Scrappin'...Hurricane Style...

So when a hurricane threatens to blow through town, what do you do??  scrapbook of course.... Even if we lose power, I have a BIG window next to my scrap table...nice planning on my part... (note: I'm finishing this post hurricane, and we didn't lose power...)

Last weekend while the girls had sleepovers, I managed a layout between feedings, judging dance contests,  and costume malfunctions...

I'm dying to take a trip to Lafayette and buy all of the treasures at Treasured Memories and Create 365 (my closest lss).  They have been getting in all of the CHA goodies and taunting me with sneak peaks...  I love both stores and both owners.  The stores and merchandise are totally different but equally fabulous!  If you are ever in the area, check out both...

I'm super excited about a teaching opportunity coming up.  Memory Mania's Camp Crop A Lot is January 4 and 5 and I am teaching a layout class.  It was so fun choosing the paper and creating a layout just for the crop.  I haven't taught in years...we'll glaze over the obvious reasons...but Tammy is nice enough to let me give it another try...I've never taught at Tammy's store or for Tammy's clientele, so I'm nervous that they won't like my scrap style or nutty personality, but I'm jumping in with both feet!  If you are interested in CCL, check out this link.  I'll be there cropping both days, enjoying this first class event!!  Here's a peak at the layout...

Every year I make a file folder to hold M & A's school papers.  Here's my tip... I keep their school papers in a big zip lock bag all year.  At the end of the year, I choose a good mix of papers from the bag that represents their schoolwork and accomplishments (ie. NOT EVERYTHING!).  Then I keep those papers in this cute little folder.  Organized, de-cluttered and memorialized for years to come...  So I managed to finish last year's folders just in time for a new school year...

So we survived Hurricane Issac with no damage to our house and without power failure - Hallelujah!!  We were very fortunate, but many people weren't so lucky...  Now, let me share with you a true Hurricane layout... a Hurricane layout, you ask?  When I am bored with no end in sight to to the boredom, I tend to resurrect techniques such as Heat Embossing and Glimmer Misting and pull out the chip board and hot glue gun...these products have not partied in my scraproom since 1999...

We even managed to celebrate a birthday during the storm.  Morgan's birthday falls in the dreadful hurricane season.  Hurricane Katrina hit on her 2nd birthday while we evacuated to Florida.  We bought a delicious cake at the Kroger bakery that year.  Knowing that we might not get to a bakery for this birthday, I promised to make a red velvet cake for her 9th birthday.  Everyone braved the weather and spent the day at our house for Morgan's birthday...

Hope you are laughing just as much as we are around here.  We are gearing up for another four days of togetherness with the Labor Day Weekend...   The partying never stops... 

Back to Back Vacations

My first one was a family vacation...a cruise...and the gentle rocking of the ship was enough to make me want to jump overboard...but the girls LOVED Kids Camp and Shane can relax in the sun for hours so overall it was a success.  And honestly, I knew I would be on dry land scrapbooking with girlfriends the upcoming weekend, so there was hope...

The saving grace of the cruise was the adults only deck on the back of the ship where the breeze was perfect  and the cushioned chairs could be pushed into the shade...I'm more of a shade kind of girl...I don't like to push my limits when it comes to cancer, and that includes skin cancer...and these faces proved that the trip was a success...

If you have ever been on a Carnival Cruise, you may agree that the food is plentiful, but it doesn't compare to Louisiana cooking.  I spent the weekend in Lafayette with girlfriends scrapbooking and the FOOD was amazing.  I am still dreaming about the Eggplant Adelaid at Prejean's along with the Seafood Gumbo and the White Chocolate Bread Pudding (the bread pudding was gratis after gumbo was spilled down Ashlyn's back -ouch!). We also found a delicious Sushi restaurant called Fuji Sushi House using Urban Spoon.  According to Jen Urban Spoon NEVER steers her wrong.  The owner was adorable and the menu was enormous and to our delight included the lightest Crab Rangoons... I just may have stuck the radish garnish in my mouth and Jen just may have taken my picture...and then a fellow diner just may have caught me...

We found delicious Rockin Ritas at Agave - a few of us had three to four of them...I stopped at one since I was driving...but made sure to follow them up with a bottle of Skinnygirl Sangria when I wasn't in danger of causing bodily harm...oh, and how is Lafayette so lucky to have a Rouse's grocery store?  I googled it and it looks like Rouse's is looking at expanding into Baton Rouge, well I have two words - HURRY UP!!  We made a stop at the Bakery at Rouse's and the Turtle Cookies are a little bit of heaven...RUN to a Rouse's if you have one and get them!

In between eating, drinking laughing and sleeping it is amazing that I got any scrapbooking done at all...to prove it, here are a few of my layouts.  I have more, but I was too lazy to take pictures of all of them...imagine that...

Halloween 2011

 Ashley's family at Christmas

 my girls at the beach last summer

my girls Christmas 2011

 Morgan playing soccer Spring 2012

And after my back to back vacations I went to the doctor and my blood pressure was 100/60 and I had only gained 4 pounds.  I'd say vacations are good for my blood pressure and worth every BITE!!!

Destructible Dell....

When Morgan was a few months old, Shane had a work conference in San Destin, Florida so we packed up every baby gadget in the entire house and brought it to Florida.  While Shane was in meetings, Morgan and I played in the pool, took naps, strolled around and one afternoon I let her fall off of the sofa onto the tile floor... Naturally I was hysterical and certain that my neglect had allowed a severe brain injury.  She cried, I cried, I called Shane and admitted my neglect, and an hour later, she was fine.  A little ice cream, a few kisses, and she was good as new.  It was at this point that I realized I made a pretty indestructible product.  I grew her...  And she would probably survive the numerous scrapes and bruises, falls and bumps she would encounter during her lifetime...

This is not the case for my laptop... But I think if I can make a durable "product" (and don't blast me for calling my child a "product"), why can't Dell? Let me explain.... Last week my laptop was in the protective computer bag sitting on a bench in my house.  Naturally there was "kid crap" on the bench, so the bag wasn't exactly level and the bag fell off... Big deal, right?  Morgan survived her fall, I was sure my computer would...WRONG!  NOTHING was recoverable from the hard drive...Luckily I only lost a few months of pictures and I'm purposely not figuring out which ones they were, oh my Christmas Card address list is gone too, so I'll be playing the game, "I'll show you mine if you show me yours" this year... I'm just moving on, but I'm really upset about this whole broken hard drive thing in the first place...  Doesn't Dell make enough money and employ enough engineers to figure out how to put more padding inside the laptop?  Like the amount of padding that Morgan has... It think that should be enough...

But like I said, after a little public ranting, I'm officially moving on...My Walmart started carrying SMASH products, oh it makes grocery shopping just a little more enjoyable...and it was so neat and organized and since my scrapbook style leans toward "piling crap on top of crap", these things were perfect...

some vintage and some girly, just perfect...

I saw Magic Mike last night and it just confirmed that I never need to see a Chippendale's show in my life because there is NOTHING attractive about greasy naked gyrating men...and I mean NOTHING!  Six packs abs are nice, but not when they are accompanied by greasy hair, thongs and very bad acting.  But I am glad that I saw it, otherwise I would have been the only woman in America who hadn't...and there was ONE man in the audience...disturbing...

Now for a few layouts...Avery's 7th birthday last November with the sweetest friends a girl could have...

For Avery's birthday, the girls got Coco "The Dog that Cancer Bought"...Shane and I promised ourselves that once the girls made it through cancer, there would be a dog...just another thing I have to thank cancer for...When people ask me if I love Coco, I say "I love that my girls love Coco...."

Last Mother's Day I took the wig off...and never put it back on...it was a fantastic celebration!!

I never in a million years growing up in NOLA imagined that my girls would be going to 4H festivals...helloooo Dutchtown!!

Mia looked beautiful at her Baptism, but the picture that cracks me up is the one of Hannah, Morgan and Avery studying the prayer books - as if THAT is going to help!!

I could have an album each year dedicated just to the Christmas season.  I collect Christmas paper and embellishments all year long.  Here are my cute girls...

That's it for today...Shane and I went to a friend's wedding recently and on each table was a plaque that said "It's never too late to live happily ever after" and I thought it was just perfect.  Hope you are laughing this weekend!

Summer Livin'

So here we are at 120 degrees at 7am...I love when I break a sweat inside my house as I'm getting dressed...gotta love the South...

We have already faced the dreaded green pool hair...It only took a few times at the neighborhood pool and the Y pool for Avery's white hair to go green.  I tried to play it off and tell her it was really cool and looked highlighted, but the sound of her hysterical crying drowned me out.  Naturally we were heading out to a family Triathlon picnic and my anxiety was at an all time high with the thought of being surrounded by insanely fit women and men for the afternoon, and then we added the 7 year old green hair meltdown...I was secretly relieved that Avery and I might be able to skip the Fit Fest due the Green Hair Epidemic, but when she realized she would miss the crawfish she told me to braid the green hair and get in the car...damnit, I was SO close...

I survived Fit Fest by telling myself that even though the skinny tan girls are A-mazing in their shorts and tank tops...I was FORCED to be tough, and they just choose to be tough triathletes, so I'm really tougher....and I have better skin...less leathery and sun damaged...none of this is actually true, but these are the lies I tell myself when I am surrounded by hoards of triathletes in social settings...

Back to the green hair...Baking soda in Dawn does remove the green....the power of Google, Ironman, a hysterical daughter and an iPhone...and it's really fun to make your child wear a hair net (I only had a shower cap, but a hair net would have been so much better)...

I went to the ENT this week because for the last 6 weeks I thought I had fluid in my ear and I am was ready to face the steroids to dry it up...Nope, not fluid...Hearing loss...Are you kidding me?? and the doctor's only comment was "Nothing can be easy with you, can it?"  I'm pretty sure when I rolled my eyes he got the point that doctors stopped surprising me about 18 months ago...So I'm just enjoying the muffled sound of the girl's fighting...Apparently it might repair itself, steroids might help repair it, it might be a benign tumor, it might be removed, it might...............so I'll just wait and see for a little while and enjoy the muffledness....

I did a little scrapbooking, nothing magazine worthy, but I am slowly using up this crazy hoard of mine... This is an adventure last summer in NOLA, on the streetcar, the steps of One Shell Square, the Audubon Zoo, the Cool Zoo and the corner of Carrollton and St. Charles...we might not live in NOLA anymore, but I sure wish we would hurry up and win the Powerball and buy a condo there....

here's my sister and her family last Christmas....don't know about all that "white space" on the left page, but once it's done, I'm not going back....

here's the New Orleans Bowl in December...

so Ironman is in NOLA tonight for a race tomorrow morning and each precious angel has a friend sleeping over.  The sleepover is a completely selfish move on my part because then they mostly leave me alone in my scraproom so I can blog and shuffle scrapbook paper...delightful...and I get the king size bed to myself...SWEET!!!  Hope you are finding some time to relax and LAUGH this weekend....

The show must go on...

I started this post over a week ago, and I actually had to consult my therapist about it...So I will be charging each of you a user fee so that I can pay for the therapy session...

See, my life is getting back to "normal"...grocery shopping, working a few days a week, hanging out with the girls, going on dates with Ironman, scrapbooking with friends...normal stuff...stuff I didn't do for the last 18 months during cancer...and I don't think about cancer anymore...I don't live it daily, and I don't feel the need to blog about it either...But here's the problem (and I only realized this with the help of my therapist...)...if I admitted that I was moving on and getting back to normal, I was somehow cursing myself, somehow daring cancer to come back...so she came up with a very important word...hiatus...I'm putting cancer on hiatus...

I'm ready to close the book, although I'm fully aware that I might have to re-read the book, and I know deep down that there may even be a sequel... But for now I'm ready to put Cancer in a box and store it on a shelf.  I don't feel like I need to talk about it, or think about it or write about it.  If someone asks me about it, I can talk about it, but I think the blog posts about cancer are over.  It's time for me to just get back to normal.  So my blog posts will resume their original content of scrapbooking layouts, pictures of my children, stream of consciousness thinking on senseless topics and other random dribble...I imagine most of you will tune out at this point, but I really appreciate your support through the cancer part...Before I totally lose you, I will share the two most important lessons I learned during cancer....Call it a farewell gift...

The first....Particularly when you find out you have Stage 4 Lymphoma on the day of your little girl's 6th birthday party.....you realize the show must go on....

Crap happens...all kinds of crap...whether it's cancer, or hurricanes or divorce or a bad hair day...You figure out a plan, you make the best of it, and you deal with it...and some days suck...but some days don't and eventually the good days outweigh the bad and you start laughing again...

The second...live well...see cancer doesn't really "go away"...I mean there is that word remission, but chemo, the necessary poison that kept you alive, was in fact poison...so it will remind you that it infiltrated your body...and the cancer will also remind you that it visited...but living in fear isn't living...so I choose to forget it...Living well is the ultimate revenge...

so I'm going to get real busy being happy and NORMAL because...the show must go on and I'm ready to live well!


Please stop by again soon.  Since I've put cancer on hiatus, I think I will blog more often.  I was really struggling with blogging in this "normal" life.  Thanks for hanging with me and keep laughing...

There is change in the air...

in my last post I eluded to changes on the horizon...see in March, we were worn out...three months of constant doctor visits with no answers, just more appointments and constant pain and tons of pain pills...I now call the Rheumatologist the "Pill Pusher"...and I have an Oncologist that says my low White Blood Count might never come up....we needed a new focus...

So after two years of reading these "hippy" books, we finally put them into action...vegetarianism, juicing, herbal supplements, reducing carbonation, caffeine and sugar....and after a month, I feel better, I put the pain pills away, after four weeks of my White Blood Count dropping in February, it finally jumped up in March...I call this "hippy" because that's what my Oncologist called me when I told him I was making these changes.  He also told me these changes were not making any difference in my White Blood Count.  Many people ask me why I stay with him...I think its a challenge...I may never change his view point, but I think now I'm on a mission to make both he and my Rheumatologist both realize that they can't treat all patients the same.  

Unfortunately, his patients are getting younger.  As I would sit in the waiting room or the chemo room, I would hear the elderly patients talking to each other and they were so resigned saying, "Well, we'll give this a try..." and the unspoken sentence was, "if not, I've lived my life, and it's my time".  But with four of my high school classmates fighting cancer alongside me, we are saying, "We have soccer practice after chemo", or "I have to make it to Honor Roll tonight for my daughter".  We aren't resigned to anything except beating this, and the effects that chemo will have on our bodies.  We are fighters, and we will do what it takes to get back the lives that we had before.  We need doctors who will think outside the box - let's talk about nutrition, herbal supplements, physical therapy, mental health.  Once the prescription pad doesn't work, let's put it away...

I enjoy learning new things to help my accounting clients.  Many times, I hear about new strategies, and although I may not be an expert on the topic, I can refer my client to someone who is.  This does not threaten me, I want what is best for my client...I'm hoping that one day, my Oncologist can see that some "out of the box" techniques could really benefit his patients.  He doesn't have to embrace them, but he could recommend them...especially for his patients who are rushing from tumbling to school to soccer practice on the non-chemo days...

Getting back to Laughing...

I know I haven't written in a while, and quite frankly there are a bunch of things swirling around in this messed up brain, so I'm going to have to focus on one thing at a time....maybe I'll start with mental health - THAT's always a crowd pleaser...

So I officially finished cancer treatment in June 2011, and from June to December I was in some euphoric state - I loved and appreciated every moment of life.  I didn't have a care or worry in the world.  I felt invincible for beating cancer.  I posted all of these adorable signs on my blog from pinterest talking about my new outlook on life...and at the time I meant each and every word.  I wasn't being fake or phony - that was how I truly felt - you will get nothing but honesty but from me...I just can't promise that my feelings won't change...

So December hits and so does pain, excruciating pain and my relationship with a Rheumatologist is born - her job is to take these auto-immune symptoms and diagnose an auto-immune disease - not exactly what I wanted for Christmas....January...5 days in the hospital for viral meningitis...February...my children see me carried unconscious out of my house on a stretcher after a seizure and now by law I am prohibited from driving until August...we've got a long hot summer ahead....

I have to give it to my husband....chemo was rough....but the depression that hit in January and February was nightmarish.  I was giving Whitney Houston a run for her money...and I REALLY fought going back on anxiety and depression meds.  I thought those were a thing of the past, I wanted that euphoric post-cancer state back. Luckily the Nurse Practitioner at the Psychiatrist's office who treated me for years before cancer didn't give up on me...That hysterical crying message on her voicemail probably helped too...

So now I am back on the meds...and things are settling down....The mid-day and pre-bedtime cry fests have ceased.  I think Shane has relaxed knowing that I am home alone with 5 different prescription pain killers...and most importantly it has allowed me to step back and gain a little perspective into this whole messy cycle of doctors we are in again....but that is in the next post....I can only bore you for so long....

I am getting back to laughing....I hope you never stopped...