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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.