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I have a tradition of writing down all the words each child can say at 17-18 months.  There are some standard ones, "banana", "shoes", but then there seem to be words specific to each child's personality.

K's unique words were "hat", "let's go", "clean-up".
J's unique words were "bear", "frog", "diego", "tickle"
I's unique words were "butterflies", "pizza", "TV on", "bite" (the name of I's blanket because she chews on it).

I am definitely  noticing a parenting trend from going places and cleaning up (with 1 child) to pizza and TV with 3 children!  Hmmm....

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Not sure how these got missed along the way but I'll share them anyway.

I'm a big fan of Ali Edwards, a scrapbooker who is doing a lot of digital work these days.  I can't afford to buy all the templates and elements she sells so I often create my own versions of her designs. She recently published a page that I liked and I wanted to "scraplift" it (that's what scrapbookers say instead of "copying").

Here's Ali's page:



Here's mine:
My page was made using Creative Memories' Scrapbook Creator Plus 3.  This is a bit of a diversion for me.  I usually make my pages in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, however, the upgrade to Scrapbook Creator was on sale for $9.95 and came with 1 kit so I thought I'd grab it as I still had the previous version.  I'm curious to see what the new features of version 3 are and whether I might be able to produce pages faster with a more scrapbook oriented tool.

I did cheat one tiny bit, and made the paint overlay in Photoshop, saved as a .png and then imported to SBC3.  Everything else was done inside SBC3.  I've since figured out I could have made that element in SBC too by using the Line tool.

Like a lot of other moms out there, I am swamped with my kids art work.  K especially loves to paint and can turn out 5 paintings at a sitting.  These paintings are usually done on some strange size paper 9x12 or even larger and can make storing them difficult and scrapbooking them bulky.

A few days ago, I suggested to K that she paint what she'd thought she see on our upcoming vacation and she turned out 5 more paintings to add to our evergrowing collection.

Rather than scrap the bulky, original artwork, I photographed it making sure to stand over top of the artwork so it was square to the camera.  I then loaded them into Photoshop and adjusted the levels.  Often this is necessary because your camera wants to average the photo to a mid-grey and if the painting has vibrant colors or little white space, things can be off colorwise.  Next I cropped out the carpet so only the painting was showing (the painting aspect ratio and the camera aspect ratio aren't the same so some carpet was visible).  Finally I added an overlay frame with the title of the painting (sometimes necessary if you can't figure out what the painting is) and printed them on 4x6 photo paper.  I also created a 4x6 journal block and then inserted all 6 images into a 12x12 photo protector page (you can get these from a variety of sources in different brands such as We R Memory Keepers, Fancy Pants Design, Pebbles Inc).

And this is the page that got inserted into K's scrapbook which takes up less space and is a permanent record of her art.  K loves it!

You've already seen the photo, here's the layout. I don't have a lot of time for scrapbooking these days so my style has become increasingly simple and sometimes I just print an enlargement, put it in a page protector and call it done :)

This layout has been printed in 8x8 for I's album.

I is at the age now where she doesn't like to be left behind when the other kids go out into the back yard.  She's still learning to talk but she makes it pretty clear when she wants to go outside.  She runs to the door with shoes on (doesn't matter who's shoes - any shoes will do!) and says "outside", which is one of the few words she can actually say.