Project Life Week 24

Last week was a full week. It seems like we didn't stop and we kept the days full with activities. I had a lot of pictures to pick from and decided to leave out some of my favorites (creek swimming) to keep the spread from being too busy. Most of the pictures were taken with my DSLR--with a few iPhone photos from Mark and my sister in law. 

I also played with four different kits---pulling cards that fit into the feel of the week. It's nice to have that option to mix up the kits a little. 

Here's the whole week:

At the beginning of the week we drove south to spend some time with my family and help my niece, Aniyah, celebrate her 7th birthday. It was a quick visit, but we were able to fit in a lot and most importantly get to spend time with family!

While we were there, we got all nine grandkids to pose with my mom for a photo. It's not often we have all of them together at once. It made for a full house, but super happy kids!

When out watering one morning I snapped a photo of Naomi smelling the peonies. Our garden has exploded with color over the past few weeks and it's been fun snapping photos of all the various flowers. I used one of the Midnight journaling cards to write about it. 

One afternoon Naomi found a dead beetle (junebug?) outside her school. She insisted on bringing it home and then keeping it in a jar. Mia had my camera and snapped this photo of her as we were getting out of the car. The card is one of the journaling cards in the holidays kit. I just cut it down and added letter stickers. 

And, yes---her shirt is backwards. The twins insist on dressing themselves lately and so most days their clothes are on backwards and even inside out. 

I loved watching Mia and Aniyah playing cards on my sister's porch and so covertly snapped a photo of them. The blue card is one of the Hanukkah cards in the holidays kit that I cut down. 

I'm not always good about saving extra things to add to our book. Movie tickets are an easy thing for me to add without taking up too much space. 

Mia and I went to see Epic and were so surprised to find that it was written by William Joyce. He's one of our favorite authors and if you liked Rise of the Guardians, you'll like this one too!

Every year our town hold a family friendly bike event called the G'Knight Ride. It's hosted by a local brewery and includes food trucks, bouncy castles, and live music. There is a variety of bike rides that you can do with the whole family. This year Mark and Mia decided to do the 12 mile ride. It's a leisurely ride with stops at some local tasting rooms. 

Although it was hot, we all had a good time at the park and then when the twins had had enough I took them home. Mark and Mia didn't ride home until after 10PM, but it was so worth it! They had a blast and next year we'll attempt it as a whole family. These were some of my favorite shots from the day.

I had to take a photo of Mark with the brew that the ride is named after!!

Earlier in the week Mia went for a sleepover with her Aunt Susan. They went to the Butterfly Pavilion, had pedicures, and ate out. It's always a treat for her to get some special time with her aunt! I love that she sent me pictures from their day!

This morning I decided to add an insert to hold Mark and Mia's bike numbers. They also made the front page of the local paper and so I'll also tuck in the newspaper article about the ride that they are quoted in when I get our copy!

I'm linking with The Mom Creative for her weekly share. 

You can find out more about Project Life here. 

New Wave Quilt

I wanted to share one of my latest quilt projects that has slowly come together over the past few months! It's not 100% finished, but the top is done and it'll go in the pile of quilt tops to finish (hopefully by later this year). 

This pattern is called The New Wave Quilt by Elizabeth Hartman. 

It's a free pattern and it's so simple to follow. She includes a lot of pictures and a diagram for how to lay it all out. It's really a perfect quilt for a beginner who wants to step out of the square and rectangle based patterns. The hardest part for me was getting the waves to line up. If you look close, it's not perfect, but I'm really happy with how it turned out! 

I love quilting with orange fabrics. It makes the sewing table so bright and cheery!

I used some of my favorite Tula Pink, Anna Maria Horner, and Lotta Jansdotter fabric. I added in a few other fabrics to help pull all the colors together. 

I'm not sure where this beauty will end up or even how I'm going to quilt it yet, but I'll share it again when it's all the way done!

If you're looking for an easy but beautiful project, check this pattern out! It comes in different sizes and really is a great way to showcase your favorite fabrics!

Project Life Week 23

When it came time to put together this week's Project Life spread I was at my mom's house two hours away from my normal stash of goodies. I had packed just the essentials---a handful of graph cards, a variety of Seafoam 3x4 cards, some washi tape, and a few sheets of letters stickers. 

It was kind of fun to have the challenge of completing the spread with bare minimum of items. 

However, my mom has quite the collection of her own journaling cards and so I didn't hesitate to peruse her supply too!

Here's how the week turned out:

Another nap photo of Naomi--I actually had two from this week, but only used one!
I dressed it up simply with some washi tape. I've been using the new American Craft Project Life pens exclusively for a couple of week and I am loving them! I only have the 3 black pen set, but these seem to be enough to get journaling done!

Mark took the photo of Mia playing Takenoko. They love to play games together and I love that Mark will save me photos to add to our Project Life. 

I snapped this photo of Hollis while we played at one of our favorite local parks. My mom just happened to have a perfect journaling card for it!

My sister in law gave Mia all her old Breyer horses and stable this week. It was such a thoughtful gift

and it's been so sweet to watch Mia play with the same horses that her aunt once played with. 

 Mia comes home from summer camp pretty exhausted. On this day she asked to watch her favorite show and as she lay there I noticed how blue her eyes popped in the sunshine.

I had to get a picture! The patterned paper was from mom's stash of scrapbook paper.
Beneath it I printed photo from a walk Mark and I took one morning. I still feel pretty lucky to live where I do---there is so much nature and beauty right in our backyard. 

Sometimes I forget to take photos when there is a girl's night. This week I remembered!! It's a fuzzy iphone photo, but a fun way to get some dear people in my pages too!

This week Mia got to use her birthday gift of a horse riding clinic at a local stable. She has been obsessed with horses for a bit and this was a dream come true for her! I found this Happiness cloud in my mom's stuff. It went well with a foldable journaling card from the Midnight kit.

The "Great Day" flag was also taken from Mom's supply!

I'm linking up with The Mom Creative for her weekly share!

Project Life is now available is all sorts of places! Read more at Becky's blog!

Project Life Week 22

 This week was our first week of summer vacation and it ended up being a pretty busy week. We crammed in a hike, zoo trip, park days, and had Mia's dance recital on Saturday. I was pretty good this week and brought my DSLR around. I was able to use it to capture some of my favorite photos in a while. It's also nice to have their crispness along side the iphone photos. 

Here's the whole week:

 Naomi has been bug hunting lately and is quite fond of capturing roly-polies. I try to get her to let them go after a few moments because she can be a little heavy handed with her holding. We've seen our fair share of squished bugs. 

I used one of the Ali Edwards' journaling card and colored it in with a pink Sharpie paint pen. 

I went to see Star Trek with my friend Lisa and so added the ticket into the book. What a great movie! I'm not a huge Star Trek fan, but they've done a great job with this redo! I have also had a love affair with the new Vampire Weekend album. One night I stayed up too late watching youtube videos of their performances. This is a screen shot of the computer screen.

Before our friends, Kate and Sean, left, we went on a long hike/bird watching walk. We were lucky enough to see all sorts of bird, coyotes, and two different pastures of horses. Mia got up close with any horse she could!

Kate took this photo of the two girls walking together and I "borrowed" it from her!

For a year Mia has been begging to read Harry Potter. She's only seen bits of the movie, but has a couple friends that are obsessed with the books. We try to hold off on things with her as long as possible sometimes to 1. give her somethings to look forward to and 2. make sure she can truly understand it. We told her she had to wait until she was eight and then we'd start the first book together. 

This week, we've been reading it as her bedtime story. So far she is loving it and is so curious to see how Harry gets out of the Muggle world. We have two copies so often she reads to us or follows along as we read to her. 

This week we met my sister at the Denver Zoo. It's a halfway point for both of us and is a great place to get all the cousins together. I created an insert for the photos by cutting down a design A page protector, but didn't embellish the photos at all. 

Side two of the insert:

With the insert gone most of the photos from Mia's recital come into view. I didn't get a good photo of her on stage, but I love these ones even more.

The You Are Awesome journaling card is from Studio Calico. I slipped in the show ticket and photos of Mia and her best friend Sasha posing together. These two were in the same class at school but didn't know each other were dancing until about half way through the year. It was fun seeing all of Mia's friends throughout the different dances.

This picture of Naomi is one of my all time favorites. I love the way her hair is blowing and the lines of the wires framing her face. 

The journaling card is from Echo Park and I added letter stickers to it. 

I'm linking up with the Mom Creative for her weekly share. 

You can find out more about Project Life here. 

Park Explorers

One of my goals this summer is to visit as many of the local parks as possible. 

We have so many in town that we've never been to and it's always fun to mix up what playgrounds we are hitting up. When reading up I found one that said it had a brand new playground, small skate park, and a stream full of crawdads. Despite crazy winds, I decided it would be our first park to try out. 

The little kids were sold the minute they saw the small bowl in the skate park. Mia ran off with a group of girls and was happy to have some new "friends" to play with.

Naomi gave the bowl a shot on her scooter and immediately crashed. She spent the rest of the time circling the bowl instead. 

Hollis, on the other hand, took to it like a champ. He rode up and down and loved every second of it. He's getting so confident in balancing and coasting and I'm pretty sure we'll be able to add wheels in no time. I can't recommend the Strider type bikes enough. They really are great for teaching kids to hold the bike up and to learn how to maneuver before adding the pedals. It was a seamless transition for Mia and I have no doubt that Hollis won't have any trouble.

The wind was pretty harsh, but no one wanted to leave. We practically had the park to ourselves and that meant I could relax a little bit and the kids had space to run from section to section.

I brought hot dogs to try to coax the crawdads out and the kids put them on the end of sticks. It wasn't a perfect fishing method, but they were thrilled to try and spent a good half hour sticking those hot dogs under the rocks. 

We only saw one and it was once most of the kids had wandered back to the playground. I got the brilliant idea to move a rock and we found one big guy. He took one bite of the hot dog and swam off. Mia wanted to keep searching and asked me to move any rock I could reach.  

This first week after the end of school has gone pretty well. I'm on survival mode really---letting them dictate (for the most part) what our day looks like. I've been giving them a lot of attention, while also stealing away time for myself when I can. We've been outside and away from the house for the most part. The fresh air has been good for all of us. We're exhausted at the end of the night and there haven't been too many squabbles. We'll get on a more normal schedule next week with summer camps, a new school for the twins, and some much needed free days for me.
But, I look forward to carving out time to explore new places with the kids.

I have a feeling, though, that we'll be back to this park for sure. 

Zoo Trip

This week we (my sister & friend Elisa) decided to be brave and take our group of kids to the Denver Zoo. Outings like this always take a bit of planning and patience, plus a lot of snacks. 

It was the first time we've been to the zoo in a year or so and high time for us to introduce the twins to one of our favorite Denver spots. When we pulled up I had a bit of panic because the whole front of the zoo was full of school groups. Seeing hundreds of kids en masse was enough to make me nervous about our day ahead. The zoo is never fun if you're having to fight crowds. 

I didn't need to worry because we started out taking it really slow. We let the kids linger at the first couple of exhibits and the hoards of school kids passed us pretty quickly.

We let Baby Grady walk a little and the eldest "kid" in the group, my nephew Anthony, helped carry him and push strollers when needed. Despite sometimes being a surly teenager, I think he was pretty happy to be spending a day with all of his cousins. 

Grady (wearing one of Hollis's old outfits!) would have been happy to watch the rhinos all day. He pointed at them & got really excited to show them to everyone.

I could take pictures of this kid all day. Seriously.

I'm not sure Mia stopped talking the whole day. She wanted to share all she knows about animals and 

bounced from exhibit to exhibit. She's in her element at the zoo and she'll tell anyone who will listen all she knows about the animals. 

We got a super rare photo of all the kids together near the gorilla exhibit. 

Naomi loved the drums that are in the Shamba area of the Primate Panorama. She thought it was so hilarious that you could bang on them and hear them echo throughout the courtyard.

The older girls loved them too. 

Before lunch, we let all the kids ride on the carousel. For as long as I can remember, the carousel has been one of our favorite parts of the zoo. The animals you can ride are amazingly beautiful and it's fun to see what animal the kids will pick to ride. This was the twins first time on and they loved it. Hollis rode a tiger and Naomi picked a hyena. The older kids ran off to pick their own away from the grown ups.

After lunch, we hit up Bird World and Grady snuck in a short nap. 

Another favorite part of the zoo is Tropical Discovery. Be warned that it's warm in there. But, the fish tanks are amazing and the kids loved getting to be at eye level with the huge river fish. Hollis squealed when he saw the snakes and was so excited to see the Gila lizards up close too.

After this exhibit, we hit a wall and could tell that meltdowns were near. We'd been at the zoo for four hours and everyone was getting tired. We bought everyone ice cream cones and let me advise that even if you don't really want a cone, get an extra (or two). We had two kiddos drop their cones and handing off ours in place of tears was perfect!
Naomi barely made it back to the highway before passing out.

This guy took a little longer, but couldn't resist a car nap too.

It ended up being the perfect zoo day and gave me the confidence to do it again soon. We are pretty lucky to have such a beautiful zoo in Denver.