Can't wait...

Seems like I've been waiting a lot lately. Waiting for people to do their part of the job, waiting for the weather to get better so that I can do my job,  waiting for my computer to process through tons of pix in raw format... Right now I'm more specifically waiting for my vacation. One week... It can't come soon enough!!

Okay, not the most amazing news ever, I know, but that's all I have for now! ;)

TDC Blog hop!

Welcome to the French step of TDC's blog hop! You should have traveled aaaaaaall the way from Japan (Holly's blog) and your next stop is Michelle Batton's FB page. If you get lost along the way you can start back here.

My freebie is a quickpage / template pack. "Template" is a bit too ambitious of a word for this, actually. I just created the chevrons and the folded frame skeleton but the rest of the page is up to you. One thing that could be fun to do is to use this big white space for title, journaling, or even a blended pic, watcha think?

Just a word about the chevrons, since I'm at it! I created those as shapes and applied an inner shadow to create the "cut out effect" to them. That way, you can clip different papers to each of them (like I did in the quickpage), clip the same paper as the background one to increase the cut out look, or even ditch the inner shadow completely, apply a regular shadow and change the cut outs in paper pieces.

This is truely a perfect example of how versatile digi scrapping is, and of one of my main reason for LOVING this hobby of ours!

Anyway, hope you'll enjoy those goodies. Please shoot me a comment and link me up if you use those, I'd love to see your creations!!

Have a fun DSD and remember to hang out at The Digichick this weekend, we have even more fun planned for you. The shop is 40% off November 1st to Nov. 5th, it's time to get those paypal accounts ready! ;)

I'll host an International Chat on Sunday. It'll be at 11AM (Paris Time) = 10AM (England Time) = 7 PM (Japan Time) = 5 AM (EST). I won't post the PST time, it's indecent! LOL If you're around, please come hang out with us, it'll be fun!

ETA: sorry, I'm a dork, I forgot the link to download the freebie! DOH!!! I guess that's what you get for writing a blog post after your b'day party (with champagne!) LOL It's fixed, now!

EATA (edited again to add... yep, totally made that one up!): Apparently my box account is out of bandwith. I'll try to get this solved later today, please come back in a dozen hours and thanks for your patience!

EAATTA (edited again another time to add): Here is a new link to download the template. This one is via 4shared. Let me know if you have any trouble and THANKS for your interest in the freebie!!

So much time, so many changes

Well, once again my blog was silent for way too long. I've had good excuses for that, though, some were indeed great and some not that great.

The last time I posted, I was about to start a new IVF procedure. This one went pretty well, we found the perfect dose of meds for me and it went really smoothly.

Right after Bastille Day, my friend Nanie came for a one-week visit. It was fabulous to have her and her two kids around for such a long time, we really enjoyed each other's company and had time to talk and catch up. It was also my last week of treatement and I got the egg retrieval procedure in the middle of it, so she also helped me focus on something else.

The day she left, we had the implantation procedure. I then spent another week off work and went back to the office for a week before my pregnancy test on August 3rd. Which came out positive.

After 4 years of trying, 3 of them with various infertility treatements, I was finally pregnant. As you can imagine, I was incredibly happy.

Unfortunately, I only last for about a month. On August 27th, we had our first ultrasound, which didn't show any cardiac activity. The embryo wasn't evolving, it wasn't even here any more. I decided to stop the pregnancy with meds rather than wait for it to happen naturally.

This was probably the most terrible experience I had to go through. Not the miscarriage itself, which was uncomfortable but not that terrible, but the fact that I lost this baby. Which wasn't even a baby  yet, of course. But as I said to Guy once, I wasn't 6 weeks pregnant, I was 4 years pregnant. I had been expecting, hoping, waiting for this pregnancy for so long that I was devastated to lose it.

I've been having a hard time since then and I was really thankful to have the opportunity, through the fertility center, to see a psychologist. It helps to have someone neutral to talk to, and even if I know it will take time, I think I'm moving in the right direction.

Through all this experience, I've been blessed to have amazing people around me to support me, comfort me, pray for me and send me good thoughts. Guy, of course, has been amazing. My family, my friends and my online friends have been fabulous. I couldn't have gone through all that without them and I'm really thankful for those amazing people.

Since the miscarriage, I've changed. It made me reconsider things that I thought were important, I lost interest for some things and found passion for other. For example, I've been more and more interested about photography. I also started yoga and, even if I only went to one lesson, I love it. This perfect mix of mindfulness and letting go is exactly what I need right now. Without even mentioning the serenity and peace you feel during the class and after! So, yeah, I'm evolving, growing, changing, hopefully for the better. I wish I wouldn't have to, though!

Another month has come and gone...

... and I failed at keepin this blog up to date. Again. There's just too much going on in my life and in digi world for me to manage it. At least that's my story and I'm sticking with it! ;)

Bonjour, visiteurs francophones! Je vous invite à passer à la fin de ce post pour quelques mots dans notre langue natale! ;-)

So what happened since my last update? Let's see... My main news is definitely infertility-related: we'll have our second IVF attempt this July, and I got all the papers yesterday. This should happen during the week that my BFF Steph will spend here in vacation. She'll come to visit with her boyfriend Daniel, her almost-6-years-old son Tristan and her 2 1/2 yo daughter Ambre. It's both good and bad, good because it'll help me not get too crazy about the IVF thing, and bad because I won't be able to fully enjoy their presence, carry the kids, walk too much, etc. But even though I won't be fully participating in everything, I'm determined to enjoy this week. Then in early August, my dad and his girlfriend will come for a visit. And after that, if I can travel safely (=if I'm not pregnant), I will go to see my grandparents and mom. Pfew, this will be a fun summer! :D


Talking about fun, I've had a bit of a mojo-less time recently but I've still managed to scrap quite a bunch of pages. Here are the one I created since my last update. As I already did in my previous post, I'll just link them to my gallery so that I don't have to explain all of them. They are all created with TDC goodies.

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This last one is very special since I created it with Jenn's images and story for The Daily Digi's Play It Again feature. They request LOs from several scrappers to have a variety of styles with the same basic "material" (pix, journaling, etc.). It's incredibly fun to see how everyone's creativity is expressed in a different way. One thing that was very surprising to me was that I highlighted a different photo (the one with the two boys) than everyone else (most scrappers focused on the beautiful pic where he's looking straight at the camera). I think that tells a lot about what I love in scrapbooking: it celebrates love and relationships and my favorite pictures and stories are always the ones where peoples are shown happy together.

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It goes without saying, I was also thrilled to be featured in a TDD post. This site is a monument in my digi world and seeing my name up there, next to some of the most fabulous scrappers of this community, made me incredibly proud!

If you made it that far in this ginormous post, congrats and thank you!! LOL Before I'm gone (hopefully not for another month!), let me just say a word for my French visitors...

Bonjour et bienvenue, amis de France! Si vous arrivez sur ce blog depuis le monde du scrap papier, je vous souhaite également la bienvenue du "côté obscur de la force", à savoir le scrap digital que je pratique depuis plus de 6 ans déjà! J'espère que, malgré mes (longues) déblatérations en anglais, vous aurez plaisir à découvrir mon petit coin de web. J'écris dans la langue de Shakespeare car la plupart de mes scropines sont américaines. C'est ce qui arrive quand on a commencé sa carrière de scrappeuse dans un site anglophone! A l'époque (tout début 2006), il faut dire que le scrap digital n'était pas si répandu et il n'y avait rien en français. Le site en question est The Digichick, si vous voulez découvrir le scrap digital, faire quelques challenges et rejoindre une communauté hyper sympa (c'est pour moi presque une famille), vous savez où vous devez aller. Je fais partie de la Creative Team du site (ainsi que de plusieurs designeuses) et le lien vers ma galerie est ICI. Si vous préférez le scrap ou les loisirs créatifs hybrides, je vous conseille le site-soeur de TDC, The Hybrid Chick. Une mine d'inspiration même si, comme moi, on ne fait que regarder. Promis, un jour, j'arrêterai d'avoir peur de la colle et des ciseaux!


N'hésitez pas à me laisser un petit commentaire et/ou un lien vers votre blog, je vous lirai avec plaisir! Et si vous avez des questions, je suis votre homme... enfin, votre femme! A bientôt j'espère!

Photo-heavy catch up

7 weeks since my last post... That was quite a break, wasn't it? Let's see, what happened since I last wrote on this poor neglected blog of mine??

Well, first I had my mom visit  me for Easter. We had a blast, we visited some places but also spent some time just being together, doing nothing special but talking and enjoying being together. It was awesome!!

In April I also prepared an album in memory of our friend Hugues that passed away recently, and we gave it to his wife and son during a lunch we had all together. It was a bittersweet task for me, sad because every picture of him reminded me that he is gone and that his son (DBF's childhood friend) and wife (my collegue) are grieving and in pain, and joyful too because those pix were from happy moments and Hugues was definitely someone that enjoyed life. It was also a great reminder that there's no such thing as taking too many pix, that I should get in the photo too (there was no pic of me with Hugues) and that scrapbooking and preserving memories is not a regular hobby, that it has a deep meaning.

Since I'm at it, I've been scrapping a lot of pages since my last post. Let's see... I'll just post them with a link to my gallery so that you can check the credits and the description of the LOs if you're interested, there are too many pages for me to explain everything again! LOL

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BTW, this is probably my fave LO ever, technically, story-wise, I love it!!

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In other scrappy news, I'm now CTing for three awesome teams: site CT at The Digichick (and I not only love love love the designers and talented CTs there but also the awesome comunity), Amanda Heimann (who moved back to Scrap Orchard on NSD) and Charm Box Studios (Charla and Michelle joined their talents to create fonts, story boards, actions and other tools for photographers and scrappers). It's so exciting, but I have to find a way to organize my time and keep track of my assignements, because I'm honored to scrap for those amazing designers and I want to do it "right". It's still a work in progress!

On that note, I'm off to enjoy our beautiful and sunny Sunday, have fun!

Scrappy Sunday... with only one LO!

Well, as I planned, this week has been pretty busy and hectic, and I hadn't much time to scrap. I still enjoyed one of TDC's challenge, though, a template one, for which I created this fun layout using Gratitude by Flutter Expressions:

 

I can't link you to the kit since Katherine moved to One Story Down that just opened a new shop.

Lots of movement recently @ TDC: Nicole Seitler passed the rolling pin (LOL) to Sinead Turner who is now the new owner of the site. She's a fabulous gal and I'm sure she'll rock. Nicole chose to focus on her designing work and is now one of SSD's new designers, along with Mari Koegelenberg. It's sad to see those girls go but I'm sure once everything settles down it'll be for the best. Change is hard on me, though. That's life, I guess!

On a more joyful note, my mom is coming this week for Easter, and I can't wait to have her here with me for 5 days. She was here for the last time in 2006... Can you believe it?? That being said, I probably won't be able to scrap much until she goes back home, but I'll take lots of pix for later scrapping! Sometimes, you have to create the memories rather than record them, right?

Have a nice week!

Scrap Sunday

Lots of new fun scrap stuff this week, but not many LOs. And lots of IRL stuff, not fun at all (a dear friend of ours, DBF's godfather and husband of one of my collegues, passed away), which also explains why I haven't scrapped as much. Sometimes you just have to sort your priorities, right?

I've still scrapped a couple pages, though! Here they are.

First a LO created with Etc. by Danyale's new release "Renewal". Very springy, very fun, gorgeous colors and textures... plus a cute pic of yours truely when I was 2 or 3 years old.

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And a second page about DBF and I using the collab "A Charmed Life" by Cluster Queen Creations and Amy Stoffel. Very fun kit, full of great papers and fabulous elements, I loved it!

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That's it for this week. As I said, too much is going on and I can't focus on everything at the same time. I will be busy this week at work too, so I'm not sure I'll be able to scrap much. When I spend my day at the computer, I don't really feel like being in front of a monitor again at night. Plus I hope my mom will come for Easter so I have to organize my house too so that we can comfortably have a guest. I will try to catch up on my P365 LOs, though, so that I can at least share those next week. Until then, take care and have fun!

I'm a marathoner

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Yep, even though I was 12 the last time I ran for more than 5 minutes in a row, I'm a marathoner. I even run three marathons at a time: weight loss, organisation and infertility. When I started those journeys, I expected them to be sprints. I expected to get pregnant like most of my friends, within months of trying. I expected I would get my house, my schedule and above all my bad habits under control in a snap. I expected I'd get rid of the extra weight after a couple weeks of exercising and eating right.

But all the journeys take more than just some weeks of effort, at least the journeys that are worth the trip. I'm hanging there, and even though some days are better than the other, I try to remind myself that what matters is the long run. I know that, despite the bumps along the road, the trip will be worth it. The rewards will be fabulous. And starting those journeys is half the victory, especially for weight loss and organisation. I'm doing much better on those two than if I'd never done anything, right? They are probably lifelong journeys, I will probably never be able to say "I'm done, I'm at my goal, I don't need to pay attention to this.", but it's okay.

Just like marathoners, I should be careful to keep a good rythm all along the run. If you sprint at times and walk at other, it's much harder and you feel much more tired. You lose your breath, you feel bad, you get in pain. Consistency is the key here. What makes the "infertility marathon" different is that you don't control your rythm, the fertility center and your body do. This is what makes it much harder: you can't control some things, while you can control other (like weight loss) I have to focus on those and let go of the rest which is not in my own hands.

Lent My Way weeks #1, #2 and #3

(check this post to find out more about this project)

On the first week we focused on our office, more specifically on DBF's desk. He had a terrible mess and most of it is gone. It feels great.

Look! Empty shelves!!

I'm always amazed how a little neatness and decluttering can have such a great impact on how you feel when you look at that space: it's so fresh, so light now! Bliss!
To make things even better I would have liked to take care of my desk and bookcase too, but unfortunately I didn't find / make time for that, so I will try to tackle this during this month.

I then started a new room: the bathroom. It's very very tiny and I was able to declutter it all during the weekend.

The after pic. It looks like there are still many things, I know, but it was
worse before and  much more disorganized, trust me!

I got rid of old products that I kept for some reason (don't ask me what this reason was!), checked the expiration dates of all our meds and prepared a bag to bring back to the drugstore, I prepared my vanity for the few trips that I make, etc.

Finally, last week I worked in the bedroom, especially our closet. Look at all the clothes I got rid of:

There were at least 15 or 20 pieces that didn't fit me and that I
packed to bring to a charity. Look at all those hangers!

Ain't it great? Those were too small for me since I gained so much weight over the last years. Even if I lose 30 lbs one day and CAN get back in those, will I really WANT to?? I don't think so! It was time for me to pass on those clothes to a charity so that someone that fits in them can enjoy them.

So far, it's been great. I have to fight my natural tendency to perfectionism and remind myself constantly that doing something is great already, and that all this mess didn't appear overnight and can't hence disappear all of a sudden. It's hard sometimes but it's getting easier and I've taken the habit to celebrate those victories, no matter how small they are.

This week, I am working on the kitchen. I especially decluttered my recipe books that I never ever use. I will also work on practicing my routines, I'm tired to have a big huge mess to take care of before the cleaning lady comes on Thursday, when it's so easy to do a little every day. Maintenance is the key to housework happiness, I tell you!

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Once again, the new releases at TDC blew my mind. So much gorgeousness, the hardest part is to pick which products to play with! ;)

First, I created this page about my little brother coming after my mom with water... You'd better hide the camera, mom! I used a new kit and its add-ons by the guest designer ForeverJoy called "Oh Boy!", perfect for this playful LO.

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Then I used the bright and fun birthday kit "And Many More" by Cluster Queen Creations to scrap DBF's 42nd b'day. As I said, he is 42 going on 13! LOL

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Last LO with this thursday's releases, a page about my love for Harry Potter. Thanks to my collegue Pascale I read the books last fall and I fell in love immediately. I used Elise Hansen's "Well Read" for this page, the glasses were too perfect for a Harry Potter LO to pass, right?

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Finally, I created a hybrid project with the guest designer's Jenn Labre new kit "A Perfect Day", a little I love you card.

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And now, 3 more LOs / projects that I created recently, but that didn't use new releases. First a P366 LO (I'm 2 weeks late on this, but trying to catch up!), that uses the february TDC collab "A Love Story":

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Then an invite for the baptism of my friends' son, using a wedding kit by Mari Koegelenberg "Always and Forever":

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And finally a LO about my BFF's saying she makes up constantly. Love this trait of her! I used Sugarplum Paperie's kit "He Said, She Said", perfect for this topic!

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That's it, these are this week's LOs.

I will post an update on the first 3 weeks of the "Lent My Way" project tomorrow or Tuesday with progress pix. I love this project so far, I feel like I really accomplished much!