I'm blogging again!

Hi there, yes it's me, I bet you thought I'd dropped off the ends of the earth or something! No, that's coming up soon though ROFL!

I really have no excuse, but we have had a lot going on inside and outside the house, and I will share some photos as soon as they are in a state to do that! I can't WAIT for our new hobby room to be ready, we're just waiting on the benchtops there. In the yard, we have had the pergola closed in, so it's our "sunroom" now! Just needs to be painted and Chris needs to build in the bbq and put a rangehood in too. We've bee planting out our new garden and the dogs have been digging em back up again, but we expected some collateral damage!

In among this, the kids have started back to school. Taylor has made a brand new best friend and has a great new teacher. She even got a "Quality Work Award" for her homework this week!! She has applied for and got a "Sports Leader" position and has been chosen for a Sports Leadership program, we are so proud of her! She is also in the Senior Vocal Ensemble and has put her name down to swim in the school swimming carnival. In extracurricular activities, she is not doing her performance group in dance this year, but is doing her dance classes, and has begun singing lessons with a local teacher. She was also asked by a friend of ours to sing at a fundraising dinner for Juvenile Diabetes and did an absolutely fabulous job! AND she has enrolled for the Weetbix Tryathalon for next weekend. Needless to say I still have to yell at her to clean her room and watch the backchat but we are very proud of her already this year!

Ronin began Preschool a few weeks ago and absolutely loves it. He is exhausted when I pick him up! He is doing 3 days, Mon/Tue/Wed 9-1pm and out of 23 kids in his class there are 16 boys!! Good luck to the teacher I say! I'm sharing some photos from their first days here.

As for me, I had a burst of scrapping things for The Scrap Heap for the newsletter, some of which I can't share yet. I really loved this month's Aussles, which were in today's newsletter so I've shared a couple here and some other layouts I have done in the past few weeks. I am off to host a 7-Midnight crop at Scrap Junkie tonight, and I'll be working on a new class for Ainslee (date tba) using the Basic Grey tag book and Cosmo Cricket Hey Sugar! papers and diecuts. Any of you Canberra girls interested, heck the website or sign up to the mailing list to get the dates!

I have a couple of personal challenges with my scrapping this year, one of them is inspired by my dear friend and fellow Inspiration Team member Bev Watt - I am using something old on EVERY layout! It's fun, it's getting my supplies down, and making my scrapping money stretch further! The other is a recurring one to do something scrap-related every day but I must say I'm not starting the year off very well!

And finally, happy birthday to my darling Dad, for Wednesday, and my dear niece Jade for earlier in the month.

And finally, only 5 weeks to go til we are off to Paris and the UK!!! Now, THAT'S exciting!

See you all soon!

Trace xxx