Happy Birthday, Baby!!!

Well, Nicholas, you are ONE!!!  It is equally hard to believe that we met you only a year ago and that it has already been a year since your birth!  You have added so much fun to our family and laughter to our home.  Happy birthday to an amazing, sweet, and loving little boy!  I, for one, can't wait to see what the next year brings. We all love you so much!

Alphabitty Moments--Y and Z

I apologize, once again, for the tardiness of these final entries.  Last week, I was out of town for my sister-in-law's wedding (Congratulations, Annie and Adam!), and this week, I was readying my classroom for back to school.  So here they are!  Carrie--I am probably going to sit the next rotation out, but I'll be back, after I re-create this book (I never did recover it!). So, now I am really in the weeds, finishing Nicholas's First Year, creating Annie's Wedding album, and starting back at square 1 with my Alphabitty Moments book.  This has been a blast, and I am looking forward to Book 2!  I hope I will MckLink-up with all of you girls again in a few monthsI  I will let the family know when this book has been published in case grandparents want to order a copy!  ;)

A classic baby page, right?  This was Nick's first encounter with PRUNES!

And this is one is from one of my most treasured family trips from the past year...the Bronx Zoo. What a fun trip. At the end of the day, Will remarked, "When you said we were going to the zoo, I thought, 'Oh great,' but this was really fun!  Thanks for taking us!"  What's better than THAT??

Alphabitty Moments--W and X

Well, I have fallen behind.  As I mentioned, I lost the three Booksmart files I was working on: Nicholas's first year (which I have just finished recreating), Alphabitty Moments, which I need to completely recreate (thank Heaven for the blog back up, since I did not prudently back up the files as recommended), and the ABC book of my sister-in-law's and her fiance's courtship (their wedding is next weekend, so there went the dream of having it printed by then).  I considered playing the kidney stone card one last time, but there you have it: I messed up!

So here is last week's layout: 

Will began wrestling in 7th grade. It was a slow start, but these pictures are from the State's Novice Tournament where he placed third in his weight class. Why aren't the pictures taken at the tournament? I must've left my camera at home, right? Nope! Will insisted we not come because we make him nervous. I decided to respect his request, mainly to prove we were not bad luck charms as I fear he suspected. Well, apparently he was right: we were! No worries though, he was much less superstitious in 8th grade, and now in ninth, I am looking forward to watching him wrestle more often!

And this week's:

Let's face it: X is just hard! We, thankfully, have not experienced any recent emergency room visits requiring x-rays, so cheating was going to be required. This Club Penguin cake for Gabe was to be my masterpiece this year. It's too bad I used SuperMoist cake mix which could not support the Jell-O lake so it imploded a few hours after the final construction.  For the recreated a book, I plan to include pictures from everyone's birthday celebrations this year, especially since we get to celebrate Nick's first in a couple weeks. So, I guess improved layouts will be the silver lining in the cloud that is my Booksmart debacle!