Remember the Date tag book
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I made this cute little tag book from a similar one I saw in a papercrafting magazine a few years ago. Might have been called Tags? I can’t remember. Very simple and quick and easy. I used 14 tags, 1 for each month, 1 for the front cover and 1 for the back cover. Sorted through and found patterned papers that were all coordinated by color. This could also be done by theme. For this one, Danielle’s favorite color is green, so I pulled out all the scraps of my green patterned papers, of which there were few so I had to pull out some that weren’t scraps also.
I used my Xyron 250 and ran all the tags through on one side first, glued them to the patterned paper, and cut them all out. Then ran them all through the Xyron again to cover the other side of the tags. Again, glued them down to the patterned papers and cut around them all. I used some green ribbon and attached to the edge of each tag by just folding it around the tag and stapling it. Then I stamped the month on the twill in black. After Danielle gave me her important dates she wanted to remember, I typed them up in Word and printed them out for each month in small squares and then used Glue Dots to adhere them to the front of the each tag. I inked the edges of all the tags front and back with green ink. Lastly I used a hole punch to punch through the patterned papers at the top of each tag where there already WAS a hole before I covered them, put all the tags in order on a green book ring (got at Walmart) and added some green ribbons to the book ring.
Now Danielle can hang this up somewhere in her dorm room and be reminded when she needs to send a birthday card to someone. These would make cute little Christmas gifts for people if you used plain white paper squares and they could write their own dates on them.
Filed under Projects | Comments (5)
Bazzill Splat Mat
I just discovered this online and I MUST HAVE it! The top of my work area is glass and it’s constantly covered with paint or glue or Hermafix residue. I need about 10 of these and I’ll just cover the whole desktop :) . And seriously, could the folks at Bazzill be any cuter, what with making the edges all scalloped and pretty? This would also be great for people who use their hot glue guns alot even if they’re not a scrapbooker. This thing can take heat up to 500 degrees apparently. I don’t know about YOU, but I sure don’t want to find out if that’s true!
Filed under Scrapbooking | Comments (3)Two Words To Describe Postpartum Depression
It sucks. There. I said it. I apologize if I offend, but I speak the truth and I know from firsthand knowledge. Depression is a horrible thing, and I hate it. I developed postpartum depression 7-1/2 years ago after my daughter was born, and 7-1/2 years later I’m still trying to handle it. I hate that depression has this stigma about it, this thing nobody wants to talk about, this huge elephant in the room so to speak. I think maybe people perceive you as having something WRONG WITH YOU. Like what is so wrong with you that you’re depressed? Why can’t you just be NOT depressed? And I don’t agree with that. It wasn’t my fault that I got depressed. It’s nobody’s fault that they get depressed. Why would anyone CHOOSE to be depressed? It’s laughable. It’s just that stuff happens. Life throws a curveball at you every now and then.
My curveball came about 3 months after my daughter was born. My husband had taken 12 weeks of family leave off work to take care of me and bond with the baby. I went back to work (at home) after 6 weeks, so he was her primary caretaker during the day (and he loved it). It seemed like a matter of days before it was time for him to go back to work. It was devastating for me. Suddenly I had to work full-time at home AND take care of a 3-month old baby? There weren’t enough hours in the day frankly. I felt like I was chained to my desk 24 hours a day just to try to get in the 8 hours I owed my job. It was awful! There was a resentment toward my husband burning in me. I felt he thought his job was more important than mine, and I resented him for that. He told me he would retire when the baby was 6 months old, and he changed his mind, and I resented him for that. I was overwhelmed. I was tired (as you mothers know, that’s an understatement). I was breastfeeding, and any mother who has done this knows it’s a neverending job. And for me a constant interruption of my sleep patterns is not a good thing. During the day, I slept whenever my daughter slept. It was a real battle to muster up the energy to take a shower. I cried a lot (also an understatement).
Don’t get me wrong~~I LOVED my daughter. She was and is and always will be the best thing about my life, the love of my life. But some new moms begin their postpartum depression right away and have a hard time bonding with their babies, feeling a detachment toward them. They look at their babies and don’t feel this love connection that mothers are supposed to feel. I thank God that I didn’t have those feelings. I can’t imagine what it would have felt like to look at this beautiful newborn and not feel the overwhelming love that I felt. But it happens to some moms. It’s so sad to me. As a scrapbooker, I think about moments. And those are moments you don’t get back.
I waited about 6 months after my depression began before I finally went to the doctor and said, “You’ve got to help me.” I waited TOO LONG. If I had it to do all over again, I would have gone to the doctor immediately! Why suffer in silence like that? Those are moments of my life I won’t get back! My doctor immediately put me on an antidepressant, and I’ve been taking them ever since. Over the last 7 years I’ve continued to take them. Oh, once in a while I’ll notice I’m feeling very irritable toward my husband and daughter and my husband will make me cry more than usual, and I’ll realize maybe my body has become immune to the antidepressant and I’ll have to change it. I’m on my fourth different kind of antidepressant now. I know that lots of people only have to take them for a short period of time, but that hasn’t been the case for me. I wish it were. Maybe someday that’ll happen for me.
Millions of women suffer from postpartum depression. MILLIONS! It’s staggering. Take it from me. If you’re one of those women and you think you MAY have depression or you know you DO have it, go to the doctor. Get help for it. If your doctor doesn’t take care of you or says something stupid like “it’s all in your head,” or “you’ve got to get over it by yourself,” GO TO ANOTHER DOCTOR. Thankfully mine didn’t say anything like that, but I’ve heard horrible stories about idiot doctors who have. Get help. Help yourself. These are moments of your life that you won’t get back, so make them be worthwhile and wonderful.
I’m participating in Blog for the Mothers Act. You can read about it here. It’s about trying to get legislature passed for the MOTHERS Act. That bill will make it so that new moms and families get education about postpartum depression and will increase the research into the causes, diagnoses, and treatments for it. If you click on that link above, it even gives you the name and phone number of your state senator (listings for all states is there) so you can call and ask them to support it. I know I will.
Filed under Life | Comments (4)Starbucks mini scrapook
I saw this video from Fiskars TV on how to make a DARLING mini book with the sleeves from your Starbucks coffee. And the best part is that we just had a Starbucks open up near me!~ Yes, I’ve been living a deprived life.
Go check it out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4iuZoM2Mb0&mode=related&search=Scrapbooking_
Filed under Projects | Comment (0)We miss you.
October 22, 2003. Four years ago today. That’s the day my stepdad left this earth for a better place in Heaven. He was 51 years old. He had fought a good fight. His kidneys didn’t work anymore, and he hung in there as long as he could. My sister was slated to give him one of her kidneys in May of 2003, but by a twist of fate his surgeon cut a ligament in her hand and had to take some time off to heal. In that time, dad became too ill to withstand the surgery and was unable to get the kidney that he so badly needed. I learned a lot of about kidneys that year, how they function, how they are affected by what you eat and drink, what happens when they don’t function. As a result of those kidneys not functioning properly some of his bowel tissue died and he ended up having quite a lot of his colon removed and lived the rest of his life with a colostomy bag on his side. That was bad.
And from my point of view, that wasn’t even the worst part. He spent the entire summer of 2003 in the hospital, the same one where he had received his heart transplant 8 years before that I wrote about yesterday. That summer he was weak and debilitated from the bowel surgery and lying in bed for so long, trying to regain his strength with physical therapy. There was a day during that time period that a nurse found him not breathing and administered a certain medication to help respirations develop. Apparently he was given too much medication or his brain was deprived of oxygen for too long, and dad lost his short-term memory.
THAT was the bad part. Oh, he would remember us. He knew when his kids came to visit him that we were his kids. He still knew my mother as his wife. But he couldn’t remember that you had been to visit him just yesterday and would ask why you never came to see him. He’d cry because no one ever came to see him. He couldn’t remember things that happened 3 months ago. He couldn’t remember why he was even in the hospital, had no idea that he had had a bowel surgery and a colostomy. As a result of that, he didn’t remember that his colostomy bag was there. This meant that my mom was constantly explaining and re-explaining things to him to try to remind him. Can you imagine waking up every day and finding this colostomy bag hooked to your side and saying WHOA, how the hell did THAT get there? And to top if off, he had hallucinations. Oh my, he would see things that others in the room didn’t see. I would always try to distract him from it when he would mention it and try to get him to talk about something else, but I suppose it’s hard to ignore a man on fire in the corner when you REALLY think you see him there.
The doctors finally admitted that he wasn’t going to get well enough for a kidney transplant, and they sent him home. It was hard. It was hard to admit that the transplant wasn’t going to happen. Hard to admit that he wasn’t EVER going to get better. It was hard to see him sick and weak and suffering. But I think the hardest part for me was his not remembering. It was so stressful, it made me not want to go visit him. Then when I DID go visit him, I would usually cry all the way home. For the way he used to be. For the way I wished he could be again. For all the questions I never asked him and now would never have the answers to. For my mother who had lived with her husband for 30 years and now had to watch him be like that 24 hours a day 7 days a week. It was HARD.
But still with all that said and done, I’m grateful. My family is grateful. We’re forever indebted to the woman who donated her organs so that my dad could receive her heart and have another 8 years of life with his wife and family. Because of her generosity, we got to keep him around another 8 years. And of course we knew it may not last forever. He was very lucky that he didn’t have immediate rejection of that heart like so many transplant recipients do. He was very lucky that he didn’t have problem after problem with the transplant like so many recipients do. He just enjoyed life for 8 more years. It was probably actually all the drugs that he took to prevent rejection of that new heart that finally took their toll on his kidneys and made them fail. Organ donation is sort of a double-edged sword in that respect, but of course we, his family, wouldn’t change a thing. We had 8 extra “bonus” years, and we’ll cherish them forever.
John Edward Cordes 1952-2003
We miss you.
We love you.
You left too soon.
Filed under Life | Comment (1)Are you an organ donor?
June 2, 1995. That was the day that my stepdad was reborn and began a new life. He had had a heart attack with no symptoms of chest pain. When he developed shortness of breath so severe he couldn’t breathe, he finally went to the hospital where he was misdiagnosed with pneumonia. By the time the next morning arrived and another doctor ran an EKG, his heart only had 10% function left because so much of it had been damaged and not treated. He was flown to a trauma hospital 40 minutes away, where he died and was brought back twice by the wonderful team of doctors and nurses there. The next day he was flown again to another hospital 2 hours away where they do a lot of heart transplants in our state. They had to put a balloon pump into his heart to pump it for him because his heart was too damaged to work on its own.
And there he waited 100 days for the transplant. He was VERY lucky it was only 100 days.
Most people don’t realize that if you donate your organs you can help up to 25 people. One person can help save or better the lives of 25 other people. Isn’t that wonderful? Here are some other facts:
** Every 13 minutes, a new person is added to the national waiting list for an organ transplant.
** On average, 18 people die every day while waiting for an organ transplant.
** Last year, 5,000 people died while on the national waiting list for an organ transplant. Three-hundred of those people were from my state.
Without a family’s heartbreak of losing their mother, my siblings and I would have lost our father, without a doubt; it was just a matter of days. That mother died in a tragic car accident, and because of her generosity and her family sticking by her wishes, our dad received a heart transplant and was given a second chance at life.
That is SUCH a special gift to give, people. You just have no idea. I cannot express to you what it was like to look at my stepdad and realize what a walking miracle he was, that he was alive because someone else had died, that he was alive because her heart was beating inside his chest. It was heartbreaking and elating all at the same time. And so amazing.
If you’re not already an organ donor in your state, go sign up and become one now. If your state requires your family’s permission even if it’s on your driver’s license, tell your family your wishes! If you wait until it’s too late, it will be too late.
Filed under Life | Comments (3)Check out this video from Tim Holtz
I just watched this awesome video by Tim Holtz showing what you can do with his new product called grungeboard. This stuff is AWESOME. I MUST get some of it. Go here
http://timholtz.com/vid_grungeboard.html
Filed under Scrapbooking Inspiration | Comment (0)Oh Baby!
Here’s a little baby album project I did. My sister-in-law hired me (thanks Michelle!) to make it for some friends of hers who just had their first baby girl. Please ignore the glares on the photos. I didn’t have time to scan the pages nicely so I had to just take photos of them with my camera and this is what happens when you’re in a hurry!
Seriously, have you ever seen a more DARLING baby in your life? There’s just nothing cuter than a naked baby butt, I’m telling ya!
This photo is probably my favorite (even with no baby butt–LOL). The look on this young mother’s face just touches my heart. She looks like I feel every time I look at my daughter.
For those interested, I used a K&CO Life’s Journey mini book. It was the first time I made one and I really liked it and will be going back to buy more.
Filed under Projects | Comments (2)Here’s a crazy question.
No, REALLY. Here’s the question: Can you actually lose your mind and KNOW it while it’s happening? Cause I think that’s what been happening to me the last few weeks. Here we go.
I talked about the new puppy we got back in July here. I have felt guilty about this poor pup not having a playmate ever since we brought her home. My daughter is in school all day, my husband is at work all day, and I work from home. So I’m the one sitting here at my computer all day looking out the window at this little (yeah right) dog laying there looking all lonely and bored and sad. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. I decided to go to the animal shelter and find her a playmate. At this point, what’s one more dog, right? Riiiiight.
So I go to the animal shelter on a Monday a few weeks ago just to check out some dogs. I’m thinking NO puppies for sure, just get a dog that’s older than my pup, maybe 1 or 2, who can teach her not to bite so much, calm her down, but still have some puppy left in them to want to PLAY! See, I had a PLAN! I looked at 3 dogs that day, one of them a puppy that I of course promptly fell in love with. I would not, however, let myself take it home. One of the other dogs really touched my heart, though. The minute I saw her I wanted to cry. She was SO thin. I could count every rib. She’d been found as a stray about 30 minutes north in another county and brought here. She was so excited and shy all at the same time, slinking down on the floor because she wanted me to pet her so bad and she got so excited she flipped herself around on her back and hit her head on the floor. I wanted to take her home right then and there but I didn’t. I decided to go home and think it over. Plus I was trying to figure out a way to bring home another dog without my husband divorcing me.
I went back on Friday with my daughter and had made up my mind to adopt the little pup that I had fallen in love with (yes, I realize I said earlier I wasn’t going to do that). The universe intervened apparently, and that one was already adopted. I looked at another adult dog about 1-2 years old who I am positive someone had beaten at some time in her life and I fell in love with her. Plus I also looked at the starving shy girl from my first time at the shelter that week. There was just something about that dog that broke my heart. Once again, I was torn, wanted to think it over, called my husband a few times on the cell phone. He thought maybe a small-ish dog would be good for sleeping with my daughter and being her pet since our other pup is going to be a huge hound dog. I agreed and decided to wait and go back to look again in a few days.
However…..on the way OUT of the shelter (almost home free!), my daughter spies a poster hanging on the front of the counter where the office is and the poster has a photo of a cute little Pomeranian named Buddy. She says something to me about the photo, and the lady behind the counter says, “Well, he’s right here behind the counter, want to come see him?” Well, we WERE thinking about a small dog, and he’s kind of small-ish, so we went behind the counter and spent some time with him. Three people inquired about him at the same time we were looking at him, so it was a do-or-die situation. Next thing I know, he’s in the car going home with us.
Now, Buddy is a VERY good dog. He’s also a very OLD dog. They estimated at least 10 or more years old. And he’s sick. They told me at the shelter he had just had surgery on his trachea and still had a bit of a cough that he was going to have forever, but it only got real bad when he got excited or exercised and there was a pill to give him to help him. Okay, I can handle that. We brought him home on a Friday, and by Monday morning this dog sounded like he was trying to cough up a lung. I called the vet who had done his surgery. Found out there was NO surgery and they don’t know why the shelter told me that. Niiice. Turns out he probably at some time had real bad pneumonia and his lungs are scarred up (which can’t be fixed by the way) and it has caused his bronchial passages to become restricted and closed up, so he has trouble breathing. Great. AND on a side note he has a bad heart too! Um, could anything ELSE be wrong with this dog? This so-called cough sounds like little Buddy has been smoking for 70 years, and it just has gotten louder and louder by the day. The neighbors can’t sleep, okay? That’s how loud it is.
Anyway, back to Buddy being a good dog. About that….he’s a very good dog, follows you around, just lies at your feet when you sit down, housebroken even…all good stuff…..except he HATES our pup Ginger. He tries to bite her, chases her like he thinks he’s a Great Dane or something, doesn’t want her sniffing him, won’t play with her. Lovely. So the dog we brought home to play with Ginger WON’T play. And he doesn’t like sleeping on the bed with my daughter. Or next to her bed. Oh, and apparently he’s got one foot in the grave also. Does it get any better than that? We bring him home on Friday and it goes bad from the minute we get home. I tell my daughter we’re going to have to take him back because it’s not going to work out and we will get the other dog we looked at that I thought had been beaten. She was very calm and meek and the right age for what I was looking for so I thought we had a better shot with that one. We decide to go back the next morning right when they open.
The next day is Saturday, coincidentally the shelter’s open house when adoption prices are half price. When it was time to leave to take Buddy back, my daughter cried because she was his friend now and she was the only friend he had and who would take care of him and blah blah blah. I caved. And I went to the shelter anyway to get the dog. I’m STILL looking for a damn playmate for this puppy of ours! Is that too much to ask? (I’ll answer that for you; YES IT IS) I arrive at the shelter 10 minutes after opening, and the dog has already been adopted! TEN MINUTES. Are you freaking kidding me? So I turn around and there in the cage behind me is the too skinny heartbreaking dog from day #1. She’s looking up at me those sad eyes just like she did on day #1. And my heart just said, “Do it.” So I did. She got sent to the vet and we had to wait 6 days to pick her up after being spayed. This dog had been at the shelter in this cage for 3 months and I just couldn’t leave here there.
To make a long story even longer, I brought her home on this past Saturday, and she is such a doll. She just craves the love and attention, as you can imagine after being in a cage for 3 months. She eats twice as much as the pup and would probably eat more but I’m afraid she’ll get sick so I hold back. I named her Sophie, and she and Ginger are having so much FUN together, playing and romping and barking at each other and giving each other kisses. It’s so sweet to see these big ole pups out there playing and jumping around. My husband is totally pissed, but I’m sleeping better at night (no guilt). My best friend thinks I’ve totally lost my mind. And I’m beginning to wonder also. But I say at this point what’s one MORE dog? Right? Little Buddy is so freaking old and sick you barely notice he’s here. In fact, if he’s not coughing and hacking up a lung I forget he IS here. He’s lying under my desk as I type this and I’ve already accidentally kicked him THREE times cause I forgot he’s under there! Poor thing. But I know my husband is a dog lover, so I’m hoping that they’ll grow on him and he’ll end up loving them despite himself. He acts all mad and grumpy about it, but I’ll catch him bending down to pet Buddy and giving him treats for no reason. I think deep down he’s a softie. At least I’m hoping for that. Cross your fingers I don’t find myself in divorce court. 
Incidentally, I’ve got some PET scrapbooks planned for the future!
Filed under Scrapbooking | Comments (9)It’s official. I’m a business!
I officially received my license to do business as Summer Rose Scrapbooks, named after my daughter, also Summer Rose! I am doing custom made scrapbooks for other people in lots of different themes and several different sizes. I think probably next summer I will launch a website, but for now I have a price list page here on this blog where people can go to see the info. I am also branching out and going to sell various scrapbooking supplies, probably mostly embellishments. I have quite a few scrapbooker friends so hopefully I can convince them all to buy from me. Right now I’m applying for accounts with different manufacturers and waiting for my info to come in the mail. I never dreamed when I started this little ole’ hobby that it would become such a passion for me. I eat, drink, and sleep scrapbooking. It’s just always there in my brain, thinking about a topic for a page or a sketch for a page or whatever.
If you’re a scrapbooker and you’re interested in buying products at cheap prices, leave me a comment with your e-mail and I’ll contact you when I’m ready to start doing that.
Filed under Scrapbooking | Comments (12)
