The Best Gift Challenge

Happy Saturday everyone! 14 days until Christmas are you ready? We are here at the stout house! So excited! Anyway, there is a new challenge over at the noel blog....check it out! She is giving away not 1 but 2 of these beauties!!!! Yowza! I'm so excited!!!!! :D I drew inspiration from two people for my layout the first is Leah on the design team....she scrapped an item she got a while ago but had never scrapped....that's what I decided to do.  The other inspiration is from my all time FAVORITE scrapper Virginia.... she used the Dear Diary Kit (hurry only 1 left).  I have not had any time to scrap with it yet so I used mostly stuff from there....my paper is bo bunny flutter butter willow....LOVE that green! And then I just used brown cardstock to back mat my picture.

I took a pink glitter pen and doodled on my letters...love them! Brown thickers from Dear Diary.

I LOVE the dimension on these flowers! To die for! :D Also from Dear Diary!

December Daily: Day 4

Today we spent the day planning and preparing....planning some christmas activities we want to do this season and that I especially want to do with my kiddos and my gma! The preparing was preparing to rearrange my living room and try to open up the space.  Other than that we just kinda hung out until dark.  My gma and I took the kids to the Christmas Light Parade and it was so much fun! We froze our buns off but I LOVED it and so did the kiddos and my gma.  Jackson was in awe at the firetrucks....good thing there wasn't a fire in the surrounding 3 counties....EVERY single firetruck was in the parade! Anyway-I am going to try and get caught up on my blog posts today and post day 5 also.....but for now...here is day 4!

For not doing too much I sure had a lot of pages for day 4! :D That's ok...I am loving this documentation!

December Daily: Day 3

Day 3 ended up being a busy day.  I only documented savannah wearing her christmas t shirt for the first time and after an afternoon of shopping and such we discovered fried peanut butter sandwiches! Yummy! :D

December Daily: Day 2

I think the most work of this album is taking pictures every day of what I did to my actual album.  The documenting and decorating of the album itself is easy peasy....Oh well...it's 25 days right? We can do anything for 25 days! Without further adu....here is day 2 in my december daily:

We mainly just lounged and hung out today! We were recovering from our long trip! Phew...glad that's over with!

December Daily: Day 1

Happy December Days! WOW! Where has the year gone? Holy cow I can't believe it's almost Christmas.  Anyway, as I have posted before I am participating in the December Daily with Ali Edwards and on the Noelmignon.com website in the message board! (sorry I didn't link those....i'm exhausted from my trip and just plain lazy at this point.) Which also explains my not so creativity on day 1, however I did not want to fall behind in posting.....I may post day 2 and 3 tomorrow night. Here is day 1:

I am so happy this is my first year to participate in this! I had no idea this concept even existed and we picked up my gma this week in new mexico to come spend christmas with us....what a way to kick off the month and a GREAT way to document memories while she is here!

Total Slacker/ December Daily Update

Good morning! Ok so I have been a TOTAL slacker these days on the blog front.  I have been so super busy with so many things it's not even funny.  We have been trying to get our house ready for when my grandma comes and I am trying to PURGE and get rid of crap that we don't need, use or want because we have a fairly small house and LOTS of stuff....ugh.  Anyway, this morning I am sitting in the dark, in the quiet just enjoying the internet! Ahhhh.....and my coffee has just finished.  Be right back.......ahhhh, love it! I love my family and all the excitement and busyness they bring....and I also enjoy the quiet moments to myself!

We have been busy here decorating for christmas, yes I know it's early but it seems like Christmas comes and goes way to fast and it is my absolute FAVORITE time of the year! So, since I decorate with fall decorations in September and enjoy them until after Halloween I have decided the past few years to go ahead and decorate for Christmas in mid November...it works for us (or for me which means it works for everyone else too).

I have also managed to get my hubby to take a family picture earlier in the month...went to a professional had them....first time in 4 years!!!!! So I bought LOTS of pictures well not really but I bought the big nice expensive ones....so we added some new pictures to the walls yesterday and I got most of my christmas cards addressed and filled and ready to go out.  They will be on their merry way on Friday! :D I am a happy girl!

Among all the chaos I have managed to get ALL my shopping DONE and most of it wrapped and those cards almost finished! I don't think I have been this organized or ahead of the game in YEARS!

Ok-so now....I have also worked on the december daily with ali edwards.  And I have been participating in the form at noel's about logging our daily albums and sharing them.  I could not justify spending any more money when I had tons of stuff on hand.  So I just made my own template, the main sheet in Ali's album for pictures, journalling or whatever.  Then I added patterned paper between every day to do whatever I want to it because I did not have the transparnecies that Ali had either.  I have also found I don't wanna decorate mine before hand.  I think it will take a little more time each day but I like to add that special touch and embellies that match whatever we did or maybe didn't do that day. So I have my base pages done and all my supplies gathered into one container, a new ink cartridge in my photo printer so I can print daily and I am ready to go! I am super excited! This is the first year I am doing this, it's my favorite time of year and my grandma will be here the whole month (and more) but for this project I just think it's special because I will be documenting all the memories we make and I will have them! :D

Here are a few pictures:

Thankful Thursdays

Well over at the elles studio blog she does a thankful thursday.  Such a simple concept...why didn't we all think of that? It really makes you take time to appreciate the things and people around you....or it did me. I love this idea! I am thankful for such freedom! I love the usa, I love being an american, I love having the freedom to do so many things and I am truly grateful for it! There are so many people in so many places that just do not have the freedoms we do and I am really thankful I do. :D

Have a great Thursday evening!