A Birthday Visitor

My friend Rachel had her 40th birthday and her husband gave her a trip to visit me as a present! How fun to benefit from her birthday present!! We had a great time. The kids LOVED the extra attention they received from her and the house echoed with, "Rachel, come see this" "Rachel, look" "Rachel, are you coming" etc etc. It was funny and a nice break from "mom . . . . ". Audrey loved the extra holding she received and I loved having someone around all day to talk to, shop with, scrapbook with, have a latte with etc. etc.

While she was here we hit the thrift store and a couple consignment stores, went out to eat at McKenzie River Pizza, visited a really cool pottery store and had dessert and coffee and scrapbooked. We had big plans to try digital scrapbooking for the first time. It was much more involved that we realized, more expensive that we thought and took a bit of getting used to. Thankfully, we found some free software as well as free downloads (backgrounds, letters and embelishments) so we only had to pay to print each page. Rachel did several pages and I spent most of my time downloading free stuff because I didn't have the pics I wanted on my computer. I am anxious to actually do a page because Rachel's turned out great and I have LOTS of well organized free stuff :-) That is so ME - lots of preparing, organizing and sorting and little action :-) Brock came into the family room late one night and found us busy scrapbooking. He laughed at how serious and intent we both looked, how we were working in the midst of such a mess, how BRIGHT Rachel's screen was and how Audrey was there sleeping through it all! Seeing what he saw (through the pics) makes me laugh too - he was right about it all :-)