A scrapper's dozen :D

Fall has been busy so far!

The little dude is transitioning back to regular school which has included some meetings and adjustments. It's going very well though, and he is in the very good hands of a very dedicated team in a brand new autism classroom :D

I have also gone back to "work", with a few days of supply teaching.

And my free time, of which I am very thankful to have a good amount, has been spent scrapping and organizing photobooks. I had 2 free books from Shutterfly and one prepaid hugely discounted one from Picaboo, all of which expired in the last 5 days of September...

So I made front and back covers and organized the scraps in the order I wanted them for the book I had been preparing for a long time (the Picaboo one about our 2013 xmas holidays in Florida) and which had 64 scraps :/ That took a while to upload! Then I gathered some extra photos to fill empty pages in the March 2014 road trip to Florida, and I scrapped a front and back cover for it. And finally, I frantically looked for an idea for one last free book, decided to scrap our summer 2014 trip to Florida with Cedric's service dog Helio, realized I didn't have time to scrap it all, came up with a mixed book (every page spread has one side of photos and text and one side with a scrap), finished the last few scrapped pages I needed, made a front cover and VOILÀ!

To make all this simpler, I managed to use some of the new releases for my books ;)

In the end, the one thing I totally skipped was blogging, so it's been a while, and I have 12 scraps to post... If you're still with me by now, I hope you're comfortable and ready for some eye-candy :D

I'm going to bullet-point them for you!

With the Scamper Squad Bundle:

Two pages from our visit to the Great Wold Lodge:

With the Cool Story, Bro Bundle:

The covers for the xmas 2013 book:

With the Snap Happier: October 2015 Collection:

A page about our first ride on the 7 Dwarves Mine Train, for the summer 2014 book:

With the Guilty Pleasures Bundle:

Our visit at Hollywood Studios for the summer 2014 book:

With the Wonderful You Bundle:

Our experience in the hyperbaric chamber for the summer 2014 book:

With Best Buds and Woof:

The front cover for the summer 2014 book:

With the Kaleidoscope Bundle:

A page of selfies with friends at a cancer fundraiser and a page of our future service dog Mani smiling :D

And last but not least, with the We Just Click Bundle:

My desktop for the month, and a page of the amazing ring my hubby had the local goldsmiths design and make for me with the tanzanite he got my a few years ago for my 30th birthday:

Aaaaaaaand that's it!

If you're still with me, thanks for looking, hope you like them :D

The other blog

Here's a quick mid-week post about my other blog!

Many of my readers are friends and family and know about both. But if you know me and this  blog strictly through digiscrap, you may not know about the other blog I write.

On "the other blog", I write about life with a little guy on the autism spectrum.

The reason I came here to talk about it is that I now have the coolest blog header ever over there.

A little while ago, Kate Hadfield had a contest for which fans would submit an idea for a design and some random people would be picked and win a version of said idea in her iconic hand-drawn style.

The winners ranged from a mouse and cheese plate, to an owl with glasses and a book. But in the mix, there was a little guy with a puzzle piece on his t-shirt and a service dog by his side...

You guessed it, that was my little guy with his autism awareness shirt and his yellow lab :D

I hurried to design something with it, using other Kate Hadfield pieces to go along with it. And then I had a veeeery hard time figuring out how to include it in my premade blogger template. Hubby, who's a computer geek, tried to help but couldn't figure out the designer's html logic and today, all by myself, I managed! Yay me!

So here's the blog header in two language for "the other blog":

I write in English because I live in Canada and can reach a wide audience, but also in French because I want my family in France to be able to read and in the hopes of reaching some people in France who also live with autism.

My hopes are that people who are not touched by autism might read and understand a little better, and that those who do live with autism can find comfort in the feeling of shared experience and sometimes maybe find a little advice or help.

I hope you like the blogo (did I just invent a word for a blog logo? Probably not, but I've never heard it and I am pretty proud of it right now :D) and if you want to read, I'd love for you to read the blog(s):

http://cedriconedayatatime.blogspot.ca/

http://cedricunjouralafois.blogspot.ca/

Two for one

It's my blog's buy one get one free event :D

Okay, it's only because I didn't blog last week, but still, it makes it worth your while today!

Lots of things have been happening, with my son on his way back to school after 2 years in a specialized program. He starts Monday, so there were meetings and shopping in preparation.

We also spent a decent amount of time this week looking at a potential new vehicle...

And the weather has started to turn towards fall, so I  made sure to enjoy as much of the sun as possible while it was still shining (today is grey and cold...).

And in the middle of all that, you guessed it, I scrapped :D

Last week, Bella Gypsy released the September installment of their year-long collection. Check out the gorgeousness of Snap Happier: September 2015 Collection:

The image is linked for a closer look at all the goodies, but you can also see them in action in my layouts.

I used the collection for my desktop with a photo of my happy dude:

But it was too big and too pretty to only do that, so I also scrapped the beautiful new cozy Bench jacket that my parents bought me while they were here visiting this summer. I am about to start wearing a lot, I think, with the weather the way it's going, but it's okay because at least I will be comfy and look good :D

The other collection last week was all about fairs and carnivals. It's called Fair and Square:

I used it twice as well. First for photos of meeting Woody in Disneyland Paris in 2012. It was my Mom's birthday and Woody was awesome, made her get up for a hug and even carried our dude for a family shot (it's people like this Woody who make Disney parks extra magical!) :D

I also used it for a layout closer to the theme. Every July the Beauce Carnival comes to our city. Cédric can't do many rides, but he really loves the ones he can go on and therefore we always go, even if only for a couple of rides (plus it's walking distance from our house):

And now moving on to this week's releases and layouts.

The first one is called Wild at Heart, a bundle full of wild animals and cool wood elements:

I knew right away when I saw it that I had to use it for some of my Cedar Meadows photos. Cedar Meadows is a park with wild animals walking around and you can take a ride through the park and see them up close, even feed some of them. I don't think I had ever seen a kit with a buffalo, a deer, a goose, ... it was perfect!!

And last but not least is Fall In Love, a bundle that combines, you guessed it, fall and love themes, in a colour scheme I love :D:

Every week, for the first week, if you purchase the bundle, you get a free pack (sometimes elements, sometimes extra papers, ...). I always forget to mention it, but this week, it is an alpha to die for. You can't just get the kit, you have to get the bundle to get the Leafy alpha (or you can also buy it separately!):

I used the whole bundle to make a birthday card for my husband's grand-mother. She turned 95 on Wednesday!! It was a nice card, but minimal element use and mostly text, and I knew I wanted to use it again. So I scrapped a very recent photo shoot of my dude at our neighbourhood park:

I used as many hearts as I could :D All the hearts in the kit I believe!

And there you have it!

Having too much fun

We're having an awesome summer, and my parents have been here visiting and my little dude is on a reduced schedule. So we're taking walks and playing games (mostly double 15 dominoes) and watching TV (we've introduced them to Chuck). But with all that, it's taking me days to finish layouts and I haven't shown you the few I made...

So here they are, one from last week and 2 from this week.

First off was the August 2015 installment of the Snap Happier Collection by Bella Gypsy:

I used it for one more page form our March road trip (explanation of why we left and photo of the souvenirs I brought back), as well as this month's desktop!

And this week, they released a gorgeous end of summer themed collection. There's a main kit, but also some gradient papers, extra alphas and a mini kit which all come separately or in a bundle.

The collection is called So long, Summer, and the mini is My Summer Story:

I used the main kit and gradient papers in a layout from summer 2014, of the sad attempt at a selfie with 3 people, a stroller, a dog and the iconic Magic Kingdom castle... and the awesome photo you get when a nice cast member offers to help :D

And then, I used My Summer Story alone for a layout of Helio sleeping in a perfect circle on the pillow I made him! I particularly amused myself with the title. I was going to title it "doughnut", but it was long to write, so I was going to write it "donut". But the Canadian in me was struggling until a pun happened. I kept the "g", got rid of the "u" and "h", and called it "dognut". Get it: it's a dog, it's a doughnut/donut, it's a "dognut" :D

Anyways, bad puns aside, the layout turned out pretty and makes me happy:

I was too busy, so I didn't scrap with the other release from last week or this week, I hopefully will get around to it at some point as they were also gorgeous!

My parents are now gone, which is sad, but I might scrap a little more, which will be nice!

Until then, have a great weekend!

Vacation, water fun and hot tubbing!

This week's kits and memories scrapped are actually quite in line with what we did this week!

We took a road trip about 9 hours away to visit a Great Wolf Lodge water park. Gastro all night aside, we had a lot of fun in the various pools, lazy rivers, and hot tubs. We had rented a minivan and were all pretty comfortable (hubby and me, my parents and my little guy), and it was fun to see the ontarian landscapes change and get out of the evergreens we live in.

Incidentally, the kits that Bella Gypsy released led to scrapping more of our Florida road trip last year, and some water fun photos from 2012!

First, the two Iron Scrapper 2015 kits that came out are called Best Day of My Life and Pocket Full of Sunshine. They are very versatile and happy:

The colours were perfect for some of the everyday moments and non-disney parts of our road trip to Florida in March 2014. There's a gorgeous little cake which I used for the photos of my father in law's 60th and an cute night owl to document my little guy night antics (not sleeping and climbing in the furniture):

The other kits are coordinated and both pool themed. The first is a bright, awesome summery kit called Pool Party:

I used it to scrap some really fun photos of Cedric and his uncle Marcel who was visiting from France having some water fun on the deck :D

Isn't my uncle cute sitting in a turtle, eating a duck and wearing a crab? lol

And the coordinating kit (which you get free for a few days if you buy Pool Party) is called Night Swimming and is GORGEOUS. It's all blues and purples and has the most amazing flair with the moon and some waves. I LOVE it:

I used it for another photo from 2012 of our first dip in out hot tub. We were under a gorgeous full moon and I always wanted a hot tub, so it was a very happy evening:

And that's it for this week!

Mani, Gypsy and a freebie

Three things on the agenda for this post, and they rhyme :D

I'm actually going to talk about them in a different order than the title suggest, though. Let me start with a bit of fun news: Theresa of Simple Girl Scraps misses designing...! She stopped a little while ago but felt that she missed it, so she made everyone a freebie!

It doesn't have a fancy  name, but the colours are gorgeous. Take a look at June Mini 2015:

I used it to scrap our new future dog Mani:

Here's a little more about Mani. Our next service dog was supposed to be a lab mix, whom we had called Captain Picard. The trainer was starting to feel that he might not be a good match and a great pyrennees mix that she was training for another child became available. She thought of us right away for him and after hearing about him and about Captain's shortcomings, we decided we would indeed switch. His name was Marty but as we know a few human Martys, it would have felt strange. The trainer offered for us to keep the name Captain Picard as we had never met the lab mix. But in our minds, we had associated the photos and personality traits she had described to the name and it would have felt wrong to use it again.

So I starting going through the old list of names, and the Internet. Now, I have to say, I might be hard to please. I love words and names. And I put a lot of thought behind choosing one. I don't think I was being unreasonable in wanting a name that was: unique, two syllables, easy to say in both French and English and sounding similar in the two languages, and with a nice meaning. But I also had to make sure that hubby would also like the name, which had been a struggle the past coupe of times we had to come up with one.

I searched for Basque names because of the connection to the breed, I searched for cool words that meant "white", or "snow", or "pearl", or anything related to his colour. We considered Alonso, a Doctor Who reference which would have allowed us to say "Allons-y Alonso" in our best David Tennant voice. But we weren't convinced. Then it occurred to me that if our previous service dog was Helio, partly based on the god of the sun which worked well with his colour, maybe this guy should have a name based on the god of the moon. So I looked up a list of moon gods and discovered Mani, the norse god of the moon, a beautiful giant who guides the moon. It worked for all my demands and even sounded quite a bit like Marty which would make it easier for the puppy to get used to it. Dave wasn't 100% convinced but didn't mind it and it slowly grew on him and got picked.

Moving on to the Bella Gypsy new releases of the week.

The first kit is inspired by Inside Out, the new Pixar movie which I really want to see. The more I hear about it, the more I want to go! The kits has gorgeous, vibrant colours, and is great for a layout about feelings, good or bad.

I tend to scrap happy moments, good memories, big smiles. I don't even usually take photos of the harder times. But for some reason I had taken photos of my little guy on a day after a short night (he has sleep issues). I think I had one of him where he looked soooo sad I couldn't stand to look at it and deleted it, but the two I kept give a good idea of how tired and upset he was.

They also released Wildflower, a beautiful collection which I thought was perfect for the Epcot Flower and Garden Festival photos, for my March 2014 album.

I have many more photos of the topiaries and plan on a project that combines them all. But I tried to compile my favourite ones on this double page!

Happy Sunday, hope your is as sunny as ours started!