Six on Sunday

1.  Minecraft

What more do I need to say?

Are everyone else's kids as addicted to this game, as mine are?  Today they are having a PJ day - they just haven't bothered to get dressed - and I'm not going to push it!  They are having a great time skyping their cousin and friends and talking whilst playing.  They (the girls and Dave), all look so cute all sitting in Dave's study gaming - Dave is playing LOL (League of Legends) and the girls are Minecrafting!

Eliza even drew this picture which I added to her photo album.  

 

I also did this layout to add to Eliza's album to go with the picture she drew.  I got out some old Luminarte paint pots to do the arrow "v"s at the top of the layout.

2.  New hair do

I have over the years had many hair-dos.  One day I am going to do a page with all the different do's on it - everything from long straight hair, to Annie Lennox do, to long spiral perm (in multiple colours) to bob.... you get the idea!

Haven't had a change for a while - so thought I would go with the umbre look - except it might take a couple of goes.  The idea is to start red at the top of the head, and eventually get down to blonde tips. As my hair had a bit of red - it will probably take another trip or two to get the look I really want. Here is the new do anyway (yes - it is very red)!

Created the background for the above layout using washi tape, and even covered the ghost alpha "H" in washi tape as well.

3.  Sleeping in their own beds

At last!  Both Jazz and Eliza are sleeping in their own beds - for the entire night. Yes, you heard me right.  No more trying to share our Queen size bed with 4 bodies :-)  Every night we would end up with either one or both of the girls in our bed by the morning - and let me tell you - these girls are tall and take up a lot of bed space!  Dave and I were hanging off the side of the bed by the morning - not a lot of decent sleep happening and a few back aches between the two of us.  So how did we get the girls to stay in their own bed? Well the problem relates to the fact they are both scared of the dark (so am I - but don't tell them that!), so the solution - leave their bedside lights on all night!  Not sure how much power this uses, but it works, so will be interesting to see the next bill (thank God for solar panels).

4.  Family Movie Night

As a result of number 3 - we decided to reward the girls by having family movie night every Friday night.  We put the mattress from the sofa bed, and another foam mattress on the floor in the cinema room, and watch a movie (complete with treats that Dave takes great delight in purchasing), and we all watch the movie and sleep in the cinema room for the night.  Bonus is that the cinema room is now getting some decent usage!

The first week we watched the Hobbit. Amazingly the girls stayed up and watched the whole thing and enjoyed it.  I must admit to being a little concerned at the beginning when the dwarves meeting at Bilbo's cottage took about 20 minutes - I was almost asleep by the end of that bit! All in all we enjoyed the movie though - it was great to see some of the places we had send in New Zealand - including Hobbiton.

This week we watched - Thor.  We have a pile of superhero Blu-rays ready for the girls to watch, as they are now old enough to watch most of them.

5.  Playing Games

I love how my girls love playing board games - probably a good thing since we have amassed a huge collection of games over the years.  This afternoon (when they needed a break from the computers), we pulled out a couple of games - we only ended up playing one, but it was a lot of fun.  We played Lego Creationary. I was really impressed with what the girls built. Jazz is a nerd at heart and built a little Enterprise for one of her cards.  She watched all of Star Trek Next Gen which she was much younger - I think it might be time to pull out Voyager and Deep Space Nine.  We also took the girls to the last Star Trek movie, which they loved (and so did we - so tempting to see it again, a definite re-watch movie for us - definitely a family movie night movie).

6.  Some layouts

 Although I have been incredibly busy with business work of late - Dave has been doing a bit of gaming and we have also had the weekend at home this weekend (happens rarely), so I have managed to squeeze in a fair bit of scrapping (lucky I can scrap really quickly).  I find I get a picture of what I want in my head - and then when I have time I just sit down and do it. Probably the most time consuming part of scrapbooking for me is printing the pictures and typing up the journalling.  Here are the results of my efforts:


School camp for Jazz:

 A trip to the Dinosaur Museum last weekend with my brother-in-law, sister-in-law and mother-in-law:

Another birthday page of Mum's 71st birthday - love documenting those group shots (no journalling on this layout as it is on another layout):

Last weekend was also my nephew - Daniel's birthday.  My girls were definitely very envious of the birthday cake their Aunt made for Daniel - it was a Creeper cake (from Minecraft of course):

Here is another Fiji layout for Jasmin's album - of the Bollywood night we had at the Civic Video conference. It was such a lot of fun dressing up in Sari's:

A couple of mother's day layouts - of me and my mum, and Dave and his mum from last weekend:

A layout with our latest investment house in Goulburn:

Had a lot of fun creating this layout of Liam's birthday in Sydney from last year. It was a great fun birthday - all the kids had Nerf guns and ran around shooting one another.

 This layout was of Jasmin's experience with "Tournament of Minds" last year. She was picked to compete in the Mathematical Engineering category with some kids from school.

This layout is of the girls swimming lessons - pictures taken at the end of last year:

Finally did a layout of the trip down the coast with friends - Mel and Kate, last year.  Love the instagram photographs:

Last of all - this layout which I created as part of Cathy Zielske's Clean and Simple Hybrid course. I managed to scan in an old photograph of Dave and I in 1986.

Mothers Day and Layout Share

I have to start this blog post with something that Eliza said to me on Monday - the day after Mother's Day.  Both Eliza and Jasmin had forgotten to give me the cards they had made at school for Mother's Day - and Eliza being in Year 2 had also made me a bunch of crepe paper flowers - as she has given them to me she has said "Mum, I love you more than I love playing Minecraft!".  LOL - this is quite the compliment in our household.

I had a lovely Mother's Day - Dave managed to work out how to make me a coffee using the coffee machine (something he does very rarely), and I got to drink it in bed whilst I read (and waited for the girls to get up, wrap my Mother's Day presents and make me some cards - using my scrapbooking supplies of course). Nothing like leaving it until the last minute (only because they hadn't had time during the week without me being around!).

I got to open my pressies in bed, and then we got up - went to the mall, where I enjoyed Sushi Train with the girls, and then we went to "Star Trek: Into Darkness" - loved it. What's not to love with all that sci-fi goodness, action and eye candy on the screen!  I didn't even have to cook dinner (I point this out as I am the one that makes all the dinners) - we ordered in Crust pizza, and I even got to pick the pizza :-)

We managed to squeeze in a visit to Goulburn on Saturday to catch up with our own Mothers (I also had to pick Dave up in Goulburn as he had business meetings in Sydney to attend with Julie and Leslie, while I held the fort up at home).  I managed to snap a couple of pictures - one with my mum (which Jazz took), and Dave with his mum (which I took). When I look through my albums, there is not a lot of pictures of me and mum, or Dave and his mum, so it was an excellent opportunity to do so.

I have only managed to do a handful of layouts over the last two weeks. Better some than none though!  I have been trying to do a couple of layouts to put in the girls albums of their trip to Fiji last year (when I have completed a couple I can move on to doing some NZ layouts for them). I normally do a family photo book, but I like to include a couple of layouts in their own albums, of them on their holiday.

This layout is of Eliza at the Sheraton Resort on Denarau Island - just a few of the things she did around the resort:

This one is of what Jazz got up to around the resort at Denarau Island:

These pictures are of Jazz snorkelling on Mystery Island - about 40 minutes from Denarau Island - she had such a great time, and so happy that she had the courage to snorkel!

Over the last couple of weeks we have also had a couple of birthdays to go to.  The first was my nephew's 18th birthday.  Where have all the years gone?  He just had a quiet family function at home, and then afterwards had a couple of friends over for the night and some quiet celebrations. He is a nice quiet boy, who loves to watch movies, game - not the going out partying type of guy.  He is just such a good kid, a real credit to my brother and sister-in-law.

My sister made the most excellent cake - made in the shape of a gaming controller!  I put together a photo board of photographs of him from 0 to 18.

I had a few too many pictures to put on one layout, so tucked them into a pocket on the top left of the layout, and tucked the journalling behind the main photograph at the bottom.

We also had my Mother's 71st birthday to go to.  We had a nice BBQ at my sister's place, and we all brought along salads, and other BBQ stuff.  Hellie of course made another excellent birthday cake - a cake like a chocolate box and it had roses chocolates in it.

On the layout I mod-podged some birthday banners onto the background, and added plenty of other banners and pennants for a celebratory feel. I converted the pictures to black and white.

I have managed to keep up with Project Life as well, completing all my April layouts.  It's fun looking back on what we have done over the month.  My memory really must be going with old age as I've forgotten what I've done this week, let alone what I have done a couple of weeks ago.  These pages help me remember all the great things we have been up to.  Here is my April summary page an a couple of the Weekly pages for April.

I am still keeping up with my reading goal.  I am at 49 books for the year and according to the goodreads web-site 9 books ahead of schedule.

I have enjoyed almost all of the books I've read (pics are below). The ones that were a disappointment were "Armour", "Nine Princes in Amber", and "Crystal Gardens" was no where as good as some of other Amanda Quick books I have read.  "Reamde" was a pleasant surprise - a little slow at the start, but a satisfying read by the end.  I loved "Indian Hill" the Mark Tufo book - I have found both the books I have read of his very entertaining and his sense of humour just clicks with me.  Diana Gabaldon's "Voyager" continued the Outlander series and was an excellent third book - so hope that the company who has purchased the option to make a movie/TV Series actually does something with it!

I completed reading the "Infernal Devices" series by Cassandra Clare - specifically so that I could read "The Mortal Instruments" series, as the first book is released as a movie in August.  I am looking forward to seeing "City of Bones" on the big screen.  The other book worth mentioning was the "Mongoliad" book 1, which was co-authored by a number notable authors - including Neal Stephenson. It certainly wasn't what I expected - with a tale set in the times of Genghis Khan.

Well - that's it for this week!