Ten minutes after bedtime. . .

J- “I had a nightmare again.”

L- “You have to actually fall asleep before you can have a nightmare.”

J- “But there was a monster.”

L- “Get up and clean your room for ten minutes. You’ll feel better.”

J- “I’m gonna go talk to Dad.”

One of my favorite Cosmo Cricket lines is the Gretel collection. I loved it so much I put it in my kits last year! I have been living in California, thanks to the US Air Force, for over five years now. There is no autumn where I live, and that is hard on me. I am a creature who likes consistancy and likes to feel the Earth making seasonal changes. There is comfort and assurance in the natural order of the seasons, and when you spend twenty some years on that cycle, and then lose it completely, it shakes you up on an internal clock level, making everything seem just slightly off.

A few years ago, my family mailed me a bunch of autumn leaves. I still have them in a drawer in my scrapbooking room, and I pull them out every fall. We take trips to punpkin patches where the still green, fruitful fields are decorated to look as thought autumn has sprung full blown. I pull out an autumn inspired wreath for my door, and my harvest inspired decorations. We buy far too many pumpkins and ears of indian corn, and we fake it. We pretend that autumn has come again, and ignore the ninety degree weather, the people running around in tank tops, and the green of our gardens.

To create these layouts I decided to use primarily the backs of the double sided Cosmo Cricket paper. I also kept things simple and incorporated the circles, lettering and leaf cut outs by using my Quickutz die cutting machine. Then I added a little inking to make things pop.

This year I have been inspired to think about Halloween costumes a little early. The Halloween season hit early at my house when Cosmo Cricket sent me their new Haunted paper line. Ever since then, I’ve been elbow deep in orange and black and photos of Halloweens past.

I never have to ask the kids what they want to be for Halloween. They start telling me on November 1st exactly what they will dress as for the following year. It is inevitable that this idea will change several times as new characters and ideas catch their attention. I made the kids finalize their costumes yesterday so I could order them and be good and ready.

Jonas has decided to be Indiana Jones. This idea beat out a vampire and a ninja.

I think the reaosn it beat out all the others was related directly to the number of really cool Indiana Jones accessories he could beg me for in relation to the costume. Vampires don’t get special whips, guns, hats or matching action figures.

I talked Maggie into this monarch butterfly costume for two reasons.

#1- It is stinking adorable.
#2- It matches Halloween scrapbook paper. The Little Mermaid didn’t coordinate so well.

Now, I usually don’t dress up. In fact, I think I was in college the last time I donned a costume and left the house. I always want to dress up, but I never get around to it. I thought about being a butterfly like Maggie, or maybe a fairy or an enchantress or something really gorgeous that would photograph well.

At this point, I realized that come Halloween I was going to be six months pregnant and huge. I’d make a pretty wild looking fairy with a huge belly, and I’d have to sew my own costume, which I just don’t have the energy for. I began to brainstorm.

I have always wanted to do the pregnant cheerleader costume and have Chris go as a football player, but Chris won’t be here for Halloween this year. Scratch that. I ran accross a nun costume and had a good laugh thinking about how that would go over, but figured I’d probably offend a lot of people wearing that get up. No.

Then I found this Comfortable, will definitely fit a pregnant belly, and cute. Not to mention it matches scrapbook paper. Now, I will not be wearing this with tights like the picture shows. I’m thinking black maternity pants and a long sleeved black shirt. It is going to be a fun Halloween!

Scrapped with the Scrapbook Nook’s October kit.

This layout is very quick and easy to create!

Start by cutting 3 sheets of Cosmo Cricket Haunted Paper into rectangles approximately 5x7 (green), 4.5x6.5 (orange), & 5x7 (black pattern). You will want to ink every edge on this page.

Then layer them on the page like so:

Before you add your beautiful Haunted purple velvet ribbon, you will want to take a black chalk inkpad and lightly brush it over the top to give it a slightly darker color.

Add your photo using pop dots to give it some dimension.

For your title, I used Cosmo Cricket “Jack’s World” rubons. This rubon set comes with a really great alphabet set in solid black and it is so useful for so many projects! Rub on the words “My” and “Witch”. For the word “Little” I cut the orange Cosmo paper with my Quickutz. You could also hand cut or use matching stickers.

To finish off the layout and give it a little extra bang, add some flowers set on top of a sprinkling of halloween flavored buttons.

And voila!

Cosmo Cricket Fleurist, and my Maggie. My how she’s grown!

Yesterday’s ultrasound yielded positive results. The large, scary cyst is now a medium sized, moderately scary 3cm cyst. That is definitely a step in the right direction size-wise, so if I am lucky, it will continue to shrink.

When a woman is pregnant, all of her internal organs do a lot of shifting around as they are shoved aside to make room for a rapidly expanding uterus and baby. I never really over thought this process before. I acknowledged my sudden, oddly shaped abdomen and the mound of jiggle on top of the firm uterus and figured all of those innards had to go somewhere. I never wondered if there was an order to things, or if these parts got shoved out of the way in an orderly fashion.

After yesterday’s ultrasound I can tell you that, no, there is no order to it. I know this because the tech spent forever searching in vain for my ovaries which had become bedfellows with various other pieces of me. The right ovary was located about two inches above my bellybutton, shoved so dramatically to my right side you would have thought it wanted to hide behind my back. The left took up residence directly over my bladder.

It strikes me as funny that when you go in for an ultrasound they instruct you to drink 32 ounces of fluid two hours before the procedure and then hold it. I can’t pull that off when I’m not pregnant, and when I’m on my third time around and my bladder has already had it, I consider it a success to only be visiting the toilet every half hour. If I tried to hold it for two hours, plus the inevitable waiting room fifteen minutes, and then allowed someone to poke, prod, and generally apply pressure to my massively overfilled bladder. . .I would pee my pants. No questions asked. Frankly, I probably wouldn’t even make it onto the exam table before this happened.

As it was, I emptied my bladder exactly 25 minutes prior to the procedure, drank half a can of soda while driving, and arrived wondering where the closest bathroom was. Then I spent twenty minutes having a tech train in on my impressive ovarian cyst, and I got to enjoy the constant compression of my bladder.

Now, the baby was busy squirming around, nudging me very close to the same area, which is typical of him (I say him, not because I have proof, just because that’s what I’m going with). That little corner of the womb is his main hangout and the place he is most likely to express his approval of my need for ice cream. With all of the hullabaloo happening on the left side of my uterus, he swam to the right side, and snuggled in for a long, extremely curled up non-gender-specific nap. As you may have guessed, there was no answering the age old question, “does the baby have a hotdog or a cheeseburger.”

Next ultrasound is in T minus 32 days.