* In case you haven’t already heard, the YM Blogs over at (my very own) YoungMommies.com have a FABULOUS contest up right now! All young moms (by our definition, moms who had their first child before age 30) are eligible to win one of two prizes – a book giveaway and a Summer Fun pack. All you need to do to enter is leave a comment! The contest is almost over (ends today!) so be sure to stop by soon! Click here to read the contest details.

* If you’ve read my recent post Introducing the me underneath it all…, you know about the Blog Carnival happening at Graceful Agony, a chronic pain blog I read. The First Round of posts has been posted! So here is the thread to visit if you want to read all the posts that were created as part of the carnival. I also wanted to share the graphic that I created for the carnival (I really love how it turned out):

* For this link, the blog itself is not a new one in my reading list (I was a featured artist there last month), but I have recently stumbled on a post there that is new to me that I wanted to share! I found this post on the blog Ideas for Scrapbookers that shows you how to create little covers for 3×3 post-it notes – an awesome last minute gift! Totally perfect timing for me to see this because tomorrow is Avery’s last day at his current daycare so I am in the middle of putting together some gifts for his teachers.

Other Blogs I try to keep up with once in a while:

* Design Mom ~ a very cool woman who is a graphics designer but also a mother of SIX (she’s definitely one of those “I want to be like her when I grow up” type people!)

* The Cornered Office ~ A great resource for any WAHMs and/or moms running small businesses.

* Information is Beautiful ~ Really neat visual interpretations of statistical data!

This is really just a small sprinkling of the Blogs I have in my “To Read” Bookmarks folder but I would say they are all amongst the ones I am able to get to most frequently. I actually find it really hard to keep up with reading as much as I’d like to – even though I have fairly large chunks of time lying down in front of my laptop, I do find it still a bit challenging to read sideways and my brain is in such a fog sometimes (example: I just typed “gof” three times before being able to type FOG!!!) I can’t process what I’m reading so I give up.

Any good blogs you want to share with me? I love reading about design, WAHM business tips, scrapbooking, chronic pain, and just meeting new moms who have interesting views on the world and cool tips to share so please drop a link in the comments (as long as it doesn’t have swear words, sexual words, drug names, etc., my spam filter won’t send it to the Junk bin! lol)

Happy Blogging and thanks for reading!

These layouts are the last pages in Harmony’s “Grade Five” section of her school album.

So I ended up being really pleased with how the soccer one turned out, but not so much with the Track & Field Layout. I think I’m starting to clue in to the fact that having a good patterned paper as a base really helps me along. And sticking with a few select colours in my palette instead of being all over the place. Funny how after well over a decade of scrapbooking, I’m still refining my techniques!

I’m glad that I created the books to only go until the end of middle school years… so grade 8. Harmony is already in the habit of avoiding pictures and not smiling for them so my ability to capture good photos is becoming more and more limited! I wish you could somehow get the message across to kids how precious these memories will become once many years (and then decades!) have gone by and they don’t remember them anymore or need visceral clues as a trigger of those memories!

There are a couple other new-ish layouts in there that I can’t remember whether or not I’ve shared here. But in any case, you can access the whole album here: Harmony’s School Album. Just please ignore any spam comments you may see! I just noticed the first ones now and have no idea how many there might be. Would hate to turn the comments off but that may be what I need to do. One of the downsides of having a blog, I guess!

Thanks for looking! Stay tuned for more, because I’m working on both kids’ albums these days and have finished some of Avery’s first layouts in his Senior Kindergarten section!

On the subject of family, I’ve also taken this opportunity to update my Family page. Both of my munchkins celebrated a birthday in the past few months, so their tickers needed to be updated. This time around, I’ve just created the type of ticker that counts up and says how old they are now instead of counting down to their next birthday…

Speaking of updating pages, my Friends page could probably use a little bit of updating too! For instance, I have a little blurb in there about my neighbour friends but of course since we’ve moved I don’t have the same neighbours!

Another change on the blog is placing all my Blogroll Links and links to my websites on their own page. I pruned down the list to include blogs that are posted to on a regular basis and/or friends I still keep in touch with regularly as well. I plan to share some of my other fave blogs in a “link love” post format sometime… There are so many wonderful creative women out there!

I’ve updated my “Site support” sections as well to try to get good results with not too much distraction. I’d better become more successful at this mompreneur stuff if I want to be sharing what I’ve learned with other WAHMs on this blog! I don’t consider pennies a week to be successful! One thing I did learn about writing a good blog is to keep posting your new material and don’t get stuck in too long of a “lull”.

One new feature I’ve been playing around with is the Scheduler… I can write blog entries when I’m feeling up for it and then schedule them to be posted at a later date and time! A few of my entries over the past couple weeks were posted using this feature and I’ll bet you can’t tell which ones!

Thanks for reading my “Creating Kris” blog! Whether you are a WAHM, aspiring mompreneur, creative scrapbooker or card-maker, new home-owner decorating her space, or just a friend or curious online guest stopping by for some inspiration, I’m glad to have you along for the ride!