Hello exhaustion.

I'm visiting family in Dallas...and my son is simply NOT okay with the change. He has not slept at all today. He's too keyed up about seeing his two cousins (ages 4 and 8) and because of it he wouldn't nap, took over an hour to get him settled down for sleep at bedtime...and then the little bugger woke up at 1AM and won't go back to sleep! So both my husband and I are up with him because we're trying to keep him quiet so he doesn't wake everyone else up.

I guess he figured the bedtime was actually naptime, so he now assumes he can stay awake for a few hours then hit the sack again? I don't know. I'm exhausted. Unfortunately we were scheduled to stay here until Sunday, but that might have to change. My husband goes back to work again on Monday (he's had three weeks off after coming home from deployment) and I'm really fearful of how things will be if Cameron is this off schedule! Ugh. And I miss my bed. My really big, super comfy, king-size bed. Sleeping on a rock-hard bed that a 4-year-old uses, next to your kid who is really angry about being out of his own comfy bed and into a pack & play, is just not all its cracked up to be. Ugh. I should have had a rum & coke before bedtime...would have made this all a little more amusing. Come 8AM...I ain't gonna be amused. :-/

Lesson 3 layout

How cute is this?? Seriously, I'm LOVING this Jessica Sprague class!! Not only because I'm learning cool new "tricks of the trade", but also because essentially all of this stuff is now in my greedy little hands for future use! I have to admit, I'm not much of a primary-colors kind of girl. But I (HEART) this layout. Just L.O.V.E. it.

All the pictures were taken the day my husband left for his training last July. We thought he was leaving directly from training to go to his deployment, but fortunately he did come home for a week in August before leaving for 7 months. So these pictures were taken thinking they would be the last together. :(

This lesson was lesson 3 in Jessica's "Up and Running" class. She also has classes that are more in depth, essentially two sequels to this class...which I will be taking. There are just too many doggone bits and pieces to Photoshop, and I like to have someone walk me through it! I'm not the type that just fiddles and messes around with programs. I like direction. Plus this gives me something to do that is structured...and I even like having "homework" assignments.

I've also been working on some layouts for the new release from JeNaSis DeSiGn, which is coming up next week! I'll be sure to post some great stuff on release day from the new kit called Bliss of Both. It is really nice...I was so excited to download it I had to force my husband to put our son to bed so I could play. :)

We will be out of town for the weekend, but I'll have great stuff next week! WOOHOO!

WOOWEEEEE! I'm on a design team!

I'm so excited, I'm on my first design/creative team! Shelby over at JeNaSis DeSiGn had a design team call...and she accepted me! Woohoo! I'm so pumped.

While I'm soooo new to digital scrapping, Shelby was kind enough to take me on and let me grow with her and the other team members.

Check out her blog!

Edited to add: a friend of mine asked what this means. Basically it means I am on a creative team of digital scrapbookers. We receive some product early and create layouts to showcase the great products that are going to be available. We essentially "sell" the cool stuff. :) And I just saw the first kit I get to work with for JeNaSis DeSiGn...it is sooooooooooooooo awesome! I can't wait to get started! :)

Eerrrrrrggggg

I'm in the middle of doing a blog overhaul, complete with a new background, a new header (I think) and some other new things I've grabbed for free on the wonderful thing called the world wide web.

Can someone tell me if they are seeing my header twice? One standard one and one sooped up one that is all purty? Also, is the purty header not really centered, but kind of off to one side? ugh. Total frustration. I had someone design that header a few years ago, when I started this blog. But now its not anywhere near the color scheme that I want for the blog, and its slightly irritating me. I am OCD about matchy-matchy. Yep, I'm one of THOSE bloggers. Sadly, I'm also one of THOSE crafters. My hardest challenge is to veer off my monochromatic color template and add spots of colors to spice things up.

Anyway, so that's my post for today. exciting. I do have two "real" scrapbook pages to post, but I haven't taken a picture of them yet. Nothing new to post from PSE, either. One page in progress, still two lessons to complete in my "up and running" course.

This week is very busy with doctor appts and other things to do, plus we are heading south to Dallas for the weekend. So I don't know if I'll have much time to be creative. Boo hoo. :(

Week 2 Bonus Layout

So this layout came together a lot faster than I thought it would! I'm pretty damn impressed with myself as well. :)

The paper and "brush" (the stamped thingie in the lower left corner) are from the freebies from the class. The strip of Paper is from Jessica Sprague's Echoes of Asia kit, which was free to us for being in the class (not sure if its free to everyone...I suggest you just go to her site and look around). The title is an alpha from a kit called Sweet Romance, as well as the gems on the bottom, which I got for free from Let Me Scrapbook!.

I'm typically not one for plain scrapbook pages which don't involve layers (I'm all about layering cardstock under photos!), but I think this turned out really nice. Very calm, and really helps to get the point across that this was our reunion after 7 months. I could have put a bunch of journaling on there...but why? You all know we're happy. :)

I'm definitely enjoying this class I'm taking...and I can already tell she's probably sucked me in for her two other in-depth classes (which are, of course, more money!) But it is just too convenient for someone to walk me through all of the ins and outs of Photoshop. She also provides a printout of step-by-step instructions for the lessons, so I can go back and find out how to do something. I also believe I will ALWAYS have access to this class, so if I forget how to do something, I can go back and find it in her videos. Nice!!

I'm loving my new foray into digital scrapbooking...and my husband loves that I'm happy about it. And he feels very special for buying PSE for me in the first place. :)

Lesson 2 Layout

Okay. Here is my lesson 2 layout. This one really frustrated me. Some of the parts were apparently easy...but I had difficulty. And a couple of times she seemed to jump ahead as if we already knew that step, then would backtrack to explain it...and I had already paused the video trying to figure out how she did what she did. Ugh.

So this layout came with the frame already established, as well as the date mumbo jumbo at the bottom. The blue flourishes and the bottom orange one were already there. I added both photos, the green circles for the date info, the bulleted paragraph, and the orange flourish on the top left. Oh, and the title, which was pieced together with an alphabet that was included. That was HARD. For some reason, my PSE just didn't want to do that one! It took me forever. I was getting really frustrated. I finally just closed everything, opened it back up, and it was fine. I guess that is PSE's version of control-alt-delete. :)

So in Lesson 2 we learned how to do bullets, which are more involved than you would think. Also just silly things, like changing the font to make words stand out. We also learned how to choose two layers (in this case, the two pictures) and "combine" them so any changes you make will change both of them. In this case, it made getting them to be even a lot easier. We did the same type of situation with the bullets and with Cameron's name. Essentially the Microsoft Office version of "merge". We also learned how to do the swirly flourish in the top left, which was a "brush". That is the fancy way of saying STAMP. Really involved. Right now it seems too difficult for me to do on my own (you can create your own brushes...eeek!) so I don't think I'll do many of those until I've taken more in depth classes that have more details.

So I have no idea what the homework assignment is. I had this issue with the first lesson too: for some reason, the info just doesn't show up when I get to that screen. Its as if there is a huge paragraph missing or something. Very frustrating! I can get to the bonus materials, but can't see the actual assignment for lesson 2. So I'm frustrated. With the lesson 1 assignment, I just kept clicking and going back, then clicking again...and suddenly the info appeared. Weird. So I might have something else to post...or I might not. Who knows!

Page from Lesson 1 Freebies

Okay.



I don't even want to admit how long it has taken me to get this posted. Seriously. I have had the darndest time! I was convinced that it was Blogger's fault. Blogger was creating the problem. Blogger was hiccuping and wouldn't let me post the picture. Its' always BLOGGER'S fault.










Ummm.........not exactly.

It really does help when you're trying to upload a PICTURE if you save the stupid document as a picture, and not as a Photoshop Elements document. DUH!!! So it kept saying, "Internet Explorer cannot display". And I kept getting more and more irate at Blogger. WTF, Blogger?!?! Its YOU! Its always YOU!

Nope. Its me. I'm stupid. There you have it.

So anyway, this digi page was created using elements in the "freebies" of the "bonus lesson" from lesson 1 with Jessica Sprague. Golly, that's a mouthful.
Each lesson comes with a lesson, bonus lesson (essentially a homework assignment) and then freebies you can mess around with. So I've already posted my original lesson page, as well as the bonus lesson page, so the page above is the page that I created from scratch using the freebies. It wasn't too hard, but then again, I didn't really do anything out of the ordinary. I'm still needing to learn how to do things like use a corner rounder on pictures or elements, and I want to find out if there's a way to create punched borders out of elements as well. I did figure out how to cut out what looks like strips of paper (the two on the left) out of paper she included in the freebies. I also created a layer for the picture of Cameron, and added the gems from another kit I have (and I totally don't know who I got it from...bad scrapper for not giving props to whoever created that! Bad scrapper!).

I'm now halfway through Lesson 2. I've had some issues with the class being geared towards Photoshop Elements 5 and 6, whereas I have version 8. And sometimes Jessica makes things seem really easy, when they aren't. Right now we're learning how to cut letters out of an alphabet...and my PSE was giving me fits over it! Took me forever to get it all cut out...and it took her about 20 seconds. :) Oh well. Live and learn.

Hopefully I'll post that later tonight. My son is having a hell of a week, and is definitely showing signs of the power struggles we are going to have with him as he hits full swing in toddlerhood. His two new problem areas are bedtime and mealtime. Kinda important things, don't you think?? He fights bedtime every night now, which is so not typical for him! We're not sure if he's just fighting it because he's still not used to the change of my husband being home again, or if this is just how things are going to be from now on. But it can take us anywhere from 20 minutes to 90 minutes to get him settled down...when it used to take me NO TIME AT ALL. Seriously, I would put him in his crib, say goodnight, and he would go to sleep. So battling for an hour is really stressing us out.

Mealtime, his new thing is to take a mouthful of something, chew it half up, then spit it out on the tray. Then he grabs it and throws it. Yep, fun fun fun! The amusing thing is, he doesn't do it with items he doesn't like. He does it with the stuff he likes. Its such a game!! We're having a really hard time doing what we SHOULD be doing, which is just not giving in to him. But when you've had a child basically fuss all day, you're much more likely to pop the damn waffle in the toaster that you know he'll eat rather than listen to him cry for another 3 hours. Ugh. I'm exhausted just thinking about this. Needless to say, I'm NOT looking forward to when Cameron actually turns two.