I have been  working on my design skills in Photoshop, and while experimenting I created these two simple Christmas Card templates that I am happy to offer free to my readers.  These templates are in psd format and can be used by anyone with Adobe Photoshop CS5 or PSE.

To use the templates, users will need to be able to use clipping masks.  The best tutorial I have found for beginning users is from The CoffeeShop Blog.  Rita, the author also has a ton of other wonderful tutorials, Actions, templates and other digital design freebies.  She is one of the first and best sources I have found when I first started using Photoshop, and wonderfully a lot of her stuff works or can be adapted for PSE users. 


These templates are free for anyone for personal usage, but not for use in commercial ventures, be it selling these templates as your own, using them for photography clients, or using the images in these samples. 




To download Template #1 click here then right click on the file and select "Extract All." 

Image Credit: Carrie Weston Photography

Just a few scant weeks into the beginning of Mommie School/ Pre-Homeschooling Noah I came to a realization.  I was waaay too overplanned for what I was wanting to do with him.  Worked into my schedule were two week and one week themes, which made sense during the planning phase of summer.  I wanted to have one theme per alphabet letter and follow a  lot of the Tot School and other online curriculum for toddlers was guiding me to.

However, with only one child  and the abundance of  activities and games available out there, I was finding it hard to print it all, ready it all and to keep Noah's attention to simple do the number of good activities out there during our daily time down in the family room.  So my choice was to either forget some activities or forget some themes: I opted for the latter.

Not that the information out there on Tot School and other sites is bad, but for us I really wanted to opt for a more relaxed plan for this special time.  I want Noah to know that the time I spend teaching him is, from the beginning, a time for him to explore and have fun, and that I am willing to learn at his pace and in the way that suits us best.  I want to be spending more time with him and less time planning and cutting and laminating (although I do love my laminator that the Hubs got me for my birthday a ridiculous amount.)

So we found ourselves with a second week of Apples in my revised plan, and we had a wonderful time outside playing in the apples at Minnetonka Orchards with a great group I am involved with from Meetup.com.  It is a haul from up here in the north metro of the Twin Cities, but it was a wonderful getaway from our daily routine and Noah loved the trees, the train play-structure as well as the animals in the small farm area.





We rounded out our week's activities with one of the classic preschool apple activities- apple painting.  Noah used the halved apples for stamping, but actually enjoyed using a brush to paint the apples themselves more than anything.  Noah is still somewhat phobic when it comes to getting his hands sticky, so I like to allow him the freedom to use a brush or use his hands when it is time to get messy. 

(This is also one of the last activities we did on our old breakfast table that we recently replaced.  Chair recovering and table refinishing posts coming soon!) :)

Whew-- I haven't posted one of these in a long time, but I am so over the blogger guilt for not posting, when really I am writing this blog as a creative outlet and a way to share our life with family and friends we are far from.  No blog boss is going to come along and chastise me for not posting.

Nevertheless, I am trying to get back into sharing these, because Noah really is too gorgeous not to share. ;)  After the photos I've shared recently though it is beginning to look to you all like Noah is a silly, clumsy little boy who is constantly sticking things in his ears, when really he is pretty coordinated and a pretty good little dancer to boot.

Buddy, next week's photo will show what a suave, cool dude you are-- Mommie promises!

Confession time:  I am one of those people. You know-- the type that gets their fall decorations and holiday goodies out way too soon.  I listen to Christmas music before Thanksgiving, and as soon as August ended, I opened up my Pinterest board full of fall digital freebies and got to work in our living room.


It has been a mission of mine to actually use the wonderful tutorials and freebies that I spend hours looking over and downloading from that very addictive site, and I have loved all of the inspiration that Pinterest has given me, as well as being a great way to find money saving ideas for decorating my home for the holidays.  One of the first things I have done is decorate a pair of display shelves in the living room where I regularly rotate out seasonal decor. 

I created the Frankenstein's Monster and Witch silhouettes using these printable and free spooky templates from BHG.  I simply downloaded and printed the outlines, and used them as stencils on two Halloween-ey scrapbook papers that I picked up in the Dollar Spot at Target on clearance last year after the holiday.  Using inexpensive frames I already had on hand (in fact one of these is usually up there with another image in it) I was able to further increase my savings and decrease the amount of seasonal decor. I have to store. 

I am also adorning my living room with a flock (is that the right word?) of spooky black bats using this template from Country Living.  These easy to make bats are created by borrowing a few pieces of my son's construction paper (or scrapbook paper) and folding, tracing and cutting.  I then used some painter's tape to fasten the creepy things to the walls. 

I admit, this is a bit early to begin decorating for Halloween, even for our holiday- happy family like ours, but due to a lot of schedule shuffling and a crazy work schedule for the Hubs, we are going to be in and out of town so much this autumn that I need to enjoy it while I can.  And I am also adding more to the decorations that won't have to come down once November hits. 

Back to crafting!

This week marks the first full week of my pre-homeschooling Noah.  I have struggled with what to even call it, because obviously he is too young for traditional school, but he is to the point of loving more structured play and games. 

We began last week with calendar, stories and games.  I am keeping it simple and only working with Noah for as long as he is interested in the activities I have planned.  I have been pleasantly surprised with how much he seems to look forward to these times, and with how he is always excited whenever I say, "Noah, should we go downstairs and play some games?" 

"Okay!"  (For some reason this is how he always answers when we ask him if he wants to do something.  We're working on a more polite version, but this is so cute I'm not trying too hard.)

We are beginning with the classic preschool first theme of Apples, and doing apple crafts, counting apples and most of all-- eating apples.  There have been several activities that just haven't happened, either because of Noah's 2 year old attention span, or because he happens to be teething and just wants a, "Cu-ddle," which is the main thing he needs at his age. 

Typically we do an extremely simple calendar, where he puts the number on the calendar, we sing the days of the week, a few other songs and read a few stories.  Then we play a few games which transitions into working in the rest of the room. 

One of Noah's favorite activities is looking in his nature bowl.  We put things that he has collected on recent walks in the bowl along with some magnifying glasses and a couple paint brush.  You wouldn't believe how dirty those stones seem to be and how much cleaning they need.  :)  I will be occasionally adding water to this to add another sensory element and let him brush the rocks, twigs etc. and notice the changes in color and feel. 

One word of caution-- be sure that the acorns, rocks etc. have no bugs or other things growing on them or you could have quite a mess.  Sadly in a few short weeks we will not have to worry as much as temperatures drop and the world outside begins to hibernate.  A nature table or bowl is a great way to avoid having anything hatch in your little one's room and confine the collecting to a reasonable amount.  As a child I was always known for gathering a bit too many rocks and things from the outdoors.  I soon had to keep my collection under the deck of my parent's home, where many of my former treasures remain to this day.

Sadly, I am so backed up with work and home that I have been negelcting you, my few readers, lately.  I have been so busy with doing the photo editing I have to do, that I haven't had much time for the posting the photos of things I simply have wanted to be doing.

I am going to endeavor to catch up over the next few days, but I feel in saying that that I am committing one of the blogging deadly sins.  It seems like every time I read a blog that hasn't been updated recently the last post is filled with exhortations of how they pledge to keep up better with posting and how they have so much to write about in the next months.

In this case I will let my photos do the speaking for me on our trip to the State Fair in all of its Minnesota- wonderfulness.

You know those blogs and people that inspire you?  Those that don't just do fun crafts, but those that try to foster a spirit of creativity in their readers?  Wish I was more like that.  However, Patty Schaffer-- the wonderful blogger of Capture the Details, who I recently found through Pinterest is one of those women.  I love her eye for color combinations in general, and when she began creating color swatches based on photos the "details" in life I was really hooked. 

And, of course, I wanted to create one of my own.  The photo I chose was from a recent landscape photography session I did.  This vase was sitting on my client's wonderful long porch-- the kind with rocking chairs an a sweet little table perfect for curling up with tea and a book on a cool summer evening. (Sigh)  I wanted to capture the beauty of the flowers, but I am also loving the way that the light green of the stems in the vase seems to be glowing within the darker glass.

 These color explorations can be used in selecting colors in digital scrapbooking and design, choosing the right paint colors for your home, or fabric for quilting or other crafts.  Coming soon will be a template so that you can create these yourself, and I am kind of hooked on making these.  I am so excited to take these colors and put them into play in other ways!

Over the summer we have been taking it pretty easy-- busy summer schedule or swimming and park visits not included.  However, summer is coming to a close and with it Noah and I will be moving into a time of more focused learning and reading.  
I won't say that we are homeschooling per-se, but we are at least going to be using this year to pursue the possibility and see how it feels.   A part of that is having a greater sense of a theme, and with it thematic books.  However, I have been debating how I would like to present these books to Noah.  We aren't in a formal classroom, and I don't think that he would flourish under falsely created school-like conditions.  Instead I have been looking for a way to make sure that we are really getting to know the stories that we are pulling from our shelves and the library shelves and get to know the characters therein. 

Imagine my delight to come across a recent post at The Imagination Tree detailing her weekly link party of 5 In a Row Books.  As Anna Ranson on Imagination Tree states,

"The idea is that you choose 5 titles from among your usual books (or from the library) and read them every single day for at least a week....short picture books which feature strong rhythm and/ or repeated refrain so that the children can quickly memorise the words and join in with the story-telling. This empowers them to be able to "read" and re-tell stories from a young age, and also makes them very fluent in a range of text types and literature styles."

It is great to see other families interested in this and read of their experiences with reading the same books over and over for a week and seeing how their child responds.  Now, reading at least 5 a day isn't a problem out here for Momma Weston.  Often Noah will move between Jim and I having a book read 2 or three times in a row, and every night he knows he gets 4 books before bed, and catches me on it if I try to skimp. 

Some nights when I am exhausted before we go in there to read I wish I had set it up from the beginning as 3 before bed, but most nights I am curious what he will choose and excited as he notices more and more detail in the illustrations.  I won't be limiting myself at bedtime to read these selections every day, but it helps to have that built in time to focus on Noah and his burgeoning love of the written word.

Reading 5 a day is no issue, but it will be a challenge to be faithful and read each of these books every day, as Noah is lately scattered in his book choices, where he used to want to read the same books every day several times for months.  (I'm a bit happy to have the variety.) 

For our first week I am picking books from Noah's regular selections that he has been choosing lately and as we proceed into the month of September I will try to choose books more on theme.

Tonight was my second day of reading all 5, and this evening Noah had a minor meltdown at bedtime.  His Da is working a show at the Convention Center right now, which means he
 is up and away before Noah wakes, working the weekend and staying later in the evening, and Noah was enjoying some Da-snuggle time on the couch when it was time to go to bed and he wasn't very happy, but the meltdown showed just how much he needed the sleep. 

But, I digress.  I asked him what he wanted to read as his first book; usually something transportation themed wins out, but tonight he sniffed and told me,  "Bunny-- flower."  It took me a minute, but then I realized he had been speaking of Margaret Wise Brown's adorable book about a Mother Bunny whose son is threatening to run away. In one page her little one tells her that he will hide as a crocus in a hidden garden, and she tells him that if he does that, she will follow and be a gardener. 

Yup, after a meltdown all that would soothe my usual rough and tumble boy is reading about a bunny that turns into a flower-- he even sniffs the pages of books when he sees flowers on them, which is about the most adorably, achingly cute thing ever! 

Our Selections:

The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown

Curious George and the Bunny  by H.A. Rey

5 Little Monkies Jumping on the Bed by Eileen Christelow

5 Little Ducks Went Out One Day by Pamela Paparone

Bill Grogan's Goat byMary Ann Hoberman

Recently I have had a renewed longing to have the Word of God around me on a daily basis.  Before I was a mom, I never had the issue of finding time to set apart for prayers during the day, and now that I am busy with a little one and everything else I find the old adage is true: I really am "too busy not to pray."

 And to accomplish this I and working to have more verses up around my house that are encouraging reminders of the importance of the joyful spirit I am supposed to have.

One of my favorite verses of all time was one that I knew I needed up -- Zephaniah 3:14-15.  At a very difficult time in my life this verse was very impactful and spoke to me as a young woman.  This file contains the verse in the version you see here as well as aversion on white with turquoise accents-- just in case you were looking to save a bit of ink from your printer. :)  It is in both jpeg and PDF formats for you to download for your personal use.

If you happen to download this image and print it out, I would love to see where you have it displayed, so feel free to leave your link in the comments below!

 Noah and I took advantage of the lovely weather we've been having at the end of this summer to full advantage.  We have had one of the hottest/coldest/wettest/ most humid summers I've seen and there has always been something interfering with us enjoying ourselves too much.  In fact, even tonight it has been storming here in Fridley. 

However, this morning was sunny and beautiful and mercifully in the low 80s for a trip to nearby Eidem Homestead-- a historical farm of the city of Brooklyn Park that was having a free event.  In spite of some serious busyness we couldn't pass up the chance to see real animals.

After wandering and seeing the sheep, goats, cow, chickens and ducks, we met up with Sharon and her son Matthew, who are members of a Meetup group I am involved in.  Our boys hadn't seen each other in quite some time, but in that way that little kids do, they were back to being friends in seconds.  Matthew took Noah by the hand and led him to the farm's large sleigh and they spent quite some time figuring out how to best conquer the mountainous wooden seat.  There was some unintentional apple eating from one of the apple trees on the property, and our stroller was almost eaten by a goat, but Noah was so brave with touching and feeding the animals and no fingers were eaten, so a wonderful morning was had by all.