One of my favorite people in the whole world is having a birthday today and if you haven’t already you should check out her blog and wish her a very happy day. She’s one of the sweetest most genuine people I have ever met and as if her sweetness weren’t enough to make her so great, she’s incredibly creative and has the best sense of humor of anyone I know. So…

And then I almost forgot to post about the new website I discovered (I think from Cathy’s blog maybe??) called Pandora.com. It’s the coolest thing. You put in a name of an artist you love and it plays songs by that artist but also finds songs from other artists that you might love who are similar. Totally found people I never would’ve otherwise heard of and I LOVE that. Sooo cool. Plus it gives me tunes to listen to while I’m on the computer. And it’s FREE! Gotta love it! :)

Finish this LO:

I’m going for an Elsie Flannigan style LO with this but I clearly could use some help from Elsie herself. I should just start over but I’m determined that this particular photo HAS to be scrapped Elsie style and so far, the papers are good, the brush strokes are good, the flower doodles are workin’, it’s just not all workin’ together or in this particular composition. UGH!

And THEN…create something inspired by Effer dare #1:

Gotta love havin’ 4 whole days off for the holiday. Got to have lunch with mom, my sisters & brother, most of their spouses and all of the neats at my favorite restaurant in town on Friday. Finished 2 whole calendars to give as gifts. Got all my gifts wrapped in time for the parties. Had a great turkey dinner with the whole family and opened gifts at my parents on Christmas Eve. Christmas day we went to the in-laws. Not quite as horrible of an experience as I had expected it to be. Actually had a little fun playing Outburst Junior (one of Celena’s gifts) with the whole fam and I really would’ve missed my MIL’s peanut butter fudge (it’s to die for). Today I did some house cleaning, took Andrew and Celena to see Cheaper by the Dozen 2 (very funny and touching movie) and redid my blog header for winter. Yay! :) Used doodles by Taran Conyers (love LOVE love her doodles) and Margarete Antonio’s snow flakes from the DDE design team doodle freebies. If you’ve been collecting them I think these snow flakes are still coming up and if you haven’t been collecting them you SHOULD be! :)

Now off to do some scrappin’ before bed. Might just spend an extra day scrappin’ tomorrow too. Sortof a little Merry Christmas to me day to do whatever my little heart desires. :)

I’d been wanting to join in on the Effer Dare thing for quite some time now and last night I finally gave it a shot. The current dare is to use a quote from a movie or book or lyrics from a song and I had many songs come to mind that I wanted to use but on the way home from work this song was playing on my ipod and it just hit me in the way they talked about for this dare, right in the gut. Brought me to tears as I was driving. Can’t say it’s the first time that’s happened. Guess that’s part of the "this way" that I am since Jacob. Don’t really remember being as emotional before he was here.

Another thing that really changed about me since Jacob that I’ve thought about often since is who I choose to surround myself with. I sortof decided who to keep close and who to pull away from based on whether or not in my perception they ‘got it’ in terms of what Jacob meant to me and my family. It was surprising to me at times which people did seem to ‘get it’ and which ones didn’t. One of the biggest examples of someone who I’ve kept close is my best friend Jill. We’d been best friends since kindergarten and then grown apart after highschool but she was my truest friend in every sense of the word through Jacob’s life and before he was born. I would do anything for her and I will never let our friendship grow apart again. And then there’s obviously my immediate family. Thank goodness they all completely ‘got it’. I was in awe at how supportive everyone was. We were always close but I’ve been closer to each one of them since and hope that in that way we’re all changed forever by Jacob’s life.

I guess another obvious example of this new outlook of mine is the fact that I started the whole digital scrapbooking thing soon after Jacob’s death and started posting pages from his album online at 2 peas and then scrapbook-bytes. Somehow through all that I gained a new ‘family’ of people who I’d never met but who totally ‘got it’. I feel closer to many of them than people I’d known my whole life.

On the other side of it there were co-workers that I’d worked with for many years, who I’d thought of as friends, that didn’t even come to the funeral or visitation. I started looking at my job as just that, a job, not a place I enjoyed spending time at at all because in my mind they just didn’t ‘get it’. Even some of my extended family seemed to not quite get it. I love my grandma dearly but I don’t think she really ever ‘got it’ so it doesn’t really bother me as much that I’m not closer to her. I know none of this is probably right and it’s probably stuff I should keep to myself but it’s honestly how I feel and I think that’s what these ‘effer dares’ are supposed to be all about so there it is.

My all-time favorite movie is on television tonight. I own the DVD and watch it with the neats every so often but for some reason I love catching it on tv each year. I love that they still show it every year just like when I was a kid. I don’t ordinarily like watching movies more than once but for some reason this one I can watch over and over and never get tired of it. You really couldn’t ask for much more in a movie. Great soundtrack, romance, comedy, world history, children with adorable accents, gorgeous scenery…does it even get any better than this?! :)