No Longer i-Less!!!

This could be fun!

Roger and I have FINALLY bitten the forbidden fruit.
We might have been the last people on Earth who didn't own an "i" something. Until now!
Maybe this will inspire me to blog more often. We shall see.

Oh yeah...I've done this before.

A couple of weeks ago I was having a restless night. Tossing, turning, not sleeping.
Pretty soon my thoughts turned to my latest hobby, the journaling. The taking NOTE.
And it hit me! I have done this before!
Eons (or 9 years) ago our family of 8 (this was pre-Jaxon) loaded up in our 7 passenger mini-van and set off on a cross country road trip to West Virginia.
And I prepared a "travel journal" for the trip. I didn't call it a travel journal back then. I just thought of it as a funky quasi scrapbook.
I made color copies of sections of the route from an atlas. Attached them to pieces of paper that were 3-hole punched and put in a 3 ring binder for the trip.

As we drove I took notes of how much we paid for gas. $1.38 per gallon!!!
And where we stopped to eat. Sometimes even what we ate. 30 White Castle cheeseburgers!!!
I collected a bunch of ephemera while on the road. Took lots of pictures. When we got home I added all of these to the notes from the trip and put the pages in clear page protectors.
I never quite finished it though. So it has always been stored away in the craft room.
But this sleepless night a couple of weeks ago got my mind turning. I wanted to finish it but I kind of hated the 3 ring binder thing. So I thought it over for a few days and finally figured out how to remake it.
I used an old hanging file folder and a couple of the West Virginia maps collected on that trip. A little Mod Podge magic and a new cover was made!

It took a couple of days to figure out how to get away from the 3-hole punched pages. But I finally came up with an idea to stitch two pages together with a kind of paper "bridge" which I could then fasten together and into the cover with a stitched binding.
This picture shows how I stitched larger sheets out of two pages each by adding a bridge of paper in the middle.
The hardest part was keeping the pages in the correct order. First page stitched to last page. Second page stitched to second to last page and so on. Until I got to the center two pages. Sounds confusing, right? It worked out!

And then my daughter went into labor and the project got put on hold again while I took super deep sniffs of a newborn baby's head. It's like crack!
This morning I finally bound it all together, same basic idea as the Remains of the Day journals I've been making as far as the stitched binding goes.
And here's the finished project. It's been so fun to relive that trip. So many things change in an eon. ;)

Happy bonus - There was some ephemera left over which will be perfect for the travel journal I'll make for our next road trip to WV this summer. Yay! Can't wait to get that one started now.

These Women - My Daughters

This is not really a birth story. That belongs to Crystal. She'll tell it in her own time.
This is the story of one of my most amazing moments as a mom.
Baby Nash was born last Thursday.
It started just after 1 am when I heard "Mom! I think I'm in labor."
I hope she knows how much it honors me to be her Mom. I hear her talk about me as her mom to other people. She calls me mom on Facebook. (THAT'S validation. Surely!) But in our daily interactions I guess we don't call each other by any name really. We just talk. Which is awesome! There's not a birth story for me to tell about how she became my daughter. But she certainly did - become my daughter. As loved as all the others.
We gathered ourselves up and went to the hospital. Started making the calls to the sisters. And they all started rolling in.
Kayleigh and Heather, together, as an energetic and enthusiastic FORCE through the doors of the labor and delivery unit. All smiles and laughter and loudness.
Kenzie on a 2am 2 hour drive from school, determined not to miss the birth of this nephew.
Emily stayed home with Jaxon, having declared herself too young for this. lol
Roger joined us and for a few hours there was lots of talking and laughing and one or more of us at a time wandering in and out for snacks or drinks or ice chips for Crystal.
But then....then we got down to the last hour and half or so.
Roger, still surprisingly squeamish about woman things for a father of six daughters, left the room.
And Crystal got down to the serious business of pushing.
Something happened.
Something very powerful that I'm still not sure how to put into words almost a week later.
There we were, two of us on each side of her, holding her legs and coaching her through sets of 4 pushes for each contraction. Encouraging her to do this hard, hard work so that she could hold her baby.
And I felt this incredible vibe, energy, connection, UNITY, no...none of those words is quite right. It was just this SOMETHING that I can't even describe that was going on between this group of women that I have mothered for so long.
It was just so moving. Any time one of them would offer up more encouragement than the business of "deep breath in! push! 2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10 exhale and deep breath in....." it would choke me up with emotion to the point of making it hard to count out loud. I might have miscounted a time or two. lol
And then Nash was here. And he is perfect.

I wish I had the words to describe this intense thing that I experienced seeing my grown girls come together this way for their sister. It was simply magical. There has always been some combination of myself and/or a sister or two at each birth but this was the first time I was there with all of them. Amazing. A week later and I'm still crying about it as I type this.
Our oldest daughter chose to become estranged from our family a little more than 2 1/2 years ago. It's beyond comprehension for me that anyone would choose not to be a part of this powerful sisterhood. I'm sad for her that she is missing out on this and that their group can't be one sister stronger.
I've never had a sister and it never really mattered to me. My one younger brother was my friend growing up and, I admit, the target of my occasional sibling meanness. It never even occurred to me to wish for sisters.
But after last week's experience I kind of retroactively wish for a few.
Everyone should have a team like that.

Fakin' it till I make it.

Our mantel has looked like this since I took down the Christmas decorations in January.

Not even kidding.
Pretty shameful, eh?
I've been busy. Making books, reading books, eating, sleeping, eating. And just generally having no interest in home decorating projects.
Now that I finished the project I was most excited about in the past couple of months (The NC book) I finally got sick of the living room looking like we just moved in.
So today I ran to Hobby Lobby and grabbed a few sprays of my FAVORITE springtime blossom, Forsythia, and put together a simple Spring mantel.

I like it. It'll hold me over till Spring arrives.
I'd like to find or make a mirror with a chunky, white, antiqued frame to lean against the wall inside that niche. To cover the electrical outlets but still keep them accessible. But that's not a "run out and grab it" kind of project. It'll have to wait for later.

This is what I do instead of blogging....

and it thrills me!
I am making books. Journals. I sew the pages together, make the covers out of paper and fabric, and bind it all together myself. I learned to do it by taking Mary Ann Moss' Remains of the Day online class and I just love it. I've made 4 since January and helped Emily make one too.
I'm obsessed.
So here's the journal about our trip to Outer Banks last year. Some of it will be familiar because I blogged about the first 3 days or so.
I constructed the body of the book out of maps, brochures, advertisements, etc that I saved from out trip. Plus some printables and scrapbook papers, envelopes, scraps of fabric, etc. Then I filled it all up with our wonderful memories of the trip.
It's LOOOOONG. But I hope you enjoy it. I sure did. :)
Clicking on the first pic should enlarge them enough to be able to read. If only there was such a simple solution for my terrible handwriting!

 Did you make it all the way?
You deserve a vacation!