Advent

Tomorrow is the first day of Advent and consequently the first day of JYC by Shimelle. I am really looking forward to getting involved in this and hopefully keeping up with at least some of the prompts.

Today I put all the Christmas stash I have in a box so that it is easily accessible and that way I don't have to hunt around for what I have got. I treated myself to some wonderful K & Co paper, chipboard and tags on Thursday and can't wait to start using it. I have lots of Chrismas scrapbooking paper left from a pad I bought a few years ago too so I have no doubt that I have enough. Enough for several years I think.


I also managed to scrap some more of our summer holiday 2007! It has been hanging around so long now that I am bored with it. But - I have only got 3 spreads left to do and it will be finished. It was the trip to Sipan in Croatia. Here are 4 of the pages I did today.




On the top left is our new bedroom! The one we got moved to after the electricity went in our first room.
The one on the top right is the view from our room - this is the terrace where we ate all our meals and you can see how close it was to the sea.
Bottom left is looking from our room window again, but out to sea rather than down at the hotel. You can see how beautiful the Adriatic is!
And bottom right is a view of the front of our hotel. Frank is outside the restaurant that they use for visitors.

As tomorrow is the first day of Advent, Katie and Lizzie will be opening their first present on their calendar. I hope they like the little gifts I have chosen for them.

Journal your Christmas

I have signed up to take part in Shimelle's Journal your Christmas. I am hoping this will give me something to look back on in years to come and remind me of what we were doing in 2008. And hopefully I will take part in future years too.

Christmas has always been a favourite time of year, especially since having children. And even though they are now adults it is still a special time of the year. We very much enjoy each other's company (well I enjoy theirs anyway!) and have lots of laughs doing things together. Some years we go away for Christmas and other years we stay at home and have family around. This year we are staying at home.

I can't wait till December 1st arrives and I can get started on this project. I just hope that I can keep motivated for the whole time. Some friends on an online group are taking part too so we are hoping to motivate each other!

Weekend

For the first time in ages we spent a whole weekend at home!

Frank spent much of the weekend working on his model boat - he will need a new one soon! And I spent some time scrapping some of our US holiday photos. My big problem is deciding which ones to leave out of the layouts, consequently I end up putting most of them in and I think my 2 albums with extra pages won't be enough for the whole 3 week vacation.

The photo on the left is of the Lincoln Memorial from various angles, the one on the right is of the reflecting pool. The bottom photo on this page is of Frank trying to photograph his finger on the top of the Washington Memorial! It didn't quite work out as he planned.

So far I have got to the end of day 2 - 30th March. This was the first of our two days in Washington DC! We visited the White House, Lincoln Memorial and National World War II Memorial.

These two photographs are of the National WWII Memorial. The photo on the left is one of the gateways into the memorial. It took us ages to get the photograph of the fountain without anyone in front of it. The photo on the right is of quotes and carvings. The carvings depict different aspects of the war!

Saturday evening we had invited a work collegue around for dinner, and as he is vegetarian we had a no meat Indian meal. Frank cooked a selection of dishes - Bindi Fry, Stuffed aubergines, dahl, mushroom curry, coconut rice and we had some naan bread too. It was all absolutely delicious.