gratuitious photos of my children...

Taken last weekend on a visit to my grandparents' place down south.

spoonflower...

If you haven't heard about Spoonflower yet it's high time you gave that rock of yours some breathing room. Really, he didn't want me to say anything, but he's chaffing from your always being under him and all...

Anyway, as soon as I read about this completely GENIUS service I started (literally) dreaming up ideas.

Caleb has been drawing the most awesome flowers lately...big round faces with huge doe eyes and squiggly mouths, long stems with at least two sets of leaves per stem. Last night I dreamt I had a border style fabric printed using Caleb's flowers and then made Molly the cutest little sundress ever: the bodice was made using the solid background color and the skirt portion sported Caleb's flowers springing up from the hemline. In my dream that dress was beyond cute, Caleb was over the moon impressed with himself and Molly wore the dress non-stop for three days straight. Logan was proud of Caleb but more interested in playing Guitar Hero and I guess Lynn was at work. The end.

I've also been dying to work up some dummy pattern repeats and finally had an opportunity to sit down tonight and play around:



I'm calling this set Dandilyons and Dots. Too corny? I don't care, I simply cannot resist the substitution...it's TOO easy. I'm thinking a little dress or pinnie using the dandilyons and using the dots for bloomers and accents. Accents like a knife pleat around the hemline (you know, for that one time when I'll have nothing but time on my hands...) or maybe bias tape trim. So many ideas, never enough time.

To say that I am stalking the Spoonflower website and blog is a slight understatement. To say that I am chomping at the bit to see pricing structure is accurate, though I would say it's more than just chomping at the bit...maybe chomping through the bit? That might be too much...but I am very anxious to find out whether or not we'll be living off tomato soup and ramen noodles so I can afford at least one print of my very own design.


Okay, better run...road trip tomorrow and I'm still not packed!!

the newest artist in residence...

click here to see a backwards slideshow of the artist in action.

While I was folding clothes this afternoon, Little Miss Crawls-Under-the-Safety-Gate-and-Climbs-UP-the-Stairs-Entirely-Too-Often made her way up the stairs for the four-hundred and sixty seventh time today. Upon her arrival she decided to try drawing with the chalk instead of her usual eating of the chalk. To be clear she wasn't drawing so much as she was stippling and hatch-marking. But no matter which way you look at it she was all around ADORABLE. We're all just lucky I didn't keel over dead and fall down the stairs from the cute this kid was emitting into the atmosphere.

one year old...

Molly's first birthday was Friday and to celebrate, we had spaghetti and cupcakes. I figured I'd better make her a party hat this year while there is no competition against princesses or pirates or Star Wars or whatever her obsession will be. Because I know it's coming eventually.

We'll celebrate a little more next weekend with the great-grandparents and the rest of the family but before that we're going to shopping for Molly's first charm! She loves my charm bracelet and I figure now is as good a time as any to get her started on her own. I'm thinking this one, this one, or this one.

my, my, how time does fly...

cub scout camp out - spring edition...

The men-folk roughed it with cozy sleeping bags (thanks Poppa Lee and Gramma Dee), an air mattress (thanks to me), an almost* fully stocked camping bin (also thanks to me) and a DVD playing laptop (thanks to Lynn), while Molly and I went back to the house to sleep in our warm, comfy beds each night. Molly will not be doing any cool weather camping until she can stay under the covers for more than four seconds at a time. I worried all night because I forgot to pack the first aid kit for them and I just knew someone would burn themselves making s'mores or bust up a knee/elbow falling down the embankment behind our campground. Luckily everyone survived relatively unscathed...no burns and only a few minor scrapes. The boys had a great time fishing, skipping rocks (or at least trying to anyway), roasting weenies and marshmallows, hiking, etc. Molly enjoyed covering herself in dirt, digging in the dirt, eating the dirt, sharing fistfuls of dirt, etc. On Sunday morning we broke down camp and abided by the scouts Leave No Trace pledge all the while listening to Caleb lament the fact that the camping weekend was over..."are you sure we can't come back after church school?" "when are we going camping again?" "I wish we could camp some more." Final report? A huge success!

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A note to family and anyone else who comes across camping gear sales: I need your help keeping an eye out for camping gear sales. Currently on our list: a heavy duty 7' x 16' ground tarp, a propane stove, two more sleeping bags and enamelware dining sets. Thanks in advance!

newsflash...

I somehow just un-dumbified my blog and now you can add me to Bloglines or your favorite feed reader of choice. Just go here: http://www.aplcreations.com/atom.xml
and you should be set!

How exciting! I feel like I just marked a rather large task off my to-do list. Odd? Yes. It's odd primarily because it wasn't even on my to-do list. Several people have mentioned not being able to add my blog to their feed readers before and until today I couldn't figure out what the problem was...and really I didn't "figure it out" today either, I just clicked all the same boxes I've tried clicking before and for some reason it works now. Go figure.

of soccer games and a woeful postal tale...

So, at the beginning of this soccer season Caleb's team won tickets to the FC Dallas season opener. We were the only family that ended up going but we still had a great time. We arrived with fingers crossed HOPING the kids would hang in and enjoy the event (because previous professional sporting events with all the kids has proved to be not so pleasant...) and somehow, by the grace of God, they did...and as a bonus, Lynn was well behaved too. It was a Christmas miracle on March 30th. However, our end-of-March Christmas miracle came to an abrupt halt when it was time to head out to the parking lot...hot and tired makes for a pissy bunch of boys (both small AND big)...surprisingly Molly kept her wits about her and I managed to keep all my bitchy comments to myself (for the most part). Anyhoo, despite the parking lot melt downs, everyone had a really good time, so much so it has Lynn thinking about some season tickets.

Unfortunately my woeful postal tale is my own fault...remember back when I mentioned I was doing Regina's note card swap? Well I got my cards made and in the mail on the 29th. I forgot to take pictures or include return postage at the time, but I was considering it a victory since I even got the cards made and in the mail on time. Flash forward to last Friday when I opened my mailbox only to find said envelope returned to me because there was no postage affixed. That's right, no pictures, no return postage AND no regular postage. It was a trifecta of idiocy on my part! However, the silver lining in all of this is that I got to take my pictures after all:



They're not what I had originally intended to make but I think they turned out nicely nevertheless. The original plan was to use bits of maps as the base and carve a little car or truck stamp to emboss and color...well, that was the plan anyway. I soon discovered carving stamps (or most anything these days) can only be accomplished when Molly is unconscious or off-site because that little girl wants to be right in the middle of whatever her mother is doing (another fine example of karma coming back around). Ahem, my plan changed and instead I started digging through the Library of Congress' Flickr pages for old timey car photos. To my delight I found this happy little group. I printed them on transparencies, mounted them over map bits and attached them to the card based I made. I thought it would be cute to make little highway signs for the information on back. I should've taken more time making the signs edges uniform but time got away from me and well, they are what the are and they didn't make it to the swap anyway so I have five available are on their way to the swap (lucky for me there have been some international postal delays!).

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Completely unrelated, but how cute are these? And there's free UPS shipping too.

momma's little garden fairie...

Last Tuesday I worked in our front yard for a few hours while Caleb rode all his wheeled toys up and down and all around the cul-de-sac and Molly "helped" me by trying to eat mulch, dumping flowers out of their pots and walking out into the middle of the driveway only to strand herself (because the incline was (it's old hat now) too steep for her to stand herself back up and she hates crawling on concrete...and really who can blame her?).

Anyway, I managed to get my clematis vines all untangled and back in order all the while losing probably twenty buds about to burst...bummer. I was pleasantly surprised the following day though...lots of blooms and more leaves too...I guess all the pinching back let the plant put its energy where it should've been going in the first place. After the clematis clinic, I pruned a couple of our trees back...Lynn was tired of hunching down to get around them when mowing and since I don't mow, it was the least I could do...so as not to have to hear about the hunching this season. And lastly since only two gerbera daisies and two tiny-red-mounding-flowers-that-I-can't-remember-the-name-of survived my brown thumbs last year I planted more gerbera daisies and trmfticrtno as well as some ranunculus (found at Wal-Mart for one dollar a pot!), lantana and salvia.



Clearly yardwork is tiring stuff.

Once everything is plugging along I'll snap another picture to show how things are coming...so far so good. Is it possible that this could be my banner gardening year? One can hope :).

easter 2008...

This year's Easter was a biggie for us: one, it was Molly's first Easter and baby's first anything is typically pretty freaking fun (well, okay, baby's first teething troubles and the like...not so much); and two, more importantly, Lynn completed his conversion to the Catholic church. Last year Logan started asking all sort of faith based questions and a there were a lot Lynn couldn't answer...hell there were some I couldn't answer either (being a cradle Catholic does have some drawbacks sometimes...thank goodness for Google and my mom) so back in August Lynn decided he would pursue RCIA and convert from the Methodist faith to the Roman Catholic faith. It's been a long process with a huge commitment of time and self to go along with it and we are so proud of him for taking the steps.

The Easter Bunny was a total crackhead this year at our house. First (s)he waited until the last minute to stock up on goodies and ended up with SLIM pickins but (s)he did manage to pull together a few things. Then (s)he went and fell asleep before filling everyone's baskets with said goodies. (S)he woke up in a fit of panic at 5am Sunday morning scrambling downstairs to take care of everything only to find that, thankfully, MY Easter Bunnies were around to pick up the slack. They are seasoned veterans after all.


inspired by these and these as well as these .

As far as creative things go I did manage to make some cute cupcakes on Sunday night (or maybe it was Monday night?) and aside from that the only creative business going on was my mom knitting and everyone's language whilst we banged away at Guitar Hero.

It was a good weekend!