The final round!

So, I just found out that I made it to the final round of the "Last Scrapper Standing" contest at Create My Keepsake! I'm shocked that I've made it this far, and I'm totally honored to be amongst these talented ladies. All of the projects that the Top 20 did for this last round were AMAZING, so i'm sure it was an agonizing decision for those judges!

It's now down to 10 of us, and our challenge for this final round is: We want to see what you can create using circles….such as polka dot paper, circle journaling spots, stamps with circles or dots, circular embellishments, heck, you can PAINT circles for all we care! Just make sure your layout consists of mainly CIRCLES!!!

I'm super excited about this as some of you may have noticed that I have a thing for circles :-) I often use circles on my layouts, so this is right up my alley. Of course, since this is something familiar for me, it will probably be my most difficult assignment yet, lol. I am pretty sure I know what I want to scrap and have some general ideas bouncing around in my head, so now I need to execute it!

The Father's Day BBQ at my friend Lisa's parents house was lots of fun on Saturday! The kids had a blast - they pretty much skipped naps that day (Chloe did take a short one in the morning), so after a day of sun and swimming, they crashed the second we got in the car to leave. By the time we got home at 7:30, we carried them both upstairs and they were out for the night! So, of course I took lots of pics :-) Here are some of my favs of the kids (and my niece makes a guest appearance in one with Noah):

Well, it's a good thing my daughter is cute because she kept me up ALL NIGHT last night! I don't know what the problem was! She's not sick, although she was a little congested from a small cold she picked up. She's also perpetually teething (she is finally getting her 5th tooth at 18 months old - she's the slowest teether in the world!), so that may have been part of it, too. She went to sleep at 7 and woke at 10, and then from 10 on, she was up. And I mean up! She wasn't cranky either, she was wide awake, laughing and playful! Which, of course, in my frustrated and exhausted state, was annoying me more, lol. Finally, at 2 am, I did something that i've never done before in the almost 4 years that i've been a mommy. I strapped her in her carseat and went for a drive. Since I could not get the child to fall asleep (and she certainly wasn't doing it on her own last night), I figured I needed some motion assistance. It took my stubborn child almost 30 minutes of me driving around to finally fall asleep, as she was a little chatterbox for the first 25! She finally fell asleep hard, and I transferred her to her crib. Only to have her wake again 30 minutes later! At this point, my mommy patience had worn veeeeery thin, so Tony got up and after awhile, managed to get her back to sleep. And the stinker still woke up at 6:30 this morning! Can we say early bedtime tonight?!