Christmas fun - virtual gingerbread house

Check out what children’s illustrator Jenny B Harris has created. She has some really cute and fun activities on her website. Her designs are delightful and the virtual activities work great. Build your own {online} gingerbread house.

There’s also a cute holiday paper doll. Here’s my paper doll creation shown in the image. What a great little drag and drop activity. So easy, let your little one give it a try!

Friday Freebie - tons of Christmas digital downloads

For today’s freebie I’ve got 5 different places for you to check out and get a ton of free Christmas downloads for your scrapbooking projects. A variety of choices and styles for you to choose from or download them all!

Sugarplum Paperie offers many fabulous digital downloads. Get their free Christmas Joy Stamp and be sure to download the Whimsical Wonderland, plus the bonus Whimsical Sparkles. Sugarplum Paperie has some of the nicest freebies. The designs are awesome. Love this place!

2 Peas has 24 free fonts for you! The “gift” and “winter” fonts are perfect for your holiday projects.

Canon’s Creative Park site has a huge amount of free Christmas kits. Or if you need just a few embellishments or extras they have you covered. Many holiday backgrounds, pattered papers, tags, borders, and fonts too!

I really like Shabby Miss Jenn’s style, download her cool winter word art. {download expired}

Looking for something besides the traditional red and green? Get this kit from Scrap Digi Style. The colors are surprisingly fantastic! {download expired}

Nika update

How about a Nika update? I haven’t done one recently. She just turned 8 months and already wearing size 12-18 month clothes! She is getting so big, so fast.

Nika is sitting really well on her own. She’s been very active this last week. She is still working on figuring out how to crawl. She does well inching backwards. She can inch herself forward, but only does that in her crib. I guess the motivation to not take a nap and get out of the crib is good enough that she doesn’t even realize she’s crawling forward. Ha!

She’s doing a lot of push ups and holding herself up on all fours. You’d think she was preparing for some type of sporting event she goes up and down, push up, after push up. It’s very funny.

Teeth update: her pearly whites look so cute. They are very prominent now when she smiles. She has moved on to eating biscuits and biting pieces of them and chewing.

Oh, her latest achievement is so cute. She waves now. Her favorite place to show off her new skill is while sitting in the car seat.

Nika’s Current Favorite Things

• Jesse - Our family dog. Nika squeals and giggles for him and calls him “J”. He is hands down her favorite!
• Biscuits - When we ask Nika if she wants a cookie (biscuit) she gets so excited. Her eyes light up and she’ll do this excited grunt noise while reaching out for her treat.
• Silly Buddy Bunny - A friend gave this to us at the baby shower. Nika cannot sleep without it. We now have 3 silly buddy bunnies to ensure there is always one close by.
• Little Superstar Sing Along Stage - Grandma just got this for Nika and she loves it. She’s a popstar in the making!
• Daddy - Nika loves Mama but is definitely a Daddy’s Girl.

Nika Chat: Nika can say “mama,” “dee dee,” and she’s just starting to say “cookie”.

MamaSheg snowboarding

How about some random holiday fun? Check me out below. Make your own SnowJoke or Go Elf Yourself. The Elf one looks best with multiple elves, but Vlad would not let me post that one. He made a GREAT elf!

Check out Tim Holtz’s Blog…amazing artist

Hello everyone, it’s Wednesday and the rain has finally {FINALLY} stopped here in Seattle. The weather has been crazy. Last Saturday there was a dusting of snow, Sunday we had about 6 inches of snow in the morning. As the day warmed up it began raining and melted all the snow away. The rain hasn’t stopped since. We’ve had near record breaking rainfalls, floods, wind storms, and just plain ole yucky weather. The Sheg family has been fortunate to keep dry and our little neighborhood didn’t flood. Many of the surrounding areas were not so lucky. So I’ve been couped up in my house with Miss Nika. I’ve been able to catch up on some of my favorite blogs. While visiting Ali Edward’s blog, I made my way over to Tim Holtz’s blog and so glad I stopped by.

Tim Holtz is an amazingly talented artist, crafter, and designer. He currently is doing a daily post called the “12 Tags of Christmas”. He highlights a new project each day with great instructions and tips. He has some very cool stuff that I have not seen before. Check out Tim’s blog and be sure to post a comment as he’s giving away fabulous prize packages every day!

A few fun places to take the kids or kids at heart

Cougar Mountain Zoo - This place is perfect for the little ones. The zoo is just the right size and has a great selection of animals and exhibits. The current big attraction is their annual Issaquah Reindeer Festival. They are open daily from 10-4:30 and the fun Christmas activities are going on until December 23rd.

Theo’s Chocolate Factory Tour - Who knew Seattle had a chocolate factory that gave tours? I sure didn’t, but I do plan on checking it out. Theo’s offers tours daily at 1 and 3pm and an additional tour on Saturday and Sunday at 11am.

{UPDATE 12/12/07} Note from Theo’s Chocolate: “Our tours are booked to capacity this time of year so please call ahead to reserve a time and date that will best fit your schedule (206)632-5100.”

Country Village - I loved going to this place when I was a kid. Located in Bothell, Country Village is a great place for strolling around. The village has more than 40 quaint gift shops and restaurants. One of the fun aspects of Country Village is the variety of animals roaming around. You’ll see lots of chickens, ducks, bunnies, and probably a peacock or two. There’s also a 1/2 mile train ride for kids and adults!

The most beautiful wood blocks

Check out my latest shopping find. I just ordered these Uncle Goose wood blocks for Nika. These are the most beautiful blocks made by a family-owned company in Michigan. What was so appealing to me was the blocks come in many languages, including Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish, as well as Braille and Sign-Language. How cool is that? I ordered the Russian ones for Nika. You can read more about Uncle Goose’s award winning blocks here.

ScrapBlog Review…I love it!

Let me just start by saying this is awesome…I {HEART} ScrapBlog!

What is it? ScrapBlog is a free web-based scrapbook application. ScrapBlog lets you mix photos, videos, audio, text and other creative elements to create multimedia , super cool scrapbooks (aka scrapblogs). You can get photos from your computer or even download from many of the popular photo sharing sites like Flickr, Photobucket, Yahoo and even YouTube. And as an added plus, Scrapblog supports direct publishing to all the popular social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Blogger, Typepad, and Wordpress. Love that!

The application is extraordinarily well designed, with one of the most usable interfaces I’ve seen. I can’t believe this is a free application! It has a super easy drag-and-drop format so you don’t need any technical knowledge to use the program.

Scrapblogs can be created from scratch or with one of the many fun themes provided. The themes are very unique and customizable. There is a large selection of really fabulous designs. You can even upload your own creative elements. I created the image shown in less than 9 minutes using a template and then modifying it a bit with embellishments and my own journaling. The 9 minutes also includes my registering for a free account (so I can save my work) and the time it took to upload my photos from my computer. This was my 1st time using the application and everything was very intuitive.

You really have to try ScrapBlog once you do I’m sure you’ll be hooked! I sure am. You can even try it without registering. This is a really fun application, I love it!

My ScrapBlog Page