MiniBullyMom's Musings

Hummie has decided to kick of National Scrapbooking Day (May 2nd) with a Cool Guy Scrapping Contest where you scrap about the men in your life/family. The contest will run over the next seven weeks with the winner being announced on Fathers Day. Her guys (she is the only female in the family) are going to be the judges.

Leave it to Hummie to dangle a contest in front of me that I just can't resist. She is kicking it off on Saturday and you can get all the info on it HERE at Hummiesworld.

She was thinking ahead and has even created a thread for "guy kits" so we have sources! Deb (Scrappin Cop) has a great kit you can get for free on her blog. I've posted a couple images from the kit so you can see them.

So...if you have a guy in your life who is into tools (what guy isn't) or who is a construction worker this may be the kit for you. Now I'm going to have to figure out if I can somehow coordinate doing a couple layouts for this contest and complete my other scrapping project in time.

Mathilde stopped by my blog last night so I naturally went to her blog to go leave some love and check it out. Even with my non-French speaking skills I was able to figure out that she had the most beautiful free kit available!!! Go check it out at her blog!! Its a huge collab kit from Soval, Joey, Penny57, Scoubidoo and Cjournet13. If you follow the link to this kit there is also an opportunity for 4 more free kits designed by Joey!!

I completed the first page of my Smith Family Scrapbook project. This is the first "album" I will have completed that has a recurring theme. I have done pages here and there for my family but never have I tackled a project of this magnitude. I am going to be creating one page for each family that covers five to six generations of our family. This is giving me an opportunity to update our family history and share it with the entire family. Lucky for me our family has consistently held family reunions bi-annually for the past 26 years so we have a contact list that is pretty extensive and current. The finished book will be auctioned off during our family reunion this summer. Every year there is one "Big Item" and this will be that item this year. Money from our auction gives the reunion committee for the next reunion some seed money to make deposits for venues and other administrative costs like printing and stamps. Each family will get a copy of their page before the reunion.

We have had absolutely beautiful weather the past four days low 70's and sunny!!!
I've started working on a Scrapbook for the Smith Family Reunion this summer. After creating family group sheets so I could update everyone's info I realized that the project was going to be bigger than expected and actually had to create a spreadsheet. This way I can track who I sent group sheets to, who's updated and returned them, if I've uploaded their info in the program, have I received photos, started the page, completed the page and if I have printed it. Once the entire book is completed (by June) it will be auctioned off at our Family Reunion. We hold a silent and verbal auction right before the Saturday night family business meeting. The money raised at the auction goes to the Reunion Fund which helps cover reunion costs and create seed money for the next one.

Hockey season is finally winding down in our house this weekend. We are hosting this weekend's tournament (Daffodil Invitational) and we finished the first two of our four games yesterday. We lost 0-2 to the Eugene Jr. Generals last night. Eugene scored both of their goals in the last 5 minutes of the game. The kids came out excited about how close the score was and talking about what a great game it was. There was actually no complaining about the refs or the other teams sportsmanship. Which is amazing for Midget (8-12 grade) players considering that they are competing against teams that are house level, midget "All-Star" teams whereas we are just a house team made up of Bantams and Midgets who lovesplaying hockey. The kids are already looking forward to next season because for the first time in four years they have a coach who is committed to staying, they will only lose one player to "aging out" and our three Bantams who "played up" are going to be Midget aged next year. The kids are already setting up what nights each month they all want to "drop-in" on as a team over the summer.

I did manage to do a little scrapping this last week in between work, hockey practice and working on genealogy. Played around with a photo of my niece that I snapped of her the night we had our family photos taken. I used a great ATC kit designed by Tangie Baxter and SherrieJD called Curious Adventures. If you look close you will see that I had a little fun with the butterfly's. I was invited to join SherrieJD's Creative Team a couple weeks ago. She does some real great ATC kits. I haven't explored the whole "Altered Art" style since I quit rubber stamping a couple years ago but I really like her designs. So I haven taken her up on her offer, joined her team and am going to start exploring some altered imaging techniques digitally. Her designs are available at ScrapOrchard.
Well...hockey season is almost over!! We played at a tournament in Bremerton...we didn't win but the kids had a blast anyways. People think it's weird that when it comes to hockey you can lose a game yet still call it a good game. Our coaches have consistently approached each game as a learning experience. Three out of the last five seasons we lost more games than we have won. When the kids were younger their coaches made a point of finding three positives from every game and that is what they would focus on afterwards. Now that the kids are in high school they find those positives on their own and still focus on them instead of beating themselves up over it. Our second game on Saturday was the best hockey the kids played all weekend. All the games from this tournament were streamed live on the internet. Anyone could listen to the audio play-by-play live for free or for $5 you could also watch the game online. The company doing the broadcast offered a CD of the game for $10 w/o the play-by-play or for $25 you could get a DVD with all the play-by-play. We are going to pick up a copy of the game to send to Mikes family in Indiana.
I managed to get a halfway decent photo of the kids in yesterdays game. It is so hard shooting action shots through the "glass" at the rink. Alex is on the right while Christina is the short one watching from the bench. Jeff who does the timeclock at our Jr. A games happened to be one of the linesmen during this game. The guy in the red helmet is one of our star players this year. He is actually an exchange student from Hong Kong. We really enjoyed having him play with our team and the kids will miss him next year. He is heading to Minnesota for the next three years where he will be in hockey heaven.
A bunch of players on one of the teams (not the most respectful nor well loved teams locally) caused some chaos at their hotel on Saturday horsing around in the elevator (boys will be boys I suppose) jumping up and down. Somehow they managed to trigger some earthquake sensor doing that which caused the elevator to lock up while they were in it. Their coach had to call the hotel manager, who in turn had to call 911 to get the fire dept to come reset the elevator sensor to get it moving again. We put in a request to have "Love in the Elevator" played during their game but alas it was denied by the management as they felt it was in poor taste which in retrospect it would have been.

Actually we have four practices and two tournaments left before we leave the regular season behind. This weekend we are "off" then we travel 45 miles to Bremerton for a tournament. The first weekend of April is our "Daffodil Tournament" which we host and for the first time in years it's the same weekend as the Daffodil Grand Floral Parade and the Spring Fair out at the fairgrounds.
I haven't mentioned to our kids that they may miss riding the tow truck in the parade this year. Our best friend (our kids "uncle") has worked for a local towing company for over 30 years. The company enters one of their trucks in the parade every year. Occasionally he drives the combination tow truck/bus Incident Response Vehicle in the parade and we have ridden along with them tossing daffodils out to kids along the parade route. During years that we are watching from the sidelines he pretends to "run us down" where we are sitting. His family is with him in the truck and we all think it's funny because who ever happens to be sitting next to us (we pick a certain spot to watch the parade from) thinks the truck is outta control and runs from it while we sit there and enjoy the "show". Their kids all love waving at their Aunt Laura and Uncle Mike and hollering at us from the truck.
Well..it's another genealogy weekend for me. I'm still taking advantage of my free month long membership at ancestry.com and downloading images left and right. I found the passport application collection the other night and some of the applications actually have photos attached to them. As a result I have a good photo of a couple relatives that I didnt' have before. Today I'm attacking the Canadian/US Border Crossing records. There is a huge chunk of Garbett's and Garbutt's that lived in Michigan that went back and forth between the two countries. I gather information on all of the Garbett's and Garbutt's that I come across because there arent' alot of us but somewhere along the line we are all tied together.