Not quite a month this time......

Gosh a lot has happened in the last few weeks. Keelan, Ethan and Mitchell celebrated their 10th birthday with a Laser Skirmish party and had lots of fun. Bruce and I congratulated each other for managing to survive 10 years of triplet boys...... LOL!

The day after their birthday on Australia Day, which happens to be a public holiday here in Australia, the boys started school for the year. They have gone into year 5 and again we have kept them in separate classes. Mitchell has Keelan's teacher from last year, Keelan has the teacher that Ethan started with at the beginning of last year before his class was split up and Ethan has gone into a class with a teacher that I have not dealt with much before. Ethan is lucky to have his fourth male teacher during his Primary school years. That's a mean feat these days with the lack of male teachers around. He manages so well with them too and most do more PE classes so he enjoys the additional running around.

Have had a few crop nights already for the year and the attendance has been on the increase which is a pleasant surprise. We have had our back room tiled now so the couches are gone from my scrap area which has made room for a rearrange of storage and added an extra table and a wall unit. The best thing too is that the new room is now complete and it houses the Lego, keyboard and old TV and wall unit so no more Wii in someone's bedroom which reduces the arguements.

So much for my plan of hosting exchange students again this year...... my younger of my step-sons is moving back home in April. It will be strange having him back in the house after 10 years of only having the triplets at home. Still, he has offered to cook from time to time and look after the boys too when we have to go out on the odd occasion. Haven't quite got my thoughts in line yet for this whole idea but I guess it should work out.

I have even managed to maintain some creativity amongst all the moving furniture and starting the school year, so here are my shares to catch up on.

At Home & Scrapped, we have a Wednesday Night Scrapover on the second Wednesday of the month so this is the "Follow the Leader" challenge made with some lovely Lime Rickey papers and some scraps.

This is the layout for Heather's sketch from the same night using more Lime Rickey..... Have I mentioned that I like Lime Rickey?

We also had a Page kit swap at Home & Scrapped which the lovely Ange from New Zealand sent to me. I uploaded the photos I wanted to use and she chose the kit of papers, embellishments and cardstock.

I use a Pagemaps sketch as a basis for my layout and this is what I created with the kit. I have saved a little of it for another layout that I will do later of Ethan and the fish he caught....

This month Heather challenged us with a double page layout that had inchies on it. Now, inchies are not really my thing but I had some old strips of bits that I had created in a class on how to make serendipity squares back in 2006 so I used those as my base and just distressed them a lot to take the intense colour from them a little. I was quite happy with them in the end.

This month of Feb. the colour challenge at Home is Teal, lemon and chocolate. Those colours were not too difficult to find in my stash and this is the layout I came up with. Only to notice that I had forgotten to include her little added extra of three pieces of ribbon or braid. So, will think about that for a day or two an add to it in a subtle way.

Back to January's CC at Home & Scrapped, where Jules challenged us all to create a layout using a poppet. Now this really was a challenge for me....... I'm not into poppets at all so found a colouring page image and traced it on to various pieces of patterned paper and pieced it to look like Wonder Woman. Luckily I had a photo that came close to looking in the right direction to finish it off. Not sure that Wonder Woman ever needed glasses though!

Kim threw us the challenge to use a rule or law on our page and boy are there some funny ones around if you google them. I had an old pack of American Tradition stickers that had this rule about dressing which I certainly thought suited Ethan in his younger years. It reads: I have always dressed according to certain basic Guy fashion rules, including both of your socks should always be the same colour or at least both be fairly dark.

This is another of Heather's sketches which I turned on its side to suit my pics. Never ask the kids to take photos of you playing tennis as you never know which angle it is going to be from.

This was a leftover layout from the Scrap of Difference CC in January which had the new beginnings theme. It was the word challenge that required us to use the word "new" on our layout.

My final share is the layout that I created for the Pagemaps paper call using some lovely Max's backyard papers from Cloud 9 and some Finley's estate words and stamps. These are some photos of Ethan and I in the pool in Cairns back on our holiday in November.

I'm procrastinating tonight over doing some Christmas cards for Fab's challenge blog as I am already behind for the year. I have some lovely new stamps that arrived today from Stamps of Life by Stephanie Barnard which I am looking forward to playing with. Maybe tomorrow.... so I don't have to cut papers for a card class this Friday.

Catch ya later....