Inconsistency...that is my word.  I read the last post...it was while Syd was still home.  Now she's in Gainesville.  So I'm trying to organize pictures and do more scrapping of memories.  And, boy do I have good memories.  So many.  

I shared this layout with Angie and she said it was the best Mother's Day ever.  I agree...it was a perfect day...Mom was still with us. Looking at this picture...and comparing it to where the girls are in their lives now...these girls are definitely setting their own courses.  I love them! 

The weeks are flying by.  I usually love to watch the weeks fly by because I'm usually counting down to my next great adventure.  This time, the next great adventure is Sydney leaving for college.  And, let's face, that adventure is hers.  

One of my coping mechanisms is scrapping.  I just joined The Scrappy Kat as a Creative Team member at Gingerscraps.net.  The style is very different from what I do at Oscraps...much more like paper scrapping which is where I started many (ok...about 30) years ago.  And I find that satisfying to tell stories about my family!

Here are two layouts using her kits that went on sale this week.  

I saw something about rail travel through Banff and I decided that would be great.  I've always wanted to try rail travel and once I got just a glimpse of it in Europe, I was sold.  I told Brian this is on my bucket list...maybe next summer.  His response?  "Have fun!"  Whatever.  I think leaving the heat of Florida in July is an awesome plan.

https://gallery.gingerscraps.net/showphoto.php?photo=629827&title=my-bucket-list&cat=1199

The next layout is a photo of our family during the summer of the pandemic.  We had been here about a year and I wanted family pictures.  We found someone who would meet us at the beach at Matanzas (first time we had been there) and wear a mask when we were close (which isn't that much time when you are doing family photos).  I love this picture...it really was the four of us in our own little cocoon once Covid hit.  But we were four people tightly bonded, taking on whatever the world threw at us, even if not always gracefully.  And, for that, I am forever grateful.

https://gallery.gingerscraps.net/showphoto.php?photo=629825&title=choose-to-be-grateful&cat=1199

 Good morning friends.  The morning is very nice weather....which doesn't happen very often in July in Florida.  So I have enjoyed being a bit of time outside this weekend.  Mainly, I just wait for the fall.  But I have a few Florida moments this week.  

First, I use a watering can...to get things sufficiently watered, I need to make a lot of trips and sometimes my plants go without enough water.  Yesterday morning, I had an ah-ha moment and decided that I should hook up the hose and use that for watering...what an improvement!  Brian is out right now looking to get a reel so that we can hook the hose to the backyard faucet and use my new method for watering.

Second, I cannot see my hibiscus unless I walk to the side of the house.  On either side, I have beautiful hibiscus but I can't see them.  Yesterday, I saw a hummingbird along the side of the house, collecting nectar.  And I realized that I need to put hibiscus in the back.  Lots of hibiscus along the white privacy fence will make me happy...  

I found strawberries for 99 cents a pound.  They were beautiful.  Inflation is crazy and I can't get an ear of good sweet corn for the life of me...but I really enjoy the strawberries and I was able to mix up a batch of homemade ice cream! 

I did scrap a few layouts this week found below.  The first one is an old photo of Grandpa Chet and Grandma Ellie.  They were my great-great grandparents...my Grandma Blanche's parents.  They lived in Truro, just a few houses from Grandma Blanche.  My mom had that Bible that Grandpa Chet had in his hand for many years.  And I see a chain that I suspect was attached to his pocket watch.  Mom also had that pocket watch...both items are now long gone.  

This post is because I am in the midst of all of the feels right now.  I look at the photos of the kids on the top of this blog.  They were so young...yet I can't bring myself to put something up that is more current.  Today, I am sitting in Gainesville, FL...in the Rietz Union to be exact.  Brian and I are waiting for our next meetup with Sydney.  She is at Preview (known as Orientation back in my day).  She finished her fall schedule this morning and she is happy with it.  She has 15 hours for first semester...one class is a fluff class...the others, not so much.  Physics, Differential Equations, Intro to Biological Engineering and some type of Digital Graphics for Engineering.  

In 6 weeks, she leaves home for college.  It will never be quite the same again.  I don't know the future...maybe she will be back home next summer, maybe she will be back home after college...but whatever the future holds, it will never be quite the same.  And it has been the most awesome privilege of my life to be her mother.  

Will she still need me?  I'm sure she will because I still need my mom.  But I don't have her.  And that will happen to Syd someday as well.  And that makes me sad.  But, in the meantime, Bioengineering?  Are you kidding me?  And I think that she is going to make it Agricultural Biological Engineering.  Good grief...I'm overwhelmed.  I do not know a single female engineer.  It didn't happen in my day.  But I'm pretty excited to say that it happens today.

While sitting here in the Rietz, I scrapped the following layout.  A photo of a different angle of the Eiffel Tower from this past May's vacation.  Everything from Vicki Stegall's Just Simply Me.

 Good grief!  How can I have gone this long without updating my blog.  There has been plenty of content...we traveled to Europe and it was wonderful.  Since returning home, it seems that most of our time (and by our, I mean Sydney and me) has been spent figuring out "dorm things".  

I'm committed to doing better moving forward. 

First layout of July is this one about Uncle Paul.  He is my great-uncle and I knew him very well because he lived such a nice long life.  I've seen this photo so many times...but when I scrapped it this time, I did a little bit more thinking about what it might have been like for them.  I'm guessing that Grandma Ellie and Grandpa Chet might have been there (Uncle Paul's grandparents), but other than that, I would have known everyone that was there.  I knew them much later in life obviously but I knew these people.

 

The next layout is Summer Vibes and I have so many photos of the beach that I will go back to this kit constantly.  This is a shot of the Atlantic Ocean from a quiet beach near Palm Coast.  

This one I did as a challenge at Oscraps.   We needed to scrap this quote.  I think that I'm going make a Mixtile with this and offer it to Sydney for her room.  Which, by the way, she won't want.  LOL  So I will keep it.

 Another day of making sure that the details of the trip are all in place.  They aren't...I found out that I didn't actually purchase the tickets to the Anne Frank house.  They go on sale the 1st Tuesday of every month for the following month and they sell out quickly.  So I got up early on April 5th to make the purchase.  I was quite disappointed when I saw that I was 300+ in line.  But, the algorithm was obviously incorrect because within 10 minutes I was up and ready to buy.  

We decided to get tickets for Sunday afternoon to help us stay awake with the jet lag.  I ordered my tickets and then, this morning, I realized that I didn't have a confirmation email.  I looked back at both my bank statement and my credit card statement...I didn't ever get charged.  I don't know if I didn't hit the final submit button, or what...but we don't have tickets.

However, I decided to not let that spoil my good mood about this vacation.  And here is a layout that I did to show how I really feel.  

When we made the purchase for Christmas gifts, I worried a little bit about what would happen if Covid got bad.  I decided we were going to go anyway.  Then Putin and the Ukraine caused me to worry more than a bit, but I decided we were going to go anyway.  I made a paper chain (as I often do with big events) and removed a link each day.  Below is my layout and all details about products can be found here.

 I have decided that I truly have no sense of time whatsoever!  How can three months have gone by without my posting anything here?  How can my very long paper chain counting down the days until Europe now be just a very few links?

I have the best of intentions of keeping this blog updated while I'm in Europe.  Will I...I wouldn't bet on it.  We leave a week from today and we will spend 3 nights in Amsterdam, 3 nights in Paris and 3 nights in London.  We fly into Schipol Airport.  I was pronouncing it with an "Sk" at the beginning but when I looked it up on Google, I was told that it was "Sh".  Yet, when I called the hotel in Amsterdam, the young man who answered pronounced it with the "Sk".  Could the internet be leading me astray?  Perhaps.  ;-)

So that, as well as many other mysteries, will need to wait another week for resolution.

However, in the meantime, I couldn't help but do a little bit of scrapping this morning.  

All of the credits for this layout can be found here.

 The time goes oh so fast!  And it is not lost on me that the time is short.  That may be a true benefit of getting older...understanding time.

Brian and I are trying to modify our eating habits...otherwise known as a diet (don't care what anyone says, that's what it is).  😉  Which means that I'm staying out of the kitchen except to make things that I'm not crazy about eating.  I like lots of cream, butter, sugar...and it shows.  So, for now, I'm trying to stay away from that stuff.  

Still working on travel plans for Europe.  I'm just making the assumption that we are going and planning accordingly.  Taking the Eurostar from Paris to London and that train goes 186 mph.  I can't even imagine that.  Trying to collect all of the ideas now so that we are ready to go.  I know that I want to have a family photography session while in Paris.  We did that in Maui once and I treasure those photos.  If you ever get the chance to do a good photo session while on vacation, I recommend it.  

I'm continuing to do digital scrapbooking.  Here are a few that I have made since my last post.  The first one is called Season of Hope and uses Christmas Evening Megakit from Simplette at Oscraps plus word art from the Home for the Holidays collaboration at OScraps.  The photo is mine from the Nights of Lights in St. Augustine. This year was the second year that we viewed the lights from the water and that is my absolute favorite way to view them. 

This one is a layout of some of Syd's senior photos taken by my very talented niece Sarah.  She was the best option for senior photos because she could do the makeup and hair as well as the photos.  This girl lives the "We are who we choose to be" lifestyle.  As she makes plans for next year at college, I already know that I'm going to miss her more deeply than I can even imagine so I'm trying to soak up the time with her now.  Everything in this layout comes from Teachable Moments by Vicki Robinson Designs at Oscraps.

 This layout is titled Just for Today.  It was a cold day (at least for us) and so I had my hoodie on and the fire blazing.  Brian and I love starting our day drinking coffee on the lanai no matter the weather.  Everything for this layout comes from Just for Today by Vicki Robinson Designs at Oscraps.  I think we should all practice a little more kindness and that goes for self kindness too.

I love layouts with big photos, especially nature photos.  This was taken one December day at the St. Augustine beach.  Everything is from BarefOOt a 2016 Oscraps collaboration.

And for 2022, I am documenting our adventures in an ABC book.  We have lived life without many adventures over the last couple of years and that changes now.  The book pages will be out of order but they will represent all of the letters of the alphabet when I'm finished.

The C is for Citrus Bowl documents the first day of 2022.  It was a perfect day...sunny and warm.  We had good seats with no one behind us and we were able to spread out so we weren't all crammed together.  Now I need to think about what our next adventure is...keeping in mind that I told you we were dieting.  Oh my.  Everything is from The Possibilities Collection by Karen Schultz and Linda Cumberland Designs.

And the last layout for this year is Imagine the Impossible and comes from a kit by the same name.  The awesome Palvinka designs created the kit including the word art.  The journaling reads:  January 11, 2022.  Just an ordinary day.  Taking our daily laps around Rittburn.  Shaun gets up each morning to make sure that Brian and I walk.  On this morning he didn't even have school so he got it early to get it over with.  So much is special to me about that.  But mostly, it is the lesson that he is teaching me.  He is doing this for our health.  I can't really imagine improving my health at this stage of life.  But sometimes, it takes someone like Shaun to come alongside and help you imagine the impossible.

That's it for layouts today.  Thanks for looking!