April Round-up

I'm not going to let myself go back (too far) to play catch up. It makes me sad for all the wonderful memories in March and February that I've neglected to report here, but I'm in need of embracing an "onward" sort of attitude these days. Note to Gutsy Self: just because you didn't blog about it doesn't mean that it didn't happen or wasn't meaningful.

So, scrolling through some April photos, here's what caught my eye today.

Easter Day.  Dinner & drinks. People in various states of casualness.  The Gutsy Dad almost always changes his clothes right after we get home from church.  I tend to slip on flip-flops and carry on in my church clothes: who has time to change? Things I love in this picture: the heron carving above my kitchen sink that I found years ago while visiting my sister-in-law (before she was my sister-in-law) and her family when the GD and I were still just dating.  My parents' dog Charlotte lounging on our kitchen floor. The glimpse of Tilly's favorite toy in the background in the playroom.  My birds from Lake Constance on the wall.

I am completely in love with my own children, and I am not ashamed to be proud of them.  Their hearts, their spirit, their creative minds, their quirks, their beauty. Here they are before our Easter service with flowers to decorate the children's cross. 

A favorite birthday present.  My mother asked, laughing at me a bit I think, "You really want a beach cart for your birthday?" HECK YES and thank you!  This thing is awesome. 

She still falls asleep everywhere and anywhere.  Here she is during story time, sleeping on the Gutsy Dad. Ali Edwards once wrote a beautiful blog post about her family dog, parts of whom appeared in almost every family picture. This is one thing I love about my own photos. Our two loyal and lovable fur kids always manage to get parts of themselves in the photos.  Here we feature Tilly's back under the GD's arm and Zephie's rump by Maddie's elbow. 

I've been meaning to write about the physical beauty of our church.  It is my style. Of course, it's not necessary for a church to be beautiful for me to love it, but it certainly makes church all the more enjoyable. This is the church's playground. I would have LOVED this swing set/arc as a kid.

 Perfect blue skies for Easter. The sanctuary was filled with lilies and blue hydrangeas. Perfection. They didn't need to tell me twice when they mentioned we could take the flowers home with us after the service. I currently have a GIANT hydrangea potted plant on my dining table.  It must have 15 blooms on it with more to come.  I need to get this thing in the ground.

I made a frozen key lime pie for Easter dinner.  (Ina Garten's recipe.)  Since it uses egg yolks but not the whites, I channeled my Nana and made meringues with the whites. 

I love that my parents were game to join in our weekly "Five of Us" photo on Easter Sunday.

Project Update: Five of Us

Remember how I said I wanted to take a full-family photo once a year for the whole year?  Well, so far so good. We're nine weeks in, and we've remembered nine times.

To keep this project doable, I'm keeping it quite simple. We take the photo every Sunday, and there is no primping allowed.  Whenever we remember to take it, we take it.  (Alarm reminders on the phone help.) Since we usually go to church on Sunday mornings, we've been taking the photos in the afternoons, and you'll see that we are in various states of post-church unravelling.

I'm also using this project as an opportunity to practice very basic Photoshop Elements skills by adding a few digital embellishments and a number directly onto the photos before printing.

Here are our first nine weeks:

Poor Gutsy Dad was still recovering from his nose surgery from a few days before.  The balloons are left over from Madelyn's birthday, and I'm pretty sure Bronwen was actively nursing when this shot was taken.

This photo was taken on my iPhone at our neighbor's Super Bowl party. Thank God for the phone, since I had forgotten about the photo until that moment! You can tell Jillson was enjoying her friend's dress-up box.

Forgot until late in the day, so we had to take the photo outside. The neighbors may or may not have thought we were weird setting up the tripod on the lawn to take this pic. These photos are revealing how regularly my girls enjoy dress-up clothes! 

This one was taken just yesterday at my neighbor's house.  Please note that I allowed the kids to pick their own outfits, with no constraints (a challenge for Control Freak Me). Madelyn then got her outfit all wet playing in the neighbors tub (I have no idea what she was thinking), so she is wearing borrowed clothing. Funny. I am unshowered. (We skipped church.) The Gutsy Dad is on a business trip, so he's not in the picture.  Boo hiss.  I contemplated whether we should take the photo one day early so he could be in it, but then I forgot to do that, so that answered that.  Then I wondered if I should have him take a picture of himself where he is, and find a way to incorporate it, but I forgot to do that, too. So I guess it's just the four of us this week.

The printed and assembled version of this project includes a 4x6 journaling card, which I am printing out at home and writing on.  (The digital elements on the photos and the printable journaling cards are from Project Life, found here.  I went with the Clementine version.)

I rounded the corners and slipped the photo and journaling card into a very simple and cheap album I found at Target a few years ago.  (You can imagine my delight when I found this album already waiting for me in my closet. Equally exciting was the discovery that it has exactly 52 pages in it... to last a year. Shopping from my own stash.  Love it.)

The inside of the album looks like this when it is all together. Not complicated.

And there you have it. I'm enjoying watching the pages of this little book fill up.

Take Twelve

1. Buddha baby

 2. A new journal

3. Zephyr can't be bothered 

4. Thank you note time 

5. Coffee break 

6. Dinner recipes 

7. Blog reading 

8. Ignoring small messes 

9. Happy place 

10. Tilly can't be bothered 

11. Another unusual nap 

12. Worried her playdate might be cancelled

Move More Eat Well 2012

I've been spending little bits of free time in the past few days setting up the crafty side of some of my 2012 projects. 

Here's a look at the notebook I'll be using for my Move More Eat Well class.

Album cover:

Album spine:

Here's what the inside cover looks like. On the left I've got a tarted-up version of the first five weeks of my training plan for easy access. (After these five weeks are up, I can "archive" the schedule in a page protector in the notebook, and a new schedule will go on the inside cover.)

Here's a close-up of the first five weeks of my training plan. Underneath it is the schedule for my YMCA and the full Hal Higdon training plan off of which I've based my own schedule.

Title page:

I've already made two more spreads in this album, but they are not ready for sharing. Well, the pages are ready for sharing, but I am not ready to share them.

School starts again tomorrow, so I can begin to return to my regular routines. We've had just enough vacation, and I feel refreshed and ready to get back to "normal."

Fitness & Fun Projects for 2012

FITNESS

You didn't think I'd contemplate the new year without addressing this topic, did you?

Of course I have fitness plans. Very specific ones. The final kid has been grown and birthed and is now happily nursing away. I'm ready to whip this body back into shape once and for all and keep it there. I've been thinking back to the fittest times in my life, and I know what I need to do to get back there again.

1) The shedding of pounds. It's time to get realistic in this area. At least 20 need to go. Up to 35 could go, frankly. I'd settle for anything in that range. Yes, my friends, it's Weight Watchers time again. I almost hate to do it (I am better than that), but it's a necessary evil. Once the weight is gone, I will focus on a more realistic way of eating. But, truly, as far as eating plans go, WW can be done in a super-healthy, super-sustainable way.

2) Remember how buff and strong I was thanks to all those Body Pump classes I took before we moved from Kansas to Georgia? Yeah. I miss those muscles. I miss being freakishly strong. I need to work more strength and core training back into my routine.

3) I am dying, DYING to run the Rock N Roll Half Marathon here in Savannah in November 2012. This is a totally achievable goal. I can't wait to sit down with a calendar and my Hal Higdon training schedule and map it all out. I'm thinking the Army 10-miler might work in as a perfect long run? Having run a 5K on Thanksgiving morning, I've got my sights set on running a 10K as my immediate goal... can't wait to pick and choose and plan and schedule and TRAIN!

4) To help me through all this, I will be playing along with Cathy Zielske's Move More Eat Well class. Can't wait for tomorrow!

FUN

1) At the request of the Gutsy Dad, I will be committing to a full year of Cocktails of the Month. We've enjoyed this sporadically, and now it's time to get serious! Plus, my husband secretly loves chick drinks, I mean cocktails, so you can be sure the monthly choosing and testing will be a couple's endeavor.

2) Date night! Around the first of the month, each month, the Gutsy Dad and I are going to look over our calendars and pick a night. We've done this the last two months and it has made such a difference to have at least one night without the kiddos. It helps that we have several great babysitter options: my parents and a neighborhood family with 4 awesome teenagers.

LASTLY

I did it! My very own "December Daily." I posted something here every day this month. I didn't want to say it was my goal to do so--didn't want to jinx it--just wanted to do it. And I did! This bodes well for my laundry list of 2012 projects, no?

Love,

The GM

Letters with Madelyn

Since I'll have the one-on-one reading going on with Jillson in 2012, I figured I better set up something to do with Madelyn.

This wasn't hard to figure out.

Recently I have been following Karen Grunberg's blog. She is an amazing woman on many levels (her position with Google Chrome, for example, or her art therapy initiative, or the careful way she blends traditions from her Turkish upbringing with her current family's traditions, just for starters). But one thing that astounds me about her is the way she seems to make a plan (many, many plans, actually) and stick to it. And she documents it. And shares it. She has so many things going on at once. I'd love to see her calendar. 

In short, she is an inspiration.

So. In addition to stealing the "Us Right Now" idea from her, I will be stealing her "Letters with Nathaniel" project idea. I won't go into all the details here (you can read about it on Karen's site), but basically we will be focusing on a letter a week (or every two weeks). 

I think we'll eat foods that start with the letter, think of songs with the letter, do art projects with the letter, and--naturally--make a book about it: Madelyn's Big Book of Letters. Or Madelyn's Alphabet.

When I ran the idea by Madelyn, she was ecstatic. She said "Oh, Mommy! Oh, Mommy, YES! I LOVE letters. Can we do M? Can we please do M? I LOVE M."

I guess we'll start with M!

Anyway. We'll see how it goes. Karen's site has links to many other sites with game and craft and food ideas for the chosen letter, so I won't have to dig too far for ideas. I'm not sure what sort of notebook we'll use to collect our projects, but I will just figure that out as we go along.

Can't wait!

2012 Creative Projects

The new year is almost here, and I am getting pretty excited to embark on some year-long projects I have planned to fuel my creative spirit.

1. Take Twelve. I will be taking 12 pictures on the 12th of the month, for each of the 12 months of 2012. Each month I will make a two-page spread with that month's 12 photos.  (And yes, each page will measure 12x12.) I will be using the Take Twelve Guided Inspiration Kit from Ella Publishing to facilitate this project.

2. I will also be participating in Twelve, the new workshop from Stacy Julian over at Big Picture Classes. I am not exactly sure what will be happening in this workshop, but I've learned to just trust Stacy, follow her process, and bask in the resultant joy she inspires. I've made this bin with twelve dividers per her pre-class instructions. Can't wait to learn more about what we'll do with it.

3. Next. I'd like to take a family photo -- all 5 of us -- once a week a la Karen Grunberg's Us Right Now project. I may or may not be turning these into a simple photo album, or a slightly gussied up photo album (i.e. mini book). This will be the first year (of many, many, many I hope) in which we will be our full family of five. I think these would be fun to flip back through at the end of the year, with or without commentary, to see what we looked like once a week for 52 weeks. I think the key to success here will be setting up a photo-taking routine that is simple and quick. Karen appears to just sit at the kitchen table with a remote control on her camera. I'm thinking Sundays would be a good day for us...

4. I'm on the fence about what to do with my One Little Word for 2012. I am not ready to give up my word from 2011. I might just keep it for 2012, too. Then again, I might choose a new word. I am not certain whether I will make any pages or projects about my word this year. I loved what I started to create last year with my OLW. Perhaps I should just continue with that... Or I might just let it be my mental talisman. Hmph.

That's it and that's enough. I've got a few more plans in the works for 2012, but these are the ones related to creativity and/or memory keeping. If I am able to keep up with any of these projects, you can be sure I'll share the results with you here.