Road Trip to Canada Day 3.

April 7th, 2009

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Let’s see…..where was I? Sorry about that lull in the story, I took a break to attend the St. Louis Creating Keepsakes Convention and work with my friends in the Pazzles booth. Which is a whole ‘nother story….

Day 3 was, of course, my favorite day because I got to finally meet Anita after months of talking to her via email and looking at her in her scrapbook pages that my friends and I worked on. We had plans to meet at her house at 1 p.m., so in the morning we had some time to drive to Chatham to an awesome scrapbook store called The Paper Pickle. Julie had told us about it the night before at dinner, and seriously just the name of the place made me want to go check it out. SO CUTE.

We saw this on the way to the store. It was at the end of the street that the store sits on. Isn’t it beautiful?

And the store? Super cute! Check it out…

This is the front window display!

The walls were painted pickle green and had this beautiful quote painted on it that said “These are the days of imagination and joy.” It was so big I couldn’t get it all in the photo. This wall also had the most gigantic rubber stamp display I’ve ever seen in a store. Awesome!

They had this beautiful wooden “bar” counter thingie that was very long and pretty and that was where the cash register was and these gorgeous jars of ribbon. I took this photo specifically for my friend JILL, who has a bit of a ribbon problem. She’ll be getting a few samples in the mail soon from those jars. When the owner gave me permission to take a photo of the ribbons, she said “oh, let me fluff these up for you and made them look nicer” just for you, Jill! haha

Then we saw THIS on the way back out. Thea tried to get a job there, but she didn’t meet the height requirement.

After our trip to the store we hurried back to the hotel to prepare for meeting Anita. We only had to drive about 5 minutes before finding Anita’s house.

We were welcomed in by Anita, her sister Erica, and her friend Becky (who’s the reason this all happened in the first place). Little Amber was there for a second, and then she was gone for a bit pretending to be bashful.

And this would be the hard part to explain. It’s an experience in my life that I will never forget. It’s an experience that I will ALWAYS be grateful for to the people that helped me get there, strangers that don’t even know me who donated their money and their scrabook supplies so I could auction them off (thank you all). I will always be glad that I sucked it up and ignored my stupid anxiety disorder and JUST WENT ANYWAY. I have missed out on lots of things in my life because of that and I’m glad that this was not one of them. It was wonderful and overwhelming and heartbreaking and fantastic. It was so wonderful to meet these women face to face and see the people I’ve been emailing with back and forth for months. My first thought was how thin Anita was. She’s sort of tall and willowy and pretty anyway……but I was just struck by how very thin she looked. And then when she hugged me I was afraid I would break her. But looks are deceiving, aren’t they? Because she is strong and she is fighting!

We got right to business and sat down and handed over the books. After all these months of waiting, I didn’t want to make Anita wait any longer! haha

For all of my friends who helped make the pages, I want you to know that this kid LOVED these books. She jumped up on the couch with Anita and she was looking at these beautiful pages and exclaiming, “There’s Daddy!” and “There’s me!” and “There’s Jillian!” It was the cutest thing EVER. That kid being so excited was all the thanks I needed for doing this book and I was so glad that I was able to see her enjoy it in person.

Anita’s husband Glen and their son came home from spear fishing for a few minutes, long enough to change into a hockey uniform and head back out the door for a tournament. Look at this cutie boy!

Glen took a few moments to sit down and check out the book also.

Summer and Jillian also took a turn looking at the books.

Then they brought out a surprise bucket and handed it to me! It was filled with Canadian things! haha Spices for cooking and dip mix and a keychain, pen, towel, real maple syrup, some fudge, and I can’t remember what else. Very neat. Thanks ladies! That was so nice of you. Glen had actually gotten us some Canadian bacon to take home with us because I had told Anita that a classmate of Summer’s asked her to bring him some as a souvenir….hilarious……but we forgot it and left it at Anita’s! VERY disappointing. Ah, well…

Here’s Becky, the reason I heard about Anita in the first place. If she hadn’t nominated Anita to win a scrapbooking prize package in Scrapbook and Cards Today magazine, none of this would have happened. So thank you, Becky, because this was a day that I will always cherish and I will always consider you and Anita my friends now.

And this photo? Well, it sort of makes the whole thing WORTH IT. This is my favorite photo, and you can’t even really see Anita’s face in it. But she’s telling Amber THE STORY, and as a scrapbooker that’s my thing, that’s what I do and what I love and that’s WHY I do it, because for me it’s all about telling the story.

And now for me Anita will always be a part of mine.