Brontë Sisters Power Dolls

This made me laugh so hard and went perfectly with my enjoyment of Gone With the Wind that I described in my last post so I had to share. Enjoy!

Mother's Day in Disneyland!

Well I just got back from a family trip to Disneyland for Mother's Day. Because there's no place my mother would rather be than Disneyland. As a family we make the 7 hour drive about 2-4 times a year to the happiest place on earth and never get sick of the place. This time was no exception. From lounging by a pirate ship pool, to the food and wine festival, shopping and eating; it's far more than kiddie rides to us. The main purpose of our trip was to experience the Disney Mother's Day buffet. As far as buffets go, it's pretty decadent. Piles of crab, shrimp, berries, cheesecake, crepes, cheeses, cured meats, mimosas, piano players, chandeliers ands 15ft floral arrangements at every turn:

We got fairly sick from eating too much and I managed to escape the penance of my gluttony by taking a 3 hour nap.  We were due to travel home the next day, so after we managed to recover a bit we headed out for our last night in the parks.

All in all, it was a wonderful Disney trip. I even managed to learn that Disney has it's own breed of rose.  We saw them in the park and they were absolutely Gorgeous! Take a peek for yourself:

So in honor of my Mother and her love for Disney, we used the Disney rose as inspiration for the present we bought her from the parks:

Isn't it just perfect?! And she loved it!

So my book for the trip has been Gone With the Wind. I am enraptured with Scarlett O'Hara. She absolutely fascinates me. I can't help but love her brand of common sense at the pointlessness of tradition and how she is going to knock the world on its rear with her own success and independence. It will definitely go on my top ten book list, which I will definitely be sharing. One particular snippet from the book just made me laugh outright. It takes place after Scarlett married the mild and pliable Frank Kennedy during the reconstruction period of Atlanta post-Civil war. Scarlett isn't entirely honest with Frank about her ambitions to become financially independent after the Civil war. She plays into his expectation for a sweet, docile, air-headed wife until he puts a ring on it. Then Scarlett immediately begins to take hold of Frank's business interests. Frank is reluctant to think that Scarlett has any sort of mental or physical capability to deal with his business. But Margaret Mitchell writes "Now he saw that she understood entirely too well and he felt the usual indignation at the duplicity of women. Added to it was the usual masculine disillusionment at discovering that a woman has a brain." Classic! What a pesky thing is a woman's brain to a man.

National Scrapbook Day Challenges!!!

Okay, so some of you may not know this but today is National Scrapbook Day! That means that today people all over the country are having parties, contests and excuses to create. I decided to participate is a couple of challenges this year and will be posting up pictures of what I create throughout the day.

First up is the scrapbook.com general challenge which was to create a page on why you scrapbook. Here is the link to the challenge: Scrapbook.com NSD 2010 Challenge
And here is my entry:

L'amour Layout

This is my most recent layout of our honeymoon in Italy! Use the link below to access my scrapbook.com gallery and see some of the products I used.

Katierose87's Gallery: L'Amour

As Mothers' day approaches I have been spending the week creating some cards based on the personalities of the ladies responsible for me. In addition to making cards I spent the afternoon yesterday with my beloved sweet grandma, or Baba as I call her. She is 88 years old and doesn't leave home much but there is deffinitely more than meets the eye. As a young woman she was taken from her home in Belarus to Nazi Germany and was sent to a labor camp. Luckily for her a local family needed an extra hand on their farm and so she was sent to work for them and became part of their family and was able to survive rather comfortably. After the war she immigrated to Canada and met my grandfather. 5 children later, they moved to San Francisco. I am so greatful for her! We had a great time talking about vitamins, eating borsht, and laughing. So glad that I have time now to spend with her before I lose my chance!

Creative Diarrhea

After a long drawn out period of holding in all that creative juice it's now blowing out in catastrophic proportions! I'm sitting here in my little studio, being all manic with a glue gun and paper flying everywhere, and I can't stop. I actually woke up at 6 am on Saturday morning to fiddle around. So I got halfway through a dignified scrapbook page of my Husband and I in Venice and then when that ran out of steam I moved on to a Hello Kitty greeting card, then a little throne made of paper. What could I possibly need an 8" throne made out of paper for? Well considering it's far too small for my ego, I think I'll settle on using it as a little display for other random things that I smash together and top off with a sneeze of glitter. Here's some of what I've been cranking out:

So May 1st is going to be my first official National Scrapbook day! I will be working on some projects for challenges and hopefully posting them up here as they come along. I will be participating with the challenges at http://www.mypinkstamper.com/ as well as http://www.scrapbook.com/ .

In the meantime I am reading Gone With the Wind and it looks to be AMAZING! I love historical fiction with a passion and will probably make some recommendations in a future post. Gone With the Wind is my all time favorite movie and I kick myself for having waited this long to read the novel. So Fiddle-de-dee and Great Balls of Fire!!!

A New Enterprise

Here begins Katie and Company.
Mission: to spread glitter everywhere while raking in ludicrous amounts of money.
CEO: Me
COO: John
CFO: Pickle
Chairman of the Board of Directors: Bambino

Today the executives of Katie and Co got some serious work done.

We attacked rugs (Pickle, CFO):

We attacked socks (Bambino, Chairman of the Board):

We found a new office space:

We added glitter to things:

And we gave dirty looks (Pickle, CFO):

So far, business is booming and we forecast 500% growth in the second quarter of 2010.

So my first couple of days being myself again have been amazing and I seriously am so happy I can cry on demand. My CFO is actually perched on my head as I type this and is making snorting noises as he cleans his pink little butt. Distraction. Focus. In fact its like my life is thawing out after a prolonged winter and spring has come. Life is creeping back in and shoots of my former self are sprouting all around. I didn't expect that I would fall right back into my old girlish habits that I had in high school and college but I did and it feels so dang good. My mind is my own again and I've been running it at lightning speed.

And when you have/take time to experience life you realize again that it is charming. There are so many little things to enjoy right down to the little white paw that is in my ear right now thanks to my kitten.

Tomorrow I turn 23 years old. This is going to be good.

As the World Turns

A couple of months ago I wrote the following statement:

"My public commitment: I will make a way for myself to be who I am and make it possible to be available to my husband and family. This is going to be risky but well well worth it. But life is full of risk. And happiness and family are worth every bit of it. Because I am going to look back and be satisfied with what I have done."

In the meantime I looked and looked for a way to make this happen and I really just spun in circles getting nowhere. WELL, today was a big major huge day for me because I left the public accounting world and faced the music that it wasn't me. Sounds pathetic but really it just wasn't. I loved the company and people that I worked with but there is little time for the things that get me all riled up: glitter, baby animals, Disney, being pathetic, etc. And so I'll spare my colleagues any further torture and distraction and embark on a new solo journey of finding my unique place in the world. No doubt that this will be made into a movie in the future in which Julia Roberts rides a bicycle through the countryside, while contemplating the meaning of life, and wearing sun hats and khaki capris. I get ahead of myself.

Some background: As soon as I graduated from high school in 2005 I decided that I needed to responsibly marry the man of my dreams, John my now husband, and ASAP. When I say responsibly I mean that there needed to be money involved, rather than an illegitimate child or something else scandalous in nature which is what I would have assumed had I been in your, the reader's, shoes. So I picked the degree that was the most direct and likely route to stability and graduated in 2 1/2 years with a bachelors in Accounting. Jumped right out of school into a great position at a great public accounting firm and have been kidding myself ever since. Albeit I did marry my handsome husband and have savored every bit of our marriage since. The stars were still not aligning.

So rubber meets road and the inevitable happens and here I am with a head full of CRAZY ideas and nothing but time. This is going to be good. I choose to share with you all.

First thing's first. What do I do with myself after going 5 years without a break? One day at a time, breathe, one day at a time. Tomorrow I will clean my house that is sorely neglected. Sounds tame right? Well it also involves removing a Christmas tree. Bad. And the dishwasher won't drain so something creative is going to happen there, probably involving a bucket. I will also take my slack butt on a walk in an effort to get reacquainted with that long forgotten concept called exercise. I mentioned my crazy ideas, which I wrote down today but won't describe because that would be like telling you the twists in the story before they happen. My wise mother said something today about crap hitting the fan and going with what sticks to the wall. So here goes!

I am going to be documenting the craziness here as often as it happens. I'm picturing this getting good so stay tuned my friends.