Who's Birthday Is It Today?

It's our dear Dad's/Grandpa's birtday. Happy Birthday Dad/Grandpa! We hope that you had a wonderful day today on your birthday especially since it was the Lord's Day. Thanks Dad from the bottom of our hearts for making time to take care of our kids and for doing your best to help us out with especially our computer "problems." Zach and Kylie appreciate you as one of their grandpas. You are always willing to make time to take care of them and share your yummy and juicy fruits with them. They always have a blast playing with you and having thier weekly fruit feasts with you. May God continue to bless you Dad/Grandpa in all areas of your life and help you to be a light for Him. God bless!
We celebrated Dad's/Grandpa's birthday a week early. We celebrated last Sunday at McCormick's Seafood Restaurant. We all had a good time eating our seafood platters, delicious bread, and enjoyed each others campany. Here is a picture of Zach and Kylie with the birthday boy.

Here are some pictures of us during dinner.



Here are two pictures of all of us after dinner.
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Sorry the pictures did not turn out as good as we hoped that they would have. Our camera did not adapt to the lighting too well. We hope that you had a good weekend. For those of you in the Los Angeles area we hope that all of you are staying warm and dry. Please visit our blog again soon!

A Card and An ATC

A week ago I made used one of my stamps from "Smirks" to create a friendship themesd ATC. (I've had this stamp for awhile now and have been looking forward to finally inking it up.) All the stamps from Smirks are extra cute. This is one of my favorite ones. This is the ATC that I came up with.

Making the ATC inspired me to make this card for my one of my good friends. ATCs are supposed to inspire you to create a bigger card, but for some reason I have not been inspired by one until now.

I think the my ATC and the card that it inspired to make turned out pretty cute. What do you think?

I've Got Mail

Even as an adult I enjoy receiving RAK and cards through snail mail. They definitely add some extra sunshine to my day. I have recently received some very nice cards and thoughtful RAK that I would like to share with you.
My dear friend Cary made this card for me. She did an A+ job in coloring the image. I love all the detail. Thank you so much for all the hard work that you put into making me the card.

This card is from my OCS partner Gracie. She also did an amazing job in coloring all the stamped images on the card. If you look closely at the picture you can see that she has different shades of brown on his hair, added some silver accents on his tail, and put Inkssentials Glossy Accent on different parts of the stamped image to make it shiney. I also appreciate all the hard work that she put into making me the card. I love to color, but I am afraid that I don't do as good of a job as Cary and Gracie do. Maybe I should take some lessons from them. :)

My friend from church Patty surprised me with this "thank you" card. She used the Simply Card Elements nad More kit from Stampin Up. The kit is pretty cool because it comes with all the supplies to put this card together.

This is a RAK from my good friend Kris. Look at all the goodies that she surprised me with along with the cute card that she made using one of the fairies from The Greeting Farm. I love her layout and am also in awe of of her coloring. Thank you Kris for continuing to think of me this month despite all that is on your plate at this time.

This RAK is from my good friend and co-worker Diana. When she gave me Kylie's gift last week at work she surprised me with a little some thing too. I was teasing her that it's not fair that Kylie received a bigger bag from the Sanrio store than I did. :) Isn't this Hello Kitty stamp cute? It not only stamps a very cute image, but it lights up and plays music. This is the coolest stamp I have ever received. Thanks Diana for the extra special surprise.

Thanks ladies for bringing a smile to my face with the cards and RAKs. Your love, thoughtfulness, and friendship means a lot to me. Thanks to all of you for stopping by too. See you again soon!

A Royal Party for a Special Princess

Happy fist day of February! I can't beleive that it is February already. January sure flew by very fast.

Well, this weekend we celebrated Kylie's birthday with a princess themed party. We had 46 guests that attended. These royal guests included our immediate family,

Kylie's grandparents, grand aunts and grand uncles, godparents, and close family friends from church (some of which are also her Sunday School teachers), and from Colleen's work. As each family of guests arrived Kylie took a picture with them.
The kids got to take a "quiz" to see who knows Kylie the best. The winner received a gift certificate to Target. We also had a raffle to express Kylie's appreication to all the guests. Because she loves everyone equally we had to pick a child and an adult in an equal manner to earn a gift certificate. The child that wins the raffle gets a gift certificate to Target and the adults wins a gift certificate to Starbucks. Besides having fun playing games we had a delcious meal together (The meal consistented of beef and brocolli, noodles, fried rice, fried chicken, and a spinach filled trigular pocket)

and sang "Happy Birthday" to Kylie. She even helped one of her godmother's cut the first piece of cake. :)


Here is a close up picture of the cakes.










Kylie of course had lots of fun playing, chatting, and serving her play food to them. Before ending our post for today we would like to share the decorations that we stayed up until 4 am working on. We printed pictures of Kylie with the princesses at Disneyland and wrote a message from them to her. For example the message from Arial to Kylie was "I hope that you get lots of thing a mabobs for your birthday."













We also purchased a huge wall hanging and enlarged a picture of her for the middle (This is the first picture of this post) along with purchasing the poster of a castle which is the first that we posted. The words on the top were added with the help of Colleen's Big Shot letters. It says, "Once upon a time... Kylie turns three."

Benson drew a giant crown and added gems on it for the royal guests to write a message to the princess. On the table where the crown was, we had a picture of Kylie when she was born and a picture of her with Belle at Disneyland.

Before the kids left we gave them each a party favor. The girls received this (Each one received on princess bag in the pencil case.)

and the boys recieved this.

The older kids received 2 boxes of sourpatch straws.
Benson die cutted a crown for each party favor and Colleen put paper behind each gem to attach to each gem on the crown. She also wrote a message on each crown from Kylie.

We hope that all the guests enjoyed the party as much as Kylie and the 3 of us did. We hope that all of you enjoyed hearing about her party and seeing pictures of it too. By the way, Zachy had lots of fun playing video games and watching TV with his friends at the party.
We all had so much fun that we were all took a nap.


Thanks for stopping by today. Come back soon to see some pictures of Kylie and her gifts.

A Gift From Our Hearts

The principal at the school that I work at asked me to help them order some Hawaiian themed rubber stamps for the staff to use on the reward charts at the end of each intervention session. Hawaiian stamps match perfectly with the name of our intervention program- "Study Island." A few years ago I helped the school order some Hawaiian stamps. When the principal asked me if I can help them order some more I was more then happy to it. The stamps arrived straight from Hawaii today from a company called TAJ. They by the way have very cute stamps. Here are the stamps that I ordered for my school. Aren't they cute?

Because the principal, staff and students have been such a blessing to me, Benson and I decided to surprise them with the stamps as a special gift from our family. I praise God for each one of them and consider them just like family.

I put the stamps in this bright hot pink bag and made a tag to attach to it.
I know that I promised some pictures of the decorations that Benson and I have been working on, but they are still in the works. I promise that the next post will have pictures of them. Until then, take care!

A Card For Him and One For Her Too

I hope that this is finding each of you doing well. This week has been a very busy one for me with paperwork to do for work to prepare for meetings as well as making decorations for Kylie's party which will be this Saturday. I have not been too motivated to work on much so it has been taking a lot longer to do everything. I hope to get motivated soon and speed things along. :) Thankfully as usual Benson has been helping me get ready for the party. I did force myself to make "thank you" cards for two of my preschool students from church for the Christmas gifts that they gave to me. Yes, I know it's a little late. I used a the same layout for both card. Here is the famale version of the card and

here is the male version of the card.

It was lots of fun making the cards for them as soon as I got my creative juices running. I hope that they had as much fun receiving the cards in the mail as I did making the cards for them. By the way, the stamps are the from one of the Build a Bear sets from Stampin Up. The punches that I used are also from Stampin Up.
Thanks for stopping by today. Please come back to visit soon to see some pictures of Kylie's party along with the decorations. I may even have some more cards to share with you. :)

A Surprise and Some Thing Yummy

My good friend Diana from work surprised me with some goodies last week. The red packages are much too cute to use for Chinese New Year. Of course my favorite one is the one with Hello Kitty on it. She also gave me some Vietnamese coffee mix which was extra yummy and came in handy last week when it was cold and raining.

Thanks so much Diana for such wonderful treats. They surely made my day at work an even brighter one.
One other thing I wanted to share with you is a lovely Swedish Sandwich cake that I had the yummy opportunity to eat at a stamping bruch workshop. All the food by the way was delicious, but this was by far the most creative. (I had to share this with all of you because I was so impressed by how fancy and creative it looked.) The lady that made it used a round piece of bread and sliced it into 3 layers. One layer had egg salad, the second one had meatballs, and the third layer had jelly. The outside of it had sour cream, cucumbers, tomatoes, ham and shrimps. This is the most fancy an d pretty sandwich I ever had. :)


I hope that all of you had a good weekend and is looking forward to starting another week. This will be an extra busy week for me as I will be making decorations and making party favor tags for my daughter's princess theme party this Saturday.
I am sorry that I don't have any stamping projects to share with you today. Hopefully I will be able to get some stuff done soon.