A good day

It has been a good day (so was my birthday but I don't have time to write about that now).
Alex is at pre-school

So it's just Ben and myself today. Ben has had a good day so far. He slept well which gave me time to redecorate the blog and take down the Christmas theme I had. Do you like the new look? I made it myself.
Ben watched for a while and we played peek-a-boo around the camera :)

I think he likes his new bib :)
Now It's time fetch the golden child.

Ben is asleep and I hate to wake him to go out :(

Some photos

Well I have an awful lot to catch up on and no, I'm not going to do it now. I still have memory cards full of photos I haven't even looked at yet. I have to take down the Christmas decorations here and I haven't even done our Christmas cards and letter yet! OK so it's a bit late for cards but I still have hope of getting our yearly letter done and some photos printed.

Meanwhile, I wanted to share some photos from yesterday :)

Ben is sooooo beautiful! He may not be all golden like Alex, in fact it looks like he will have my colouring, but he is beautiful! He is growing so well and getting better every day at holding his head up and he loves being in a sitting position so he can see everything. He is very vocal and does a great imitation of 'hello' with 'eh oh'. He is just 4 months old now or nearly 3 corrected and about 5kgs. His umbilical hernia is getting smaller now as his stomach muscles get stronger with all the sitting he is doing and he is doing a great job of stretching out his tongue tie. His smiles light up the room and he is almost laughing. I am sooooo proud.

Alex is being brilliant, charming and cheeky as usual. His reading is just amazing, he loves clocks, the internet and we have to start each day checking the calendar and the weather. For Christmas I got him a set of magnetic words, words that are apparently required learning for the end of 1st grade, so he should know them by the end of 2011. Well forget that! I started putting them on the fridge with the idea being to give him one word until he'd learnt it and then another on another day until he mastered both and so on and so on. Well he knew the first word as soon as he saw it. I didn't have to tell him what it was at all. I have no idea where he learnt it either. Same with the next one and the next one etc. until we got to 'you'. That he didn't know. By then half the pack in on the fridge so I left he with those. Next day I rearranged them several times and asked him to read them to me. He got them all including 'you' so he got another word and another etc. until we got to 'away'. So we've left it there for now. He keeps saying 'away' as 'that way' :)

Alex starts pre-school this year for 2 days a week, Wednesday and Fridays. Starting this week so I get a bit of peace and quiet for my birthday :)

OK here's the photos. I'll post more news and stuff about Christmas when I've got more time, Ben is due for another feed now. Look how big he is now!

That lump sticking out of his belly is not rude, it's his hernia. He is getting so good at holding his head up now :)

Alex got a bouncing ball thingy for Christmas so this is what he did yesterday.

And here's some photos from Christmas day. Most of the photos I haven't been through yet so this is just a quick selection.

it's beginning to look a little bit like Christmas

Well I updated the look of my blog to match the season but I still haven't had time to do an update post. I have one half typed and a pile of photos ready to resize but haven't had enough kid free time to finish anything. For some reason I find it hard to type with the kids around. There's always night time when if we're lucky they will both be asleep for a while but that's when I relax with some digiscrapping for a hour. One of these days I'll catch up properly but for now here's a couple of things I wanted to mention.
Firstly my new look blog is courtesy of the fabulous Mel aka PixelGeek Designs at ScrapOrchard.com

She has made these blog kits which come with all the graphics and instructions to dress up the blog like this. Concentrating on the instructions was a little difficult with the kids but really it was very quick to set everything up like this. Next time will be even easier which is a good thing because I'll have to take down the Christmas decorations soon. Christmas is coming up way too fast. Luckily I have just about all my Christmas shopping done. Most of it I was able to do online. I had to as I'm without a car since Graham crashed mine. I'm still hoping to have it back before Christmas but running out of time.

I have some digiscrapping things in store now. It's something new I'm trying and I'm hoping they sell well enough to fund an internet upgrade. We keep using up our monthly internet allowance, even with careful rationing, and it's worse now that Alex has discovered things like the ABC kids website (and IKEA and Bunnings) so the next plan up would be better and would get us through the month. We had a temporary upgrade a few months ago, funded by Graham's work while he was working from home but now he is back at the office we don't have that luxury. So if I can have something new in store each month that sells well I can cover the cost of an upgrade and we can all enjoy the internet again, including Alex.
So I have 2 quickpage sets for sale in Studio mgl at ScrapbookGraphics.com created with Monica's gorgeous kits.
This one is using Crimson Gypsy and is all the right colours for Christmas but is not Christmas themed so can be used and reused for any photos.

previews are clickable :)

and the other quickpage set at Studio mgl is created with Monica's Nameless kit.
This is Nameless - The Album :)

Then over at Digiscrapaganza.com I have a brag book album created with Shana's beautiful Angel Whispers kit. It's a 4x6" album of 8 photo pages, 8 journaling pages and 3 blank matching pages. Of course there's no reason why you can't put photos on the journaling pages too and vice-versa. These pages are ideal if you're looking for a quick DIY gift for someone. Just add your photos and text, print them out and slide into a little 4x6" pocket photo album. Perfect for a brag book of Grandma's little angels :)

All my quickpages are created at 300dpi and have my 'famous' shadowing :) I paid a lot of attention to detail and left room on each page to add titles and journaling or even extra elements.

and I have a freebie as well :)
Last night I made a couple of layouts using Shana's lush new Christmas kit, Holiday Shimmer

The kit has these cool Christmas lights in it but I wanted to turn them on. So I made myself some light flares in colours to match the lights. I was so happy with how they turned out that I'm giving them away for a short time so everyone can light up their Christmas layouts.
If you want them head on over the Digiscrapaganza store and grab them for free for a limited time. I think you'll have to register with the store to download but it's free and there's a heap of stuff on sale there right now starting from just 50c. If you do grab the light flares leave me a comment here and let me know what you think of them. I'd love to see any layouts you make with them.

Sorry the freebie has finished. You can still get these here but they just aren't free anymore.

Climbing the stairway to heaven

What a day! Alex went to day care where he got hit over the head with a book by another child, Dad came over and built the stairs to our wonderland room, and Ben has been unsettled all day.
Right now he still wont settle and it's 4am. It's bad enough having to make do with sleep in between 3 hourly feeds but even worse if he wont settle between those feeds. This kid just does not want to sleep!
So if I must be awake at least I can blog. I'm having internet problems though so don't know if this will upload. My last few blog posts had to be done over and over again as the images were corrupting during upload. Since then I've found it's not just blogger, I'm having trouble with just about any site that requires a login or upload. We have yet to determine if the problem is my computer, software, the 'new' router or Grahams rewiring of the cabling in the garage. Trouble shooting will have to wait until we both have our hands free, ie when Ben is asleep.

So today Dad installed THE stairs! Nice safe full width stairs so we can get in and out of the room above the garage. They are a work of art too :)
Here's the progress shots. Dad's standing on a ladder in the garage here and that's the 4'6" door above him.

All done and they even hold my weight! They still need carpet and paint to finish but we have to panel the room next.

Ben had his first shower tonight. It was part of a plan to wear him out and make him all warm and sleepy but it didn't work. He liked the water when he was under it but wasn't too happy to be held out for a photo. I had to make the photo black and white because there's a limit to how much pale pink flesh I want on my blog :P

After his bath Ben had one of his quietest ever nappy changes. Not really a change though, just a dressing, but it was nice not to have any screaming. He looked so cute too. I hate the dummy though. The hospital got him started on this dummy. It's part of the process of learning to suck for tube fed babies and most of the time Ben doesn't need it but when he is screaming we'll try anything.

At the moment the change table is a mat on top of my dresser, just until we can move Ben into his own room and get the change table off Alex. Above the dresser I have a mirror on the wall and on the mirror is a black and white photo of Graham and Alex. Alex always liked looking at black and white pictures when he was a baby. He had one stuck on the wall next to his change table, a geometric design. I haven't had time to print something out for Ben yet so I gave him this black and white photo to look at.

I finally got around to uploading some layouts tonight. These are layouts I did a while ago but didn't get to upload because I was in hospital (cept the baby fat one, that had to wait until after I got home for a photo and journaling). They were supposed to be uploaded for Tara Dunstan's opening spot at a new store but it's turned out OK because now she has a whole new store called La-Di-Da Studios and it looks great. Luckily it's one of the few sites that would work for me tonight so I've uploaded these and will spread them to a few more galleries later if I can get things working again. You can find the credit/kit links for these in my La-Di-Da gallery. These are all that's there so far because it's an all new site. and typically I can't even log in there now but I was able to upload earlier. This internet is getting worse and worse.