Sunday, May 20, 2012

Bonding with Teenage Sons

This post is for all my April layouts - I'm enjoying PL and being so up to date, so glad I plunged into it with my particular combination of digi and paper project life!

I have been subscribed onto Daily devotionals f rom - Daily Hope from Rick Warren, and a recent week focused on parenting. In one of them Rick said this "When my kids were young, they were never impressed with what adults are impressed by in my life. What they wanted to know is, "Is Daddy fun?" So I intentionally worked hard on this one." Simple and inspiring! Just because we never thought of it : Are we fun? Can we actually be fun to our teenagers?

Being teenagers, being boys (perhaps?), plus teenage angst and moods, plus being constantly glued to their laptops and phones, we do have to up our parental 'cool' factor, or risk being relegated to monosyllable answers and one-sided conversations (me asking, them gruntling), lol. I really want to turn our interactions to be less about nagging, setting boundaries, getting them to get things done, to more real, engaged conversations, more enjoying family together, before they totally grow up!

 So we are intentionally working on being fun : movies, breakfasts, cooking their fav foods, checking out you-tube videos, keeping pet fishes, ice-cream suppers, swimming, beach, walks, and for the first time in our lives, phone games, lol! After resisting it for the longest time, we're finally playing Angry Birds, Draw Free, Scramble, and getting so good we are beating the kids, and getting quite hooked! LOL

How do you bond and connect with your kids, especially if you have teenagers?
                 
Project Life & Project 365
Notice for my 365 digital pages, I've intentionally kept a theme of using graph/notepad papes as background, adding an alpha for the month, and only further adding some word arts and a couple of tags to complete my fortnightly layouts - this makes it really quick to pull together and keeps a running theme. In fact every time I open up kits or go through new kits I pull out any relevant elements and papers and keep them in one file specially for P365 layouts - power scrapping Katie style - it works!    
Apr 1-15                     
Credits: Blended papers by Amber Clegg and CD Muckosky, both from The Lily Pad's Things that matters most Collab, 'Livelaughlove' by Sahlin Studio, alpha by Karah Fredericks, everything else from RobynMeierotto-ChillKit
April 16-30
Credits: Paper by Jenna Desai, tab by Shawna Clingerman, paint by Emily Emeritt, tag and word arts by Gina Cabrera, arrow by Robyn Meierotto, alpha by Kaye Winiecki.
April PL pages
Pre-prepped my photos by using Paislee Press's free 4X6 templates to squeeze more photos into a 4x6 pocket.
Lots of photos from family outings - all snapped on my iphone, not the best photos, but definitely good enough :)
This page includes photos of Jared and his new gold fishes, screen shots from the iphone games that I have recently caught on, hehe;  also a bodum french press pamphlet from a new one dh bought, like including bits of stuff like that.
And this whole page was from a morning we spent visiting the Museum of Toys - fun and nostalgic!

Allergy alert! Jared went for a skin prick test and found that he is super-allergic to dust mite. We are now on full assault on his mattress, pillow, rug etc, and found this (below) - if you can't tell, that is the amount of dust we vacuumed out on that first day using our Rainbow. We had been slacking on the vacuuming since we moved. Totally scary.
I love this photo! Here's our family of Miffys checking their very own photobook (free from shutterfly!)
And more photos from a May Day (public holiday here) that we spent at home. The quote is lovely and is downloaded from Becky Higgins' free stuff.

See above bottom right showing Jared making his prototype for a school Lamp design project. And below is his 'poster' advertising his Lamp that is named 'FlexIlluminate'. Isn't he cool?
I got my 12x12 Project 365 layouts printed when Persnickety had their recent INSD sale! I actually cannot find anywhere locally that prints 12x12 and Persnickety's rates were reasonable so I went for it. Honestly I was very delighted when they arrived - perfect colors and solid photo paper, wow! Highly recommended! Just like printing photos professionally and the colors were very true and just perfectly saturated.
I am also very happy at how they looked in my Project Life album, next to the 4x6 and 3x4 photos, they did not look out of place at all, and everything fit like they really belonged together. Yay

I also did some 12x12 layouts like this one of a fun time in the pool, and these go right into the PL album too. Thus I will only have the PL album for 2012, and will maybe make a separate digital photobook for a long trip if we take one. Also, it looks like I will be able to fit the entire 2012 into one PL binder - another plus!
 Since I had 9 photos that I really liked for this afternoon we spent at the pool, I made a 12x12 layout  for it.
(credits: Paper by Bobita designs, alpha by Karah Fredericks and border by Just Aimee designs)
I really liked how it turned out, all it needed was a border, nice alpha for the title, and a simple kraft background. Use this template for fun, action-filled photos. Hope you find them fun to use and enjoy memory making and keeping!
This is now available as part of Template Pack 7 in the store. Thanks for your interest!

26 comments:

  1. I love looking at your layouts. You always have such gorgeous pictures! Thanks for sharing them.

    Thanks too for the template! Unfortunately I do not see a download link. I'll check back later. :)

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  2. Hi Yin! Love all your pages! It's so neat to see the 12x12s in the album next to the PL page protectors. I am SO behind on PL right now. I need to work on my WITL album for this year (and last!), and then I also just started doing the 31 Things project. What am I thinking?! :) Ha!

    I like how you included the screen shot from the Draw game. I've been playing that one a lot lately too.

    A friend sent me a devotional article the other day from Proverbs 31 Ministries, and it was about texting Bible verses to your kids. I thought that was a great idea. My boys don't have phones yet, but I know they will one of these days, so I'm tucking that away for future reference.

    We did an ice cream supper recently too! My husband thought I was crazy for suggesting it, and couldn't believe that I'd really let the boys have ice cream for dinner. It was fun.

    Anyway, thanks for sharing! I like the new free template, and like Sue said, the download link isn't linking. :)

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  3. Thanks Sue and Jenny for your always wonderful feedback on my albums and pages. I've fixed the download link, sorry about that, thanks for pointing that out (oops!). Jenny, that is a GREAT idea! It will be a unobtrusive way to give encouragement and blessing during a day when I'm not with them! Thanks!

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  4. AnonymousMay 20, 2012

    Thank you for another awesome template. :)

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  5. Thank you so much for this post. I want to let you know that I posted a link to your blog in CBH Digital Scrapbooking Freebies (please, notice the new url for my blog), under the Page 5 post on May. 21, 2012. Thanks again.

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  6. AnonymousMay 21, 2012

    thank you as always for your great templates
    I have been scrapping my g-son album and with all those great photos it is so nice to have some easy to use templates that accommodate lots of pics

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  7. Hello, thank you very much for sharing your templates, I love them all and use a lot in my albums, if you want to see some my blog is http://delobjetivoalraton.blogspot.com.es/

    Bye.

    Maria

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  8. Would be very happy to see my designs on your blog.
    Tank you!

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  9. Thank you so much for the freebie! Your layouts from persnickity look great. I tried to get an order in, but I was too busy and so was their server, LOL. That's o.k. I'll just save them up for next time :). Thanks again!!!

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  10. Thank you for the template! I love templates with lots of landscape photo spots, so this is perfect for me!

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  11. AnonymousMay 25, 2012

    Thank you for your awesome template! cj

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  12. thank you for the template!

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  13. I love seeing your layouts! They inspire me so much. Thank you very much for the template! :)

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  14. Hi Thanks for your free template:)may i know how did you print out the 12x12 and file it into PL album?

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  15. Hi Cheryl,
    I upload my 12x12 jpeg layout online to Persnickety Prints (see link in blog post), they print it and sends the printed layouts to me in about a week ! (considering I'm in Singapore) and then I just insert them into my Becky Higgins 12x12 pockets!

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  16. AnonymousMay 31, 2012

    Thanks for the template. I use your templates a lot!

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  17. Thank you so much!

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  18. Love it, thank you for sharing this

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  19. Thank you for the awesome template!

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  20. Thank you! Love those templates!

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  21. Thank you for the template :) They make scrapping so much easier!

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  22. Project Life. What a great idea! I love your site! I am very behind and PL is a great way for me to catch up. Thank you for giving me such great ideas and templates.

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  23. Thanks for sharing your wonderful Template :)

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  24. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  25. Oops! I think I scrolled down too far to find the comment box. :) I meant to add that last comment to your most recent post, not this one! HA! :)

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  26. I have recently found your blog and all your incredible templates! Thank you so much for your fantastic inspiration!

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