Hubby Was Home

For a little while at least.  But now he is gone again.  This is the busiest he has ever been and will repeat this home for a day or two pattern at least 3 more times over the next month or so.  Sigh 

And my sister and her family just moved here.  So excited that she is so close. 

Sketchy post #3.  I haven't done a double pager in a while.  Ok, I rarely do double pagers.  I am strictly a one page layout kind of girl.  but here goes.

and the page. 

larger pic of page one.  I plan to put pics of my hubby on this spread.  I was so happy with the contrast between the blacks, creams and reds.  It is what I call a dual monochromatic page (if that is possible) because I used different saturations of 2 colors, red & cream.  The glimmer mist, wow.  You can really see how it shimmers in the upper left corner. 

and page 2.  I did a lot of layering on this page.  Lots of fussy cuts but the page looks really simple.  It took me a day and a half to finish!

I altered it just a little bit.  I used glimmer mist and a THoltz mask on the sides of the pages to make it feel more balanced to me.  I also used scraps almost exclusively for the mats and pp on the page. 

Finally, after over a year of applying, Aaron got a call back.  I am very proud of him and am so excited that he will finally know what it is to earn the money he puts into his pocket.  I really can't believe that he is going to be graduating soon and leaving home soon after.  He will spend a couple of months in Ill with his Grandma and then he will be off to basic after that.  Time sure does fly. 

My new favorite breakfast is a banana, 2 cups of coffee and

These littly babies are sooooo good! For the last few years I have been trying to healthyatize our diets.  Not necessarily cutting out fats and sugars but more leaning towards cutting our preservatives, food dyes and what not.  It has been going pretty well.  It is definitely more expensive but so worth it.  Last year, I was looking for a good alternative to cream soups (they have msg in them) and never found one but I learned in that process that there is a lot of food out there that has msg.  Yikes.  I hardly buy any canned foods, preffering fresh or frozen (no preservatives at all most) and I don't buy rice mixes or foods like it anymore, which have tons of msg.  It has not been as difficult as I thought it would be.  We love noodles with fresh spinach and veges, rice the same and potatoes.  I have been learning so many new ways to cook potatoes. So what's the point to this.  No  point to this whatsoevah, just talking to my girls about something that ive been mulling and i hope you dont mind.  The good news is that before I started, my cholesterol was super, super high and now it is better than normal so something must be meshing here.  And if I am being totally honest (which I am), the changes were so slow that we havent even missed the way we used to eat or the things we have dropped from our diet.  

I saw a news report not to long ago about a woman that set an experiment to see if she could eat healthy off of the average amount of money that food stamps supplies to a family per month (I bet that saved her a ton of money!  My grocery bill is out of control).  I was amazed by how she was eating.  She said that she couldn't afford fresh or frozen foods or good cuts of meat.  Hello, where was she shopping at whole foods?  Not that I have anything at all against whole foods, it is one of my favorite stores but you have to have a healthy food budget to shop there.  Seriously.  Budget shoppers shop where the bargains are and that is not whole foods my friends.   I had to wonder if she exagerated a bit, she was talking about all this weight she lost and having to eat canned foods and fatty meats.  Wha?  My mom budget shopped for us and she started a garden, found a co-op and learned how to make a mean pot of stew (ok, sometimes it was nasty) but she did it and we ate healthy.  Just no snacks except what we made at home and not a lot of the more expensive fruits (grapes, cherries, etc). 

 Babble over, time to say thank you for stopping by and I hope that you have a fantastic weekend!!!!!  Hope your weather is not rainy, cold or snowy like ours here is supposed to be.