The weekend that was ...

... busy, busy, busy. I:

• did a truck load (Lachie would probably say it was a B Triple Road Train's worth of washing - that kid has farming on the brain) of washing, folding and ironing
• did a stack of planning for the coming weeks at school - happy with the tweaking to my Modern History unit for the Year 12's
• took the boys to Milo Cricket Saturday morning and then to soccer sign-ups (why oh why did I cave ... cricket season is almost done which means that Sat morning sleep-ins were going to be mine again but alas with soccer starting, that is no longer the case
• watched the first crops of the summer season get harvested
• went through over half a tank of fuel driving back and forth around the farm, dropping the boys off to the headers, picking them up, taking lunches over for everyone, helping move gear from one paddock to the next
• listened to my little farmer boy recount all of his adventures in the header, road train and chaser-bin (a large grain bin towed behind a tractor)
• took myself off for a little photoshoot over where Tony and the others were harvesting
• DROPPED MY CAMERA FROM THE TOP STEP OF THE HEADER :-( I think it is ok - took a few shots after the 'fall' and all appeared to be working well. I guess time will tell.

Some random farm photos:

This is a cotton boll. It starts off as a little square, then a flower and finally the boll emerges. Eventually, the crop will be defoliated (sprayed out) to kill off all the leaves and dry the bolls out so they crack open and let the cotton be seen.
Photo Two: A paddock of cotton - this crop is still over a month away from defoliation. The crop is looking ok for a dryland crop and considering the terrible start to the season with the flooding. Photo Three: one of the paddocks of sorghum which was harvested today. If you look real closely, you can see where part of it has actually being harvested before I got there. This paddock actually spent a great deal of time underwater during December and January due to all the flooding. The yield is not all that great but at least there is something to harvest - a lot of farmers don't even have that this year.
I also participated in my first cyber crop in over twelve months at Scrapbook Savvy which helped my confirm my earlier suspicions that teachers are the WORST people to get to follow instructions (well this teacher is the worst anyway lol).
I completed three of the challenges - the blind scrap (the instruction one), Kerryn's English 101 challenge and Anthea's Maths Challenge. I can't show the LO for the Blind scrap just yet but here are some pics of the others.
Kerryn's English 101 layout: we had to have journalling that added up to at least 100 words. I wrote about how I have finally come to accept the reality that I will never have a little girl and that pink will never live in our house. We also had to have a poem - I chose the nursery rhyme, "What little boys are made of" - seemed to suit the theme well.

Anthea's Maths Challenge: we had to scrap to Einstein's E=MC2 equation. Each element was a different part of the equation. I loved this challenge and I am fairly happy with the result: If you are interested, you can follow the links above to read the details of each of the challenges. You can also head over to my gallery at 2 peas for more detailed pictures of each of the layouts.
Wow so that was one massive photo overload. If you are still here, congratulations on actually making it to the end. I will be back in a few days to post pictures of the Blind Scrap layout. Hope you all had a great weekend too.
Cheers,
S xoxoxo

... and we interrupt this to return to normal programing ...

Yes believe it or not Telstra has actually come through for a change - sorry Telstra but you really do leave a lot to be desired for us country customers - and I have a brand new modem. What was supposed to be at least a week with no internet turned out to be a few days which is awesome news for me!!!! Here I was thinking that I would be lost in a deep black hole of no technology forever (ok a little over-dramatic but for a moment, I thought the world was coming to an end hehehehehehe).
Modem arrived this afternoon and was very quickly installed. Weekly swim club interrupted my progress so I am only just getting back to reinstalling now.
It was a busy weekend on the scrap front - 4 layouts which for me is lots of scrapping at once. Yes I know that I will never win any prizes for the speed of my scrapbooking but at least it is 4 more pages done.
Layout One: Mitch and Lach's new school shoes for the 2011 school year (well hopefully they will last a semester. Both boys have large feet for their ages and I can tell I am going to be kept poor buying shoes for them. There is nothing better than pristine new school shoes:


Layout 2: Ready 2 go. I didn't think I was going to get the boys to cooperate long enough for me to get some 'nice' back-to-school photos. Not perfect in the professional sense, but they are perfect for me. The layout is based on this months Scrap the Girls sketch - yes I know it was for STG but when you don't have girls, you just have to make do LOL:

Layout 3: Simple scrapping is what I love best and there is nothing more simple than this LO:

Layout 4: This was a MAJOR cause for celebration - the arrival of my very first Scrapbook Savvy Monthly Kit AAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNDDDDDDDDDDDD it arrived within 2 days of me ordering it. Cannot get better service than that IMO. I ordered the 'We're Savvy' kit and I am totally stoked with its contents. I have only done one layout using the kit so far but have a few others planned - just need to find the time to do some scrapping:

Not a lot else to report - the start of the week has been very quiet, except for the exciting news that SM picked up one of my double layouts for publication - first time ever for a double!! Here's hoping the rest of the week stays quiet so I can squeeze some scrapping in somewhere.
Chat soon,
S xoxoxoxox

Telstra ... why oh why do you do this to me?? no net for a week

Telstra ... why oh why do you do this to me??

First Scrap Shares for 2011

Wow, who would have thought that it would have taken me this long to get back into the scrapping swing of things. I went to a crop night at my LSS on Saturday and worked on two layouts - who needs to scrap when there is talking and gossiping to be done??!! Between catching up on everyone's news from the Christmas/New Year period and telling them about my time in the States, time flew by.
The first LO uses one of the pictures I took when the boys were busy burying each other in the sandpit (see previous post). Love this photo. Think I am going to have to enlarge it and frame it for my wall somewhere. Very simple layout - great way to break the scrapping drought.


The second layout uses pictures from Lachlan's first day of school this year. My little baby is in Year One (where has the time gone???). He was so excited to be at school again, ready to learn. As always, he was super excited to pose for the camera. Good thing he let me go overboard with pictures because his older brother didn't want to have a bar of it. Totally love the stickers from October Afternoon's Report Card collection, especially the one with the space for handwriting. It will be great to look at what Lachie's writing used to be like.

Nothing else to show. I am in the middle replanning my scrap area and am contemplating the idea of moving out to the formal dining room/lounge (which we don't really use as the formal lounge). Upside is that it has more room than my little office and I am out with the family; downside is that the room is all open-plan so no dividing wall between the two areas so I have to keep it super tidy - the house is not ours but comes as part of DH's job package so can't make any structural changes. I have moved my desk out for a trial run to see if I like this new set-up or not - only time will tell. Any tips/ideas greatly appreciated, especially from those of you who live in a rental/work house and have successfully created a scrap space in your family areas.
Cheers
Sarah xoxoxo

My boys

The boys and I spent last weekend all by ourselves here on the farm because Daddy had to head out to other farms (about 2 1/2 hours away) to do some spraying.

We had fun - we ate Nachos (something we don't eat if Daddy is going to be home for dinner), we played with Lego, Thomas and all the John Deere toys, we played Connect Four (a newly discovered passion of Lachie), we played on the Wii, we went to a birthday party, we mowed some of the lawn (only managed to get 1/3 of it done and I spent close to 3 1/2 hrs on the mower - first time parts of the yard have been mowed since the first lot of flooding the week before Christmas) and the boys spent hours in the sandpit. Their latest game involves seeing how deep they can bury their legs as well as all the toys. There was laughter, there was shouting, there were fights, but mostly there was fun. At the end of the day, the boys asked if I could take some photos of them. I got heaps of the 'burial chamber' but I love these ones the most:

They look so sweet and innocent - looks can be VERY deceiving lol!

My littlest man is the cheekiest monkey. Never takes anything too seriously and happily told my mum that he was 'really enjoying his little vacation from Daddy.' Not sure where he got that idea from but it made Mum and I chuckle.

My biggest little man is growing and changing so much. He has the most extraordinary imagination. I love sitting behind the curtain in my bedroom (the closest room to the sandpit) and listening to him playing his games. I have no idea where he comes up with his games or schemes for doing things.

Finally, after the boys went to bed late on Sunday night, I played around in Photoshop a little bit and created this for my diary cover:

The collage is made up of a snapshot of photos taken during 2010. Sometimes it is hard to work full-time and I know that by choosing to work, I have missed out on some things with the kids but I look at these photos and realise that I haven't missed out on too much because there are soooooooooooooo many great memories to be found just there.
Still no scrapping :( as I am snowed under with planning and preparation. Hoping to cut the school work ties over the weekend and do a little something for me.
Cheers,
Sarah