Scrapbook Challenge!!! June 21-28!

Decisions, decisions..................
-Scrap a layout about your father, husband, brother, friend, or other special man in your life!

-Use blacks and browns on your layout!
-Use a flower SOMEWHERE on your layout!
-Scrap anything!!!
Okay, you asked for it...........................These are all pages from my Mom's 80th Birthday Album. I finished it, barely, on time and we had her surprise party on Saturday June 20th. It was wonderful. Her entire family was there. We had beeeeautiful weather, no rain, few bugs, pleasant temps. Many old family friends and even high school girlfriends showed up!

1st the special man layout. This is my Freddy. We've been married 28 years this past May and Mommy and Daddy accepted him as one of their own immediately, as they did with all of their children's spouses. The joke is that he is her favorite son-in-law (yeah, he's the only one, but still her favorite).

Blacks and Browns? Well all of the pooches have been various shades of black and/or brown. We've had many over the years. I don't think we had a year when any one of us didn't have a dog in one of the homes. We've had numerous spaniels: Cocker, 2 Brittanys, Boykin, English, and a Springer, a Poodle, a Gordon Setter, 2 Weimaraners, a Yellow Lab, and our 2 Beagles. Woah. It's incredible to think about the numbers when you put them all down in a row. I found it absolutely hilarious that this is only one of the two pages I had to make in order to get them all in and look at the number of photos on this page alone! We're a family who loves our pups.

Flowers, you say? Okay here are some flowers. Truly, my Mommy and Daddy are two of my favorite people in the entire world and their love was so obvious. It could be mushy, sweet, silent, sentimental, loud, hilarious, or teasing/sacastic, but it was always, simply there. They met in college, where she hadn't intended to find a husband. He was a friend of a friend and they just sparked. Instead of graduating, working, then finding a hubby, she turned it entirely around and got the hubby, the degree and then went to work. He was one of the first men I even knew who truly embraced "women's lib", not just by Mom working 'cuz she stayed home once we all came along, but he recruited and promoted women in his business who were smart, enterprising and hard-working. He believed that a woman could do anything a man could do and sometimes do it better and smarter. They were married almost 47 years when he died....................from the brain cancer that Ted Kennedy is LIVING WITH 11 years later.............if you don't believe anything else about cancer research, believe that! (I'll be hittin' ya up for ACS Relay for Life donations within the month, so be ready)

So, the final layout is the scrap anything. Yeah, I know, I've already scrapped, but I wanted you to see this last one. We all came up with words that described, reminded us of and captured Mom, Grammy, Carol (M-i-L) for an alphabetical list.

So, there it is ladies and gentlepeople. My contribution for this week's scrapbook challenge and a pretty, darned good attempt at condensing my Mom's incredible life down into 80 pages.......yep, that's why there had to be so many pictures on some of the pages. Since it was her 80th birthday, I wanted to have the album include exactly 80 pages................and I did it! But here's the best part. At the end of the book, I included another dozen slide-in pages and people who came to her party (or weren't able to make it) made memory or birthday-wish pages for her and we slid those in as we got them. And there's room for the cards she received last Saturday and in the mail. In fact, I just got another page in the mail to add today.

Not bad, eh?
Not bad.
Take care. Stay cool.
Love and Blessings.
Carla