Just Peachy Keen!

This past weekend was a crazy busy but oh so much fun!!! The weekend started with my Friday night workshop. We had fun creating with our new Splendor papers.

We continued the fun on Saturday with our all day crop. I love my all day crops because there is always lots of food, catching up with friends and seeing fun creations that everyone is making. Here is Ms. Zada getting a head start on her Christmas gifts creating recipe boxes with our new Cherry-O papers.
One of the yummy foods that we had was Frozen Fruit Salad. This recipe is SO easy and SO yummy especially during the hot summer. I promised I would post the recipe so here goes (by the way, this is a huge recipe but is great for freezing and eating all summer long):

Frozen Fruit Salad:

14 bananas sliced
3 pounds sliced red grapes
1 #10 can of diced peaches, drained and rinsed
1 #10 can of crushed pineapple - un-drained
1 regular sized can of lemonade concentrate
1 regular sized can of orange juice concentrate
9 cups of water
sugar to taste. The recipe calls for something like 9 cups of sugar but I only use about a cup and a half of fructose.

Slice bananas and mix in with lemonade concentrate. Mix in all other ingredients. The #10 cans are the large cans that you can get at Sam's, Costco, BJ's, etc. Like I said, this creates a huge amount! We have to mix it in a rubbermade tote! :) Pour mix into large zip lock bags and freeze. When you are ready to eat, just take out of the freezer about an hour before and let begin to thaw. Salad should be eaten like a slush. Enjoy!!!

To finish my week I did something I hope would make my grandmother proud - I canned peaches. This is a whole new experience for me. Last year it was Strawberry jam and now peaches! It only took me about 6 hours - ugh!!! But hopefully they will be worth the effort.



Well, I'm off to have me some more fruit salad - enjoy your 4th of July weekend and remember to say a special prayer for our service men and women who are fighting to keep us safe. God Bless!

Happy Father's Day!!!!

This is the sign we woke up to this morning on our floor outside our bedroom. Whiz kid made it using toilet paper and staples. There was also a picture of him, Bruiser and Daddy playing Guitar Hero. A great start to our day!

I hope you and your families had a fabulous father's day!!!

Having fun in Hostess Club!

I love my hostess club! It is just a fun time to get together and create! I love it because it is planned time to get away, have fun with friends and make something new. This month we focused on making Dry Erase Boards to decorate our homes or give as gifts. Here's a little snippet of what we made - enjoy!

These are so fun and easy to make and make great gifts. It's a great way to use up your scraps. Try making some and upload them so I can see them.

Where the Wild Things Are

This last weekend our church group decided to go camping as an early Father's Day present to the dads and for a little fun time for the rest of us. As I packed the bags and precooked most of the food, for one reason or another every other family in our group had to back out of our trip. Disappointed but not deterred we decided to make this a fun family excursion and fun is definitely what we had.

Now camping with a scrapbooker and a scrapbookers family definitely yields different discussions than most might have while camping. As each scene of the day would unfold, and I of course holding the camera so I wouldn't miss one moment, I would think about the title to this picture or the overall title to the entire layout or layouts as it may be, that I would create to commemorate this special occasion. My kids even started throwing out titles but I think the one we all agreed on was the title to my posting - "Where the Wild Things Are".

Now as most of you have met my four wonderful children, you know that that could be the title to my life but this trip showed us different "wild things" and lots of them.

Here are only a couple samples of what we encountered, not mentioning the little mouse we found under our tent as we packed up at the end of our excursion or the beautiful yellow butterfly that seemed to follow us around no matter where we went - I am sure it was thinking "what wild things just entered my home?" The best though was an encounter with the geese (or as I always called them growing up - the ducks!"

When I was growing up, every year my parents would take us to Florida for a special family vacation. At the beginning our yearly trips we would always stay at the same hotel that had this small pond in the back. In the pond you could always find a dozen or more "ducks" wadding around waiting for a helpless little girl to come feed them. I was just that sucker! My wonderful father would go out and buy me a loaf a bread everyday to "feed the ducks". I would excitingly run out and start breaking off pieces of my bread to feed them. This worked well for several years, until one year, they saw me coming! I, armed with my loaf of bread and ready to say hello to my "ducks", headed out to the pond early one morning. This morning the ducks were ready and waiting and within minutes I was completely surrounded. They were jumping/flying at me, grabbing the bread out of my hand and hissing at me. Hissing at ME!!! I was bringing them food what were they hissing at me for???!!!?? I don't know but the screaming began and well, let's just say that was the last time I fed those dumb ducks!!!

OK anyway, back to last weekend. The camp ground we stayed at had a lake on it for fishing and since Bruiser has his own hunting license and dad just got one to fish with his buddies at church we decided to head down to watch the boys fish. Upon arrival to the lake, what do we see but swarms of beautiful geese. My girls were so excited to see these geese and ready to "feed the ducks!" Now since I am a bit older than I was those many years ago when I was so traumatized by the "ducks", I decided to put my big girl panties on and help the girls "feed the ducks".

Now what you can't see in this picture (and I was not about to walk into the ducks area any further) is little Tinker Bell (mini-me as I am told) on the other side of Princess getting up close and personal to these beautiful creatures. The girls were so excited to feed the ducks and they too were excited to be fed. But of course, there always has to be a grumpy goose on the loose and ours had it's eyes set on Tinkerbell. As soon as she pulled out the bread the dumb animal came running up and started hissing at her. Of course, the goose would eat the bread, balk at the other geese for trying to get its bread but then would start hissing at Tinkerbell again. All the sudden images of me at 4 of 5 years old, feeding the ducks and one jumping on my head, came rushing back into my head. Needless to say, Tinkerbell and Princess were quickly escorted back to the truck and away from the geese for the day.

Ah yes, memories, these are the memories that I would soon forget but hey, we scrapbookers have to scrapbook the good, the bad and the ugly - the ugly ducklings that is!!! Keep your eyes out for my layout commemorating these wonderful family memories, hopefully to be completed this year :).

Happy Birthday, Princess!

I can't believe that it has been so long since I have posted on here. Things have been so crazy busy lately. I won't even try and catch you up on everything that we have been doing but I will say - wow!!! I need a vacation! The funny part is that we just got back from a weekend trip to Chicago for a wedding. This trip was not a vacation though. We didn't arrive in Chicago until 2am and then we left that say day at 9:30pm to head home. We finally arrived home at 7am the next morning. Life is always fun here at the Hicks house!

Today is such a special day - It is my sweet Princess's birthday! We started the day off right with a special gift. Princess just learned how to ride a two wheel bike about 2 weeks ago and had definitely outgrown her last bike. It was time for an upgrade and she was thrilled!!!!

As the custom here at our house, Daddy always take the kids birth day off from work and spends the day with the kids.The usual request is to go to Chuck-E-Cheese because the kids know that that is the only day that they will get to go (I can't stand that place). They went and played there for a while and then saw the new Furry Vengeance. Both thought it was hilarious and really enjoyed it! Looks silly to me but was just up their alley!

Afterwards they met us back for a fun party at the park. Princess had requested we go to the local walking track for her birthday where all the kids could ride their bikes, scooters and the like and have some fun. We cooked out and had a great time.

Princess was definitely spoiled again with so many fabulous gifts. There was a definite theme to the gifts though - lots of artsy stuff! Here cousins even gave her 15 rolls of tape!!! To this she replied, "Yes, I'm in heaven!" She is so funny!!! She has requested that her new name be Artsy Fartsy Chick - so, be watching!

Happy Easter!!!

I hope everyone has had a wonderful Easter Sunday with friends and family! Praise the Lord we can celebrate this Easter and every Easter - Jesus is ALIVE!!!!

God Bless!
Heather

Organizing with the Best!

OK, you definitely couldn't tell it from my house but I love to be organized! It feels so good to have everything in it's place and a place for everything. I have tried to learn over the last 9 years that with kids (and a husband) that you can't always have everything organized like you would like but I love to try. Besides my homeschool supplies, my scrapbooking supplies seem to be the hardest things to get and keep organized. One of the main problem I have, and it seems most people have, is organizing your pictures and having them ready when it's time to go to a crop or workshop. Well, I think I finally got that problem solved! It worked so well for me, I taught a workshop on it Friday night! It was so fun to see everyone walk in with arm loads of pictures that needed to be taken out of the envelopes and organized and then see people leave with a lot fewer envelopes and a new process to organize learned. At the workshop, everyone received:

1. One Cropper Hopper tote (if needed)
2. A In-Progress 12x12 3-ring binder
3. 10 Close to My Heart page protectors
4. 2 packages of Close to My Heart photo pages
5. Index cards and index tabs to organize photos in the Cropper Hopper tote
6. page listing all the Close to My Heart papers and colors used in those papers since 2008
7. Close to My Heart color swatch ring of all 60 of CTMH's colors
8. Custom stickease for pre-journaling while organizing your photos in the photo pages
9. Listing of other Close to My Heart items great for organizing
10. Dinner
11. Good time with friends!

Look at all this organizing going on. Isn't this great!!! During our organizing, Brenda and I found out that we both take too many pictures of animals. Brenda likes cows and I apparently like giraffes and whales - who knew?!? Now, off to scrapbook some more now that I can see what I have to work with!

Get your pictures out, put in a good movie and see how organized you can get! You never know, you might just love it like we do!