this man was. I don't know who his family is, where he was from, what he did for a living. It doesn't matter. He was a human being and I watched as he slipped away from this Earth. I hope and pray I never witness anything like it ever again.

>> Friday, November 28, 2008 – Family

Thanksgiving this year was simple, easy, and wonderful. Everyone came over to our house and we just kept it simple and fun. The kids had a great day and enjoyed helping me cook. Granddaddy's birthday was on Thanksgiving this year, so we had a mini-party to celebrate his special day, too. There is just nothing in the world better than spending the day with family.

Sweet Shoppe Saturday and Some New Layouts

>> Saturday, November 22, 2008 – CT, Layouts

Hi, everyone! With my less computer time experiment still going on, I haven't been blogging so much. However, today's an awesome Saturday at the Sweet Shoppe and I just have to share what my fantastic designers have out!

First, Penny has All Worn Out: Holidays:

Darcy has 2 new goodies, a font pack called Euro Pack and a super fun Rubbed Out Alpha:

Finally, Christy has an amazing new Christmas kit called Jolly All the Way:

If you get these kits today, they're 20% off in the store! Here are some layouts I did using these wonderful new goodies (linked for credits):

An Update on the Experiment

>> Monday, November 17, 2008 – Ramblings

Sooo...maybe you're wondering how my less-computer-time-experiment went. Well, it went very well. I did a great job of staying away from the computer. Even now, I'm still cutting way back. Some days are better than others. Some days there are things I want to do online that I just go ahead and do. Other days, I stay away more completely. Things at home have changed a bit...I'm reading a ton more, paying more attention to the kids and giving them more one-on-one time, and enjoying evenings cuddled up on the couch. I still love my computer, still love my online friends, still love scrapping...I'm just trying very hard to not let it consume me anymore. It's going to be an ongoing experiment. :)

New Look!

Under construction...new look and updates coming soon!

My Experiment

Where to begin.... Let's see. It all begins months and months ago with me spending more and more time on the computer. Sometimes I'm on the internet, sometimes I'm scrapping, sometimes I'm doing both. It seems like lately I'm always on. I'm constantly checking my email, my IMs, my favorite sites. It's to the point that I feel stressed out if I'm away from the computer. I've been slowly realizing that what I've been doing is probably not good for me or for my family. I can't hear that IM pop up without rushing to check it. I check in with certain forums more times a day than I can count. I scrap all the time. I'm losing sleep, I'm low on patience, and I think I'm suffering because of it. Yes, in the back of my mind for a while now, I've known I needed to make a change.

Fast forward to yesterday. Things have been going pretty much normally, although I have been trying to spend a tad less time on the computer. Yesterday, though, I was online, chatting on IM, and just "busy" in general. All of a sudden, all of our internet just died. No wireless on the lappy, no normal internet on the PC. No internet. No IM. No nothing. And we couldn't fix it. It was early in the evening...a long Saturday night stretching in front of us. What would I do with no computer? I was stressed.

That's when it hit me. It is ridiculous for me to feel this way. Yes, the internet is great, Being able to chat with my friends is great. Scrapping is great. But not great enough to make me freak out about not having it for one night. So, I made myself calm down. We had a nice family dinner. The kids went to bed early. Shane and I cozied up on the couch and I started a book I've been meaning to start. I read and Shane watched football for a while. Then we decided to watch a movie. Together. On the couch. No jumping up to check the IM buzz. No checking email "one last time." No "checking in" before bed. No internet seemed to equal the most quiet, peaceful evening we've spent together in quiet a while. Hmmmm....maybe that nagging voice in my head telling me that my computer addiction is out of control has been right this entire time.

So, where does that leave me? What's my point? The internet is back, up and running normally. But I've decided to try a little experiment. I say little because I'm setting the short term timeline as 48 hours. For the next 48 hours, I'm allowing myself only 1 hour of computer time. That's 30 minutes a day. And I'm sticking to it. I can use that 1 hour however I like. I will do a quick blog update each day and I'm sure I'll check into my normal sites. I may break it into 10 minutes at a time or 15...I just don't know yet. I'll have to see how it goes. But I just can't wait to see how I feel at the end of these 2 days.

Do I think this will be hard? YES! Will there be times that I'm dying to check in? YES! Will I totally ignore my IMs? No, of course not. But I will be timing myself, making sure I don't break my goals. Who knows what this will show me...but I sure do hope I learn something about myself. So, until Tuesday....I'll be in and out. Mostly out.