Hi everyone! Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I was quite melancholy for mine, being the first time in 43 years that my mom wasn't with me. But on the other hand, its my second "first without Mommy" already and she's only been gone 6 weeks. Somedays I feel like I'm being 1-2 punched, but then some friends think that its a good thing that all my major FIRSTS will be behind me by mid January....my birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas and my mom's birthday all fall between November 18 and January 11. Its true, every day gets a little easier, but my heart still aches like I've never known before. At least with the holiday season upon us, I have other things to focus my attention to....like shopping! Did you do any Black Friday shopping? I did a bit online and then on Friday mid-morning the kids and I hit the stores. I wasn't in the market for any of their Doorbuster items so we didn't have to brave any crazy lines or anything. I mostly shopped at Michaels and AC Moore taking advantage of their before-noon deals and a 30% off entire order coupons. Is it really bad when you have most of the stuff for sale at those stores? Yikes! But I did pick up two Gingerbread kits which we will decorate today.

I have two layouts this morning. This first one...above...has been sitting on my desk partially done for weeks now. Its not a great photo but I "borrowed" it from my daughter's Facebook page. The journaling reads - "With the invention of Facebook there is no shortage of pictures of Susie and her friends, uploaded with their phones or webcams. This one is of Susie and Emily." I have grabbed so many cute pictures off my kids and their friends Facebook pages. Shots that I would normally never see. But thanks for Facebook, and the fact that they are not allowed to have an account if I can't have free reign to see what they are doing (and even most of their friends are my "friend" on Facebook), I have access to hundreds of silly snapshots capturing a moment in time when its not MOM behind the camera!

I did start with a sketch on this one but since its sat for so long, I for the life of my cannot remember where I got the sketch from! So if this is your sketch, I'm sorry for not crediting you properly! This layout is also an entry in the monthly Color Challenge at ACOT. Here it is November 27 and I have only ONE layout done for the November challenges!

The above layout came about because while at Michael's I saw this adorable little Santa hat and had to get it for our cat, Cloudy! Here he is, sporting his Santa hat and wishing you all a Meowy Christmas!