Captured by Reb.L.: It's huge!

'bout time I did an update here, which means this is a long one.
This post is backdated because I typed it all up but we went over our internet limit for the month so I couldn't upload this. Now I have my connection back so I'm playing catch up, all over the place.
It's been a busy month creatively speaking.
Firstly though, Alex is well, active, happy and chatty. He is talking all the time now, about everything. As I type he is in bed talking to himself, it sounds like he is discussing chocolate milk with his teddy (he should be asleep, Alex that is not teddy). It's quite amazing some of the things he comes up with and the connections he makes. He spoke to Jim and Elin on the phone on the weekend and said 'Hello Uncle Jim' and 'Heydoor Auntie Elin'. It didn't come out quite like that, Elin was more like Elinlinlin :) He also got to say 'Gday Mate' to some friends who visited from Texas!
We are persisting with toilet training. He is really good at using the potty but not at telling us when he needs to. So I find myself asking him every 10 mins if he needs to go. This may take longer than I expected.
Alex has been doing a lot of this

and some of this

Alex is turning 3 in just a couple of weeks!

Check out the flowers on my coffee plant. Looks like we might be in for a good crop! An unexpected bonus is they smell really nice. I had no idea coffee plants were scented. They even smell good at night!

Alex stayed with my parents on the weekend so Graham and I could go photo hunting. We went to the Australia Day dawn balloon rise. Got there at 5:30am in the dark, in time to watch the balloons being filled before the lift off. We spent a few hours shooting and ended up with
soaking wet shoes and trousers from the dew. There were a lot of people taking photos. I had to laugh at the ones carrying around huge tripods and huge external flashes. I don't know how much of a balloon they expected their flash to light up. I just bumped my ISO up to 1250 to
cope with the low light. A lot of people are afraid to use a high ISO because if noise/grain but as long as you get your exposure right there shouldn't be much noise difference between 100 and 1000 ISO. It's when the photos are underexposed that you get noise problems. Graham and I
traveled light, a camera each, a lens on each and one spare to cover wide, long and mid range, and that was it. Other stuff like spare batteries and memory cards we left in the car. We didn't need the batteries and when I filled my memory card I just took Grahams off him :p
The balloons were stunning, huge and colourful and so beautiful when the sun finally hits them.

We ran into some friends there and went out for breakfast with them afterwards.

It was quite nice to have a meal without a toddler playing with his food. Got home about 9am. Not a bad morning.
Camera club starts again tomorrow. It's a talk though, which we've heard before so we'll skip this week. The first meeting next month is about black and white photography so I'm interested in that one.
Gymbaroo starts next week for Alex. He is doing so much dancing and singing at home now, he will love to get back to Gymbaroo.

OK the creative news.
I'm now actively doing digital scrapbooking. I've been doing the occasional layout for the last few years but never participating in the whole sharing side of the digiscrap world. Now I can't get enough of it. I know some people (Hi Mom) think it's silly and childish but I enjoy the creativity of it and it's something I can do with all my photos. I've also met a great bunch of people online and I'm enjoying my new virtual social life.
I signed up to GDS (a large digital scrapbooking site) a while ago but only ever browsed there but the beginning of the month I jumped in with both feet to compete in their Supreme Team Contest. I didn't expect to get anywhere, wasn't sure I'd even be interested enough to get my first entry in but the offer of a free digital kit was enough to get my attention :) For each round we we given a digital kit from one of the GDS designers and had to make a layout using only that kit and our photos and journaling.
Well I've made it through to round 4 of the competition, the last one. Tomorrow I'll find out if I'm one of the 12 winners. I think we started with 158 contestants from all over the world so I feel pretty privileged to have made it all this way.
Along the way I've been doing every one of their monthly challenges I can. I can't get enough of them. The challenges inspire me. There was even a Queen of the Crop challenge that meant doing 10 layouts in day with a limit of 2 hours to be spent on each. Each one had a theme to
conform to. Quite a challenge but I did it and my layout for the theme 'green' got me a January Queen of the Crop award :)
There also a project 365 going which is a photo a day so I get to keep up the daily photos with themes that make me think outside the box.
There is some amazing work to see in the galleries there and the members are so encouraging in their feedback. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
I've joined 3 Creative Teams! Wont mean much to non-scrappers but to anyone in the scrapping world it's pretty special to be on a designers CT. So I'm now doing layouts for Amy Fenner, ScrapShana and Theresa Borntreger :)
and I have blinkies!

and I've signed up for something called the Amazing Digiscrapping Race (on another site) which starts next month. My partner is from Texas so we are the Tex Aus Coast Girls. It sounds like fun. Here's the official description.

'Teams of two will traverse the digital scrapping world, site by site, completing challenges and collecting prizes along the way. Everyone who completes the week's challenges in the allotted time frame will move on to the next week, where they can collect even MORE prizes! And at the end of the race, everyone who has traveled around the digiworld and completed each and every challenge will be entered into a drawing for the GRAND prize!'

Here's some of my digiscrapping layouts.
I posted my round post entry for the supreme team earlier so here's round 2 using Leslie Emery's Pocketful of Posies kit

Credits here
and round 3 using Theresa Borntreger's My Shining Star kit

Credits here
and the final round using Helen Ehrenhofer's Mom's Diner kit.

Credits here
One I did for the colour challenge. We had a set of pastel colours to work with.

Credits here
This one is using ScrapShana's Blue Jean Baby kit

Credits here
Check this out too. A different look but all from the same kit.

Credits here
and for the previous colour challenge. Much bolder colours.

Credits here
The cover for my legacy book. This is a long term challenge where we will do a page each month.

Credits here.
This one I did using the January Collab kit and it was chosen for the scraplift challenge which means people were challenged to create a layout using mine for inspiration.

Credits here
It's been really interesting to see what everyone came up with. Some layouts are very similar, right down to the same papers and frames, and others are so different I wouldn't have picked them as a scraplift of this. Of course I wanted to do this challenge too so I had to scraplift myself. I kept the basic idea of paper, 2 journaling mats and clustered frames and came up with this one using Amy Fenner's I Heart You kit.