Retreat Update

Friday and Saturday were full of serious scrappin' time for Sniz and I! We drove up to The Gathering Retreat around lunchtime on Friday. It was a nice drive, chatting and stopping for lunch at Applebee's (which we've been talking about doing for months now). Once we got there we did a little settling in and got the grand tour of the beautiful old house. Stephanie was our hostess and she was just sweet as can be. It didn't take long before we were spread out over our own tables and getting down to the business of scrapbooking. We were the only ones booked for the weekend so we had about as much space to scrap as we could use. It was great!
I was super excited to use the Cricut. It took a few tries to get the hang of it but we're smart girls. I think I liked it better than Sniz. I will admit its kind of tedious, choosing the font, cutting it out, then one by one applying each and every letter. But the pages that I used it with are some of my favorites! There were also lots of other tools available for our use but the Cricut was the coolest!
Because it was just the two of us we got to order our dinner from The Latte Cafe(a local restaurant)'s large menu. We both got pasta and it was very good! After dinner we took a walk in the local park which was perfect. The weather was lovely and the park had a paved walking trail and it was only a couple of blocks away. Sniz made it to the park for a few walks. However, I wasn't prepared for walking... my shoes were a poor choice and thanks to the blister on my toe, this was the only walk I accompanied Sniz on.
I stayed up scrapping until 10pm-ish and then I went upstairs and took a nice bath and read for awhile before going to bed. I had hoped to sleep in but my internal clock is too used to waking up with my boys so I was wide awake at 8am... oh, well... it was still nice to wake up on my own and not by someone wanting their diaper changed.
We got a leisurely start to the day with a continental breakfast, but got right back to scrapping. After we'd been working on our pages for a couple of hours we had a lovely brunch of sausage & cheese soufflés, cinnamon bread (we call it monkey bread), and fresh fruit. Yummo!
I was happy to just enjoy the time away and the company, but Sniz let her competitive side show. She started keeping track of who was doing more pages. I tried not to get into it... but I will say that I won. But it was all in good fun, right Sniz? Besides, she's a far more experienced scrapper - dare I say far better. I'm still a baby scrapper and some of my pages are mediocre compared to hers which all look like they're from a crafting magazine.
We both were refreshed by our brief respite from our daily life... I know I was a little reluctant to leave. I'd like to stay two nights when we do another one. I hope we can get a few more girls to go with us next time! Hint hint girls...
I forgot to bring my camera so I'll have get the few pictures that Sniz took while we were there.

Here are a few of my favorite pages that I did over the weekend. If you see a blank space that is probably where I plan on putting journaling later. I'm bad at that. Oh, well, you get the idea.

This page is from when a few of my girls and I attended the wedding of some
friends from college. They now have the cutest red headed baby boy!

I love having girly pages once in awhile! Here are a few pix of me and my girl-friends!

This is the first page that I've actually used a blog post as the journaling.
I love the way this page turned out!

I really like this one of my sister Lauren and Nate. They're so cute!

This page documents the beginning of Joe's therapy through First Steps. He has
improved since these pictures were taken. I'm sure we'll have many more
pages like this as we continue on this journey with our special little guy.