Cosmo Cricket Love

I'm pretty much obsessed with Cosmo Cricket lately. Girl Friday and Early Bird have been some of my favorite lines ever. I love the vivid colors, fabulous patterns, and fun images. I also love that they seem to be such a fun, good natured company. When I heard they were having a DT call, I knew I had to at least throw my hat in to the ring. If nothing else, it gives me a reason to devout a whole blog post to Cosmo goodness, which makes me very happy. Here are some of my favorite Cosmo creations.











Thanks for looking. Go play with your Cosmo goodness!

Back to Reality

We've just returned from a lovely trip to this gorgeous place:


Where we spent a lot of time enjoying this:


and this:


Shawn and I decided to go to San Diego to celebrate our third wedding anniversary. We originally wanted to stay at Pacific Terrace, where we enjoyed our first anniversary, but it was a bit out of our price range. While searching for other options, I found a good deal at this hotel, La Valencia in La Jolla. We were pretty happy with the pictures and the description of this 1920's Spanish Colonial built on a hill with great views of the ocean, so we booked it. It was definitely a good choice and we quite enjoyed our stay. Here's the hotel:


Our room was on the 11th floor, you can see it in this next picture. It's the room on the top right with the window partially open. I love being on the top floor, it's usually quieter and you generally get pretty nice views.


Here's the view from one of our windows:


The other window faced the village and the mountain, but we also had a nice view of the nest of baby seagulls. They were awfully cute and serenaded us in the mornings.


We spent our mornings and one afternoon here, sitting by the pool and looking out at the ocean.


La Jolla is beautiful and we spent a lot of time walking the cliffs by the water, where there's a nice mix of sand, surf, rocks, grass and flowers.


We saw quite a bit of wild life, including tons of seals and some dolphins. We got massages, enjoyed some of the best food we've ever eaten, went to the Aquarium and got lots of rest and relaxation. Shawn was so happy he even smiled in a picture:


We had a lovely time and were lucky to have such a wonderful four days together.

Thursday Thankfuls

Here's the latest round of gratitude for today,

1. Late start work day today and some time to myself this morning.
2. A gift of the most fabulous smelling lavender sachet brought home from the south of France by a client.
3. Strawberry milkshake from Freddy's.
4. A good night's sleep.
5. The words "I want to work on the house" actually came out of Shawn's mouth.
6. A few to do's crossed off my list.
7. 3 beautiful red gerberas popping up in my garden.

Ten Today

Today's 10 is kind of random. Things you'd find if you were in my head today.....

1. Got a lot of stuff done this weekend, including scrappy DT work and some paperwork, but this morning, my extra bedroom/office space looks like a giant mess with piles of paperwork everywhere. I'm working on some organizing and updating with work and house files. It's a bit scary right now. Now to finish this project......

2. I have declared this summer the "get it done" summer. I've got big plans to work on lots of in progress projects and cross some of those "someday" to do's off my list. So far I've finished my Week in the Life album and gotten started on the office organization/paperwork project. We'll see how much I actually get done.

3. Spent the morning working on this page for Scrapgal's Summer BBQ Relay Race. I used Studio Calico's Playground kit. I love how it turned out.


4. Looking forward to an upcoming San Diego vacation. Beach here I come!

5. Enjoying the 90 weather and hoping it lasts. Looking forward to a few monsoon storms soon.

6. Hoping we continue to develop a relationship with our new friends whom we BBQ'd with on Sunday. We had a lot of fun at their house.

7. Torn between wanting to read, wanting to knit and wanting to scrap. How to divide my spare time so I can do it all?

8. Working on a fun summer mini album, which I will share some time next week.

9. Contemplating a few sewing projects and hoping I can recruit my mom to help me.

10. Liking my summer schedule, which has me getting home earlier than normal two days a week.

New Do

I finally got my hair done today and it was long over do. I desperately needed highlights and my long hair was driving me crazy. I said to cut it off. Give me something easy to do and fun. Here's what I got. I love it. So fun and summery!

10 Today

1. Met Stephanie at Verde Maison for a little paraben free shopping. Got a new Ahava Body Wash that smells delicious, plus it came with a free canvas bag.

2. Got a cute sweater from Ann Taylor Loft. They have tons of cute stuff right now. I'll need to go back when I have more time to try things on.

3. Lunch with my Dad at Phoenix City Grille.

4. This article that calls music a mega vitamin for the brain and validates NMT (Neurologic Music Therapy).

5. Melody Gardot

6. Just purchased this from roundabout on etsy.


7. Filling my Scrapgal cart with new Making Memories and waiting patiently (or not so patiently) for my DT voucher so I can checkout.

8. As I type this Shawn says to me "Chicken, (yes, he calls me chicken these days...don't ask) je t'aime" to which I reply "je t'aime aussi."

9. Learned one of my clients (7 year old) has taken to drawing pictures of breasts on every piece of paper he can get his hands on and today told me "nurses (what they're calling breasts--he has a baby brother) are private." He's been told he can draw nurses, but they are private parts, so he must also draw a shirt over them. It's a good thing they went with calling them nurses because he's also prone to googling his favorite things and we'd much rather have him finding nurse sites, right? His mom showed me her mother's day card from him, in which he drew a picture of her on one side and a circle with two gigantic "nurses" on the other side. Oh and nurses have "nurse dots" (nipples). So funny.

10. So excited I'm getting my hair done tomorrow...off to look for a fun new haircut. Got any ideas for me?

8 Months Later...

I finally finished my Week in the Life Album this weekend. The pictures and journaling have been done since last October when I finished the week of documenting. The actual album has been sitting in my to do pile ever since. It took me a few hours yesterday to put it all together. I used digital templates from Ali Edwards purchased from Designer Digitals, an old Studio Calico kit and baseball card sleeves. Here's the finished project. Sorry for the not so great photos. I'm on a time schedule this morning and wanted to get this done and posted before I head out for the day.













I like the way the album turned out. If I do this project again, I want to take a ton more pictures. I didn't have nearly as many pictures as I would have liked for this album and several of my shots were not so great. I would also keep a lot more ephemera from the week. I think it would be fun to have food labels, junk mail and other bits of daily life mixed in with the photos. I did a little bit of this, but I hadn't saved very many things.

I am happy to have this little project finished and have looked at it several times since completing it yesterday afternoon. Now if I could only finish my wedding album....

Happy Monday!

It's Important

Saw this on Ally's blog and knew I need to share. This is important stuff. How I wish the masses realized how important.....

It's June

It's that time again...new galleries! The June Scrap for a Cure kit was so fun to work with. I've pretty much used it all up. You've seen a few of my projects so far, but here's the rest of my June gallery.





The June Scrapgal gallery is also up and full of Pink Paislee goodness. This month is "Think Pink" at Scrapgal. Create a page full of Pink Paislee products and you could win a fabulous prize pack donated by Pink Paislee. Here's my page using the gorgeous Fetching line:


I'm so in love with the new October Afternoon, I just had to mix and match papers on this page. It coordinates pretty well with the new KI Memories too. Another Eloise page. She's just too cute to not scrap all the pictures I took of her last month.


In other news, I said goodbye to one of my favorite kiddos today. His family is moving to California. He's been making such good progress and is so fun to work with. I will miss him.
It does free up a coveted afternoon therapy slot. I'll be picking up a new kiddo (or two) soon, which is always an adventure.

Ok, I'm off to read. Am finally getting into Wicked, it's only taken about 80 pages or so.
Happy Wednesday.