Maggie Update

So our Maggie went from feeling like this on Friday night...


To pretty much feeling like herself and enjoying one of her favorite treats (rawhide with peanut butter) by Sunday.

And as we suspected, we are having a heck of a time trying to keep her "quiet and calm."

Maggie sends her best wishes to her favorite cousin back in Ohio. Hope you're feeling back to yourself soon, too, Lily!

In other events this weekend...while Del was on puppy duty, I went to my good friend, Lorissa, son's, first birthday party. As you can see, Jason had no reservations in digging into his very own cake...

His older sister, Rachel, even got into the action a little by getting some on her nose and cheeks.

Happy Birthday, Jason!

Our Poor, Poor Baby Girl...

Maggie went in for her surgery this morning. Del and I were so worried about her all day. Tonight she's been so, so sweet, but just not herself. We feel so badly for her, she's just not very happy tonight. But, hopefully, she will be able to sleep most of the night and feel better tomorrow - so much so that we will probably have a hard time keeping her quiet and calm like we are supposed to do for the next seven days (oy!).

Chaotic Weekend back home

So I went back home to Toledo this weekend.

Friday night I had dinner with my friend, Chris and her husband, Al and two other ladies I used to work with back at HCR. After dinner we went back to Chris's house to book a Girl's Cruise for my 40th (heavy sigh!) birthday in September. So far, seven girls are confirmed going...still waiting to hear from some others. So excited!!!

Saturday started with breakfast with my two nieces, Lisa and April, my two sisters, Jenny and Tina, and my mom before we went dress shopping for Jenny's wedding that is in October.

This is us all waiting for Jenny to try on her first pick.



She fell in love with this dress (but with blue instead of red)...


...only to find out it was discontinued and they can no longer order it in blue. I thought her heart was going to break right then and there. But then we found this one....


This is the style of the girls dresses. Half the girls will be in the color Blue Velvet (same color on Jenny's dress) and the others will be in Canary Yellow. This is my nephew, Nick's, fiance (I just found out they got engaged at Easter) Congratulations, Nick and Lindsay! (I appreciate you not getting married this year!)


Sunday was filled with church in the morning and then my niece, April's, bridal shower. She is getting married May 17 (so that means another trip back to Toledo next month). April, of course, was in true form...


It was so great to see everyone, including my new great-niece, Kaylie (my brother's granddaughter)...

...and Jesse, my great-nephew


Other than the rain on Saturday and the snow flurries on Sunday morning (in April - are you kidding me??), it was a great trip home.

Library of Memories

So I've mentioned that I'm taking an online class at Big Picture Scrapbooking that is completely changing the way I organize my photos and in turn is changing how I'm scrapbooking and how I will be filing my finished layouts. We're only in week five so far of a sixteen week class, but what an ispiration it is already.


The whole class is based on the two books The Big Picture and Photo Freedom, both by Stacy Julian, the teacher of the class. Both books I highly recommend to any scrapbooker!

Week one talked about the process of organizing digital photos. I did this by year already, but then organized it by topic or event. Now, I am organizing my pictures by year and then by quarter within the year.

Once a quarter is complete, I search through and download those pictures I think I might want to scrapbook to an online photo processing store (I use ScrapbookPictures.com and LOVE them!). Of course, I don't have to wait until the end the quarter to do this, but I do it at least once a quarter.

Once I receive my printed pictures back, I store them in my new three up binders by quarter and year.




From there they are either scrapbooked or sorted into my new 4X6 file cabinet drawers in the categories Us, People We Love, Places We Go, Things We Do (all with sub categories). In the process of this sorting is where you truly see the connection in your photos.

For example, while sorting through my sister, Tina's, pictures I noticed there was a picture of Heather opening a present of a dress and then I saw another picture of her actually wearing that exact dress. Tina may have already made this connection, but I didn't until I was looking more closely and differently.



How cool is that?

Something even cooler were the pictures I took at Williamsburg, VA last year when Del and I went with his dad and Anna. As I was sorting through my old pictures, I found ones that I took in Williamsburg when I was 12 years old. Quite a few of the pictures were of the exact same things I took last year. I was so amazed by the similarities, I just had to make a layout. Seeing this connection was so awesome to me! (The layout doesn't paste very well here, so I've also uploaded it to my Scrapbooking Gallery .)

The journaling on the layout reads as follows:

The idea of this page was conceptualized during an online class called Library of Memories. The premise of this class is to organize your photos in such a way that it inspires you to not just scrapbook your pictures, but to document your memories. Part of this is done by making connections to your past. That point was made crystal clear when I came across these pictures during the sorting process.
I remember Aunt Louise and Uncle Bob taking me and my best friend at the time, Tammy Dirrim, to Williamsburg when I was 12. It was such a blast for us. So when Del and I decided to go back with his parents 26 years later, I had fond memories to relive.
As I was sorting through my pictures, I was amazed and excited to see how similar the pictures I took in 2007 were to the ones I took as a kid in 1981. It was so surreal to see that what I wanted to capture as a kid were the same memories I wanted to capture as an adult.
My perspective on life may have changed as I’ve gotten older, but the way I want to see the world may be more similar than I realize.

That's it for now. Hope you all are having a great weekend.

Walking the dog...

Del has one more day of his extended weekend. I, on the other hand will be heading back to work tomorrow (heavy sigh!!)

It was a sunny day here, but on the cool side - not more than 45ish today. Still a nice day for the dog's walk...



For some reason, Maggie loves walking with a stick in her mouth. It seems to be a good distraction for her, but unfortunately, she does not keep it in her mouth the entire time, which means other things make it there instead - like rocks, paper, leaves - you name it, she tries to eat it.

Right now we are only able to go about 2 miles (to the end of the street and back)...

By the time we are back to within a block of our house, she starts to run out of steam and her tongue comes further and further out of her mouth.

And just as we are heading down the home stretch...

...Jed (a.k.a., Fat Dog), the neighbor dog, came out to say hello and gave Maggie her second wind.


She definately gets very excited when other creatures (human and otherwise) come into her sight.

Off to go play with some more photographs...

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter, everyone! It was a beautiful spring day here so after church I decided to take advantage of the trees in bloom and use my tripod to take our picture.


Including a family portrait - well a partial one anyway - Chalupa was missing.


Del and I took a few days off this weekend to make it a longer weekend. We had no plans, just taking some time to decompress and play with the puppy.

In other news, Chalupa has had another ailment this week. It seems she has developed an ulcer on her right eye. We're assuming that Maggie might have scratched her. We're having to put two different kinds of drops in her eyes every four hours. After two days, her eye is looking so much better!

I'm also still plugging away at my new online class at Big Picture Scrapbooking. I am sorting through all my pictures (some more than 20 years old) and finding connections between them that I may not have found otherwise. As I continue my sorting, I will be sure to post some of the connection I find. It's actually been pretty fun. More on that later...

Hope you all had a great weekend!

P.S.

What do you think of the new additions to the blog (title block picture and playlist)? I'm so impressed with myself! HA!

Your Preference?

So would you rather have this white stuff on your trees? (courtesy of Del's parents in Norwalk, OH)...

....or this white stuff (Bradford Pears in bloom in NC)?

Del's dad decided he was tired of the snow in the north and came down to NC for the weekend. It's been a little on the cool side, but still nice enough for them to golf.

Maggie is so excited to have someone here visiting her (at least she seems to think he is here just to see her!) and she has had some added benefit to this visit. You see, she normally stays overnight in her crate in the room below the guest bedroom. The first night Del's dad was here, I think she heard him moving around and started barking at 3:30 a.m. and didn't really stop until Del went down to attend to her. The next night, we decided to let her stay in our bedroom and I have to say, I was very proud of her. She slept most of the night (only getting up once) and did exceptionally well for the first night outside her crate. Well enough that we think we might allow her to do it more often. The only draw back to this plan is poor Chalupa, who usually sleeps with us every night, has been kicked out of her bed, since she doesn't want to share any space with Maggie and we have to keep the bedroom door closed to keep Maggie in, so Chalupa can't come and go as she pleases. We may have to work out a schedule.

And as a sign off...today was a nice spring-like day, a little cool, but still a perfect day for a walk with the pooch.

P.S.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Something other than Maggie...

So just to prove that we are still doing other things than revolving our lives around Maggie...

I started a new online class at Big Picture Scrapbooking last week called Library of Memories. It is a different philosophy on how to organize your photos as well as your scrapbooks (rather than chronologically). It is a 12 week class and based on the syllabus, it is a lot of work - but the kind of work I love - organization and scrapbooking! (I've actually had people tell me I should be a professional organizer.) The system seems like it could be very motivational to scrapbook more, which I need. We'll see how it goes. The first creative project of the class was to alter a clipboard. Here is mine.

There seems to be something missing, so I'll probably be doing some type of adjustments at some point. So far, though, the class has really made me want to dig into all my pictures - even those that are 10+ years old. I'll keep you posted on the process.

She did it!!!

Maggie graduated from Puppy Kindergarten. Today was the day she had to pass her test and she did it. We were a little worried, but she made us proud.

She had to sit (pretty easy for her)...

Lay down (also fairly easy for her, although she is not the most graceful when she lays down, it's more of a plop, really)...

And she had to stay for 10 seconds - the one we were the most worried about.

She does pretty well with stay at home, but when there are so many distractions, she doesn't do so well. Fortunately, Brett, Maggie's teacher, gave her a break and counted to ten very quickly and allowed her to graduate with her class. :o)

If graduating from puppy kindergarten was not enough to prove that our baby girl is definately getting big, there are others things that do.

She is big enough now to sit in the back seat of the car by herself (after climbing in without any help!!)

She is also tall enough now to look out the window in our bonus room.

And she can get up on our red leather chair by herself and pretty much take up the entire seat when lying down now.

It amazes me how much she has grown in just the short five months of her life! She just makes us smile each and every day! :o)

Happy Valentine's Day...

So, since it is Valentine's Day and since I had the day off (not to mention I had a coupon), we decided to take Maggie to the Puppy salon. She came home with these cute, very girly bows in her hair.

She doesn't seem to even mind them one bit, either.

In other news....remember Mr. Frog?

Well...since this picture, we've had an incident....Mr. Frog's name is now Lefty. The reason for the new name....well....Lefty no longer has his left arm.

But it doesn't seem like Maggie cares that he is one arm less - she still loves him just the same.

And, of course, so as to not to leave our other child out....here is Chalupa sleeping in her favorite spot - on her Poppa's lap.

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone!