Mother's Day Cards

Happy belated Mother's Day to everyone who is a mom. Hope it was a good one. Mine was wonderful. Joe made me breakfast, got me lunch and dinner and also had a fun idea for something we could do as a family. We dipped oranges and strawberries in chocolate, then put them in the fridge to harden, to have for dessert. It was a lot of fun and super yummy. I can't wait to do it again soon. For a present he told me I can spend $50 at Michaels AND Joann Fabrics. He wanted me to go there that day, but (I can't believe I'm gonna say this) I didn't need or want anything then, so I took a rain check for when I do. :-)

Elijah also did something for me. He drew me a picture and explained it to me...

Unfortunately, I don't speak "2-year-old", so what it is, is still a mystery to me. All I know is he said "monie" (which is me) while he was explaining it, so maybe one of those blobs is me... I dunno, but I watched him do it and he picked the colors he wanted to use, very carefully, so I know he was making sure I liked it, which I do. I love it.

Now, onto what I made my mom and mother-in-law. I was apparently feeling the 'hanging" type cards this year, so that's what I made.

This card is for my mother-in-law. She likes fat birds, so I try to find different ones to put on her cards. The card stock is Stampin Up. I have no idea what the bird stamp is. I thought I could just look on the card entry from last Mother's Day and find it, but I didn't say what it was. The silver string stuff I found in ACMoore in the ribbon section. The purple ribbon at the top I bought in the dollar section of Target. I colored the bird with purple Colorbox Chalk Ink and a blender pen. Cut the hole with my circle cutter and put a "transparency" behind it. I actually didn't have to buy a whole box of transparencies. They sell clear sheets of paper in ACMoore in the loose paper section. And I think that's it.


This is the card I made my mom. It's from this entry: Dawn's Purse Gift Card Holder

Originally I went through like the video said, but apparently the top part was bigger than it was suppose to be, because I don't have the die, so I got a bracket shape online and sized it to the size I looked up online that it was suppose to be. Well, I'm guessing the measurements were wrong, but anyway, after my not-so-mini crisis (because I was making this at like 2pm on Mother's Day). I came up with a plan, with my sister's help. I had already shaped the bottom, so I took the demensions of the top of it and resized my bracket to fit. It worked! Thankfully. The rest was super easy and took me about 15 minutes to do.

I used the same Stampin Up paper as my bottom for the card. The top is a random sheet of loose paper from ACMoore. The ribbon, again, was from the Target dollar section. I used my crop-a-dile to punch the holes for the ribbon. Little, sticky back, velcro squares to hold it together and a cute big button to make it look like that's what's holding it together. The bag inside is just a cut up sammich bag.

Slip the gift card in and you're all done. The only thing I will do differently when I make another one, is get thicker card stock for the bracket part, so it won't feel like I'm going to rip the paper when I try to open it.

That's all for now. One of these days I'll upload a new video, since Elijah is talking up a storm now. Til next time...

Laminated List

After much thought and searching thousands of pictures on the Internet my laminated list is finally done and ready for your viewing pleasure. Basically the definition of a laminated list is "a list of five people, usually celebrities, whom you would be free to pursue, if the opportunity arose, regardless of whether you were in a relationship or not." Basically it's just a bunch of hot guys who fit various categories.

My sister-in-law, Mandy, and her friends expanded on the list to not only include the top five, but also additional categories. You can find the list and rules at her blog. So without further ado I present my laminated list.

1. Zachary Quinto


You might have seen him on: Heroes and Star Trek


2. Dominic Monaghan


You might have seen him on: LOST and Flash Forward


3. Shia LaBeouf

You might have seen him on: Transformers


4. Joshua Jackson


You might have seen him on: Fringe


5. Johnny Depp


You might have seen him on: Pirate of the Caribbean



The Special Categories:

Barely Legal - Zac Efron

You might have seen him on: High School Musical, Hairspray and 17 Again


Older Men - Cal Ripken Jr.


Played for the Baltimore Orioles


Bad Boy - Joel Madden


A member of the band "Good Charlotte"


Good Guy - Matt Damon


You might have seen him on: Oceans 11 and Saving Private Ryan


Token Ethnic Guy - Will Smith


You might have seen him on: Fresh Prince of Belair, Independence Day and Men In Black


Nerd - Joseph Gordon-Levitt


You might have seen him on: 3rd Rock from the Sun, GI Joe and 500 Days of Summer


Goofball - Adam Sandler


You might have seen him on: The Waterboy, Happy Gilmore and The Wedding Singer


Athlete - Matt Stover


Played for the Baltimore Ravens (I refuse to acknowledge that he plays for another team)


Musician - Brad Paisley


Country music superstar

No one else gets it - Noah Wyle


You might have seen him on: ER


First Love - Joey McIntire

Used to be in the band New Kids on the Block (and still is? I don't keep track)


Singing Voice - Christian Bale


You might have seen him on: Newsies(haha), American Psycho, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight


Speaking Voice - Charles Shaughnessy


You might have seen him on: The Nanny



Fictional Character - Laurie from Little Women




Action Hero - Sam Witwicky from Transformers




Tough Guy - Tobey Maguire


You might have seen him on: Spider-Man


Tortured Soul - Milo Ventimiglia


You might have seen him on: Heroes


Brainiac - Charlie Eppes


You might have seen him on: Numb3ers


But his face - Josh Holloway


You might have seen him on: LOST


Chubby Hubby - Greg Grunberg


You might have seen him on: Heroes


Scruffy - Jake Gyllenhaal


You might have seen him on: Donnie Darko and The Day After Tomorrow


Gay - Elijah Wood


You might have seen him on: Lord of the Rings


Dapper Dan - No clue


Villain - Sylar from Heroes



I hope you enjoyed. If you do or did your own, please post a link, so I can take a look. :-) Until next time...

Smile...

It's FRIDAY!!!

I hope everyone has a great weekend!

My Surprise...

Now, this is the surprise I was hoping to share with you.

"What is it?" You ask. Just press play on the video below to find out....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Czs7GIOMVy0

That's it. I got it done at Shear Genius in Perry Hall Maryland. They cut and styled my hair for free because I'm donating it. The hair is going to the Pantene's Beautiful Lengths program to make wigs to give to cancer patients. I was originally doing Locks of Love, but in researching where I could get my hair cut for it, I found out they sell their wigs at a discounted rate, based on the person's income and they sell the unusable hair. I don't agree with that, so I found another organization to donate to.

That's about it, for now. Hope everyone had a great Easter! Until next time...

A trip to the ER...

So, in my last post when I said I had a surprise, this was not what I had in mind. I guess the surprise was on me. I actually wasn't going to post about this, but the scrapbooker and family historian in me said, "This is a part of Elijah's life, whether you like it or not. Just make it short and sweet and to the point." ... And that's what I shall do.

Thursday night Elijah had a run in with our entertainment center... Literally. The entertainment center didn't have a scratch on it, but Elijah didn't fair as well. He was bouncing on the floor in front of it and lost his footing. He went forward, smacking his mouth on the ledge, and busting his lip open. I yelled for Joe and we practically ran straight out to the car to take him to the ER.

Once we got there they checked us in right away (probably because there was an abundance of blood all over shirts and hands and faces) and took us back in about 20 minutes. He ended up having 5 stitches put in his top lip and we were done.

He needs to get the stitches out on Wednesday and hopefully that will go smoothly.

So, I guess I have surprises for you, God has surprises for me. I can never tell what crazy dramatic situation is going to happen next. Will it be a leak in the basement? The dishwasher breaking? The sink clogging up? My car dying? Hah, been there, done that, but I would have preferred any of those things over rushing my precious little big boy to the ER. The only thing that keeps me sane through all this crap is knowing that God will be with me through all the trials and tribulations of life and he won't give me anything more than I can handle.

Thursday night I learned two things. 1, don't sweat the small stuff. And 2. Don't wait to eat, cause you never know when you'll get to eat again. This whole incident happened -right- as our dinner was finished being cooked. There was no time to grab anything as we were running out the door, so while he was getting stitched up I almost passed out. Fun times... fun times....

Stay tuned for more exciting adventures in the world of Hybrid Simplicity.

Penelope's Birthday Card

The babiest baby of the family, Penelope, turns 1 in a few days, but we celebrated yesterday. This is the card I made her. Every "baby" has an animal that is representative of them. I actually forget what Elijah's is, but I use monkeys and dogs, cause he likes them so much. Charlotte's is a giraffe and Penelope's is a dragon/dragonfly. That is why there are dragonflies on the card.

It would be quite amazing if I could remember all the things I used. All I can really tell you is that the paper is DCWV - Pastels and DCWV - Animal Crackers. I'll update this when I get home with the exact stamp sets for the happy birthday and the hearts on either side. The chipboard letters I got in the dollar section of Target and the dragonflies I got from Target too. I still have some left in the package, I'll update that too. The white gel pen is the Signo broad white gel pen. And the circle cutter I bought about 900 years ago, so I have no clue who makes it or anything.

That's about it. I hope to update more in this thing. I have been working on my Laminated List for about a month now. It only took me about a week to come up with the names, the rest of the time has been made up of me finding the time to search the web for pictures and put them on the post. I hope to have that done sometime this week.... If I'm lucky.

I also have some other surprises in store. So stayed tuned.

Quick Birthday Card

The 7th was Joe's birthday and I had been planning on making him a card, but I never got around to it until about 2pm that day. Elijah did most of the work though:



Originally it was suppose to have more things on it, like a sentiment and buttons... manly buttons of course... and that was about it. However, after Elijah finished "writing" his message on the piece of cut out card stock, I was looking at it and thought that if anything else was on it, it would take away from whatever he did. I like the way it turned out. Inside it said "I told Elijah to write something for your birthday, so he wrote what is on the front of this card. It could mean anything, but I like to think it says, "I love you, daddy".

That's about it out of me. Nothing else going on, except we had a blizzard on Friday and Saturday and Lord only knows how much snow was dumped on us again today. They said on the news that the total for the winter of 2009-2010 is 72" and we are suppose to get more on Monday... When is Spring getting here again?

Elijah's Birthday Party

I don't know where time goes anymore, I actually did a double take at my calendar when I was counting how many weeks it has been since we celebrated. To my surprise it has been over 3 weeks since we had his party. Somehow I still feel the need to share a few pics and videos... cause that's what I do. :-)

Studying the balloons he got from his Grandma Marie

He loved playing with the bear.

But, most of all, he loved -hitting- them and watching them bounce back

Enjoying his McNugget Happy Meal dinner. No veggies included.

Time to open presents

He got lots of cool toys, but he loved his Mickey Mouse Club House train the most out of all the presents he received that day.

He played with it for 45 minutes straight... we timed it.

I think his favorite thing of the night was the singing though. That's where the movies come in:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvbCjoa6ZjA

Ok, so he didn't want the cupcake. You saw that. However, you didn't see him get down from his booster seat, go over to the candle laying on the table and try putting it back in the cupcake. At that point he "made" us sing to him again, so -he- could blow out of the candle:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkvSrBpuhJ0

Hope you enjoyed. I will try to update again soon!

New Years Resolutions

As most people do, at the beginning of each new year, I make a resolution. Although, by definition, resolution isn't really the right word... I make more of a goal for myself for the next year. This year my goal is to pay more attention to Azalea, to pet her more and praise her more and play with her more. Because these past 2 years she has kinda just been... there. Elijah took precedence, as he should, but I still feel like I've been semi-neglecting her. So far this year... all 14 days of it... I've been doing better.

As it turns out, I wasn't the only one who made a resolution... Joe made one too. His, well our, resolution is to not eat out at all this year. That includes delivery and pickup. If it doesn't come from a grocery store, we don't eat it. Now there are exceptions to the rule. If we have a gift card, it doesn't count. If someone else pays, it doesn't count. And if it's a birthday or special event (ie our anniversary) it doesn't count. Before I tell you how wonderfully we are doing, I must say this is one of the hardest resolutions ever, for me. After working all day it's so easy to just pull up to McDonalds or order some Chinese to be delivered. No cooking and no dishes to clean, sounds like a dream... With a big price tag.

But anyway, even though it's hard things have been going well. Joe even made something new a week or so ago. He made his dad's chili... a double batch, so we could freeze it and it would be an easy dinner later on. And because I know how we are with "What's in the freezer? I don't know. Let's just order something", I made this list on the white board on our fridge:



So at a glance you can see everything that is available for cooking.

And last, but not least, it looks as though Elijah has made a resolution also. He has tried more new foods this month than he probably has, before, in his entire life. Ok, maybe not that many... but what is more amazing is that after he tries them, he eats the whole thing that was given to him. He has had fish, meatballs, triscuits and pretzel sticks to name a few. Last night he even ate pizza. Actually, there was -one- thing that he tried and ended up throwing on the floor, it was peas. I totally don't blame him for this, I hate peas also, so I think I'll give him a pass on that one. Hopefully he'll continue to try new things and make meal time a whole lot easier.

That's about it, a few resolutions and some progress on each. We shall see what the rest of the year brings and maybe at the end of the year I'll post an entry saying how they all went... If I remember.

Two!

My precious little baby doll turns two today!

We are celebrating tonight... and because everyone in the family gets to pick a birthday dinner, but he can't really talk yet, we decided he would get a McNugget Happy Meal for his dinner. I think he will love it and he doesn't even have to have any veggies if he doesn't want them.

After dinner we are having cupcakes... and cookies (Nutter Butters) because he loves cookies. Opening presents will be last, but I'm sure his favorite part of the day. He got in plenty of practice at Christmas, so he should be rarin to go.

I'll post pics of his birthday celebration later this week and might even have a video or two to share also. Happy New Year, everyone... A little late.