Clarine

I live in the states and have always celebrated Thanksgiving the traditional way, but for the past 8 years we have had to change the way we celebrate it. We have several snowbirds in our family now that leave early December for their warmer state home and so we now celebrate ThankMas. It's a combination of Thanksgiving and Christmas. I have 7 siblings and with all their family members and a momma we have a pretty large group, so we all take a turn to be host. Yes, we do the potluck thing and play games, open gifts and laugh so hard we cry over the silliness of things. We have a blast. For my own immediate family, (husband, 3 kids and their families we total 15) we find a weekend day that everyone is free to meet and we grill chicken and steak with lots of sides. That is what works for us.

I get my grandsons (age 3.5 yrs & 6.5 yrs) once every few weeks. They love to bake with me, so lots of learning about measuring. Cracking eggs is their most favorite task, along with stirring. Being taste testers and getting to pour their own glasses of milk is the "icing on the cake." They also like to play with dry rice or barley and a funnel, spoons and measuring cups. What is spilled is easily swept up and discarded. We do play card games and simple board games. They are counting and adding as we play. And when they tire of that I bring out scraps of paper, the kids sized scissors and glue sticks. They love making their own creations, some of which end up on my fridge, while others make it home to show mom and dad. It is fun to teach them new words as we chat while we play. One other thing we enjoy doing together is playing outside. We can take a walk around the block on these fall days and find many different colored leaves. On a larger piece of paper they draw and color in a tree trunk and then dabs of Elmers school glue pastes the leaves where the artist feels they should go. Add a few clouds and a sun and wha-la, a masterpiece.

Thank you Ann. I will check that out. I like to learn about PSP. I have been using it for many years but never have blocks of time to sit and learn all that it can do. As I get closer to retirement, I am excited to get more chances to dive deeper into it. The lessons are a great start and awesome teaching tool.

Hi, I did find a few there but none really suitable for what i was trying to create. I also took Carole idea of finding frames in the Creative Content on the home page. I downloaded the package, but do not know where they ended up as no more new frames showed up the Picture Frame file under image. I thank you for the suggestion and one day I will work on finding and adding a few more frames to that folder. 🙂

I got this far and then couldn't find a frame saved in any folders and after trying to find and save and use a brand new frames (and still no luck finding them in a folder) I gave up. Not only did I not conquer finding/using a new frame, I lost all the layers I had up to this point so I couldn't do the shadows. I know it's time to give up when my bums gets sore and my legs start to fall asleep. I have enjoyed getting reacquainted with the program and relearning how to use layers. I don't do scrapbook pages, but I do do a lot of editing the many photos I take. It was really nice to see many of the familiar and beautiful faces that grace the pages of the forum. That just feels good!!! Thank you Carole for doing such a marvelous job teaching us how to use PSP. You are a delight to have for a teacher. 🙂

This was my fourth attempt to finish this assignment. When I went to the file folder to find and add the next element, it would shut the program down. After the 3rd time, I ended up restarting the computer. Finally, it went pretty quickly/smoothly and I finished. If you can check out the frames on each of the photos, you can see that it is not a solid frame. Using the flood tool, I had to click each spot to get the white to attach, and as you can see, the white still did not fill in on all the spots. Not sure why this happened, but it was consistent thru all 3 prior attempts as well. But in the end, I liked the camo effect so didn't mind that it didn't work as it should have. My grandson will love that I did this assignment for him.

My mom and Auntie Rita's daughters say I remind them of her. Sadly, Auntie passed when I was about 10 years old so I didn't really get to know her. I will be printing this page for each of her four children.

I found a little tree frog in my raspberry bushes and thought it would be a fun show-and-tell item for the little girl I nannied. I captured it in a small bowl and used plastic wrap (with a few holes punched in) to keep it contained. I put the bowl on the counter for the next morning's trip to the girl's house. The whole afternoon the frog chirped. And chirped. And chirped. So I put the bowl in the car. The next morning, I got into the car to drive to the girl's house, only to discover that the frog was no longer in the bowl. It had gotten thru the plastic wrap and escaped. In my car. I searched the whole car but did not spot it. For the next two weeks I drove with my pants legs tucked into my socks so the hopper wouldn't surprise me crawling up my leg. And for two weeks I left all four car doors open in the hopes it would find its way free. It must have gotten out as I found no frog or smelled any remnants of it.

I live an hour west of Minneapolis and had good luck finding the Northern Lights about 5 miles out of the town I live in. Looking the sky over, disappointingly, all we saw were white streaks from the horizon to straight over our heads. No color at all, just white streaks. I set up my dslr camera on a tripod and took a few photos anyway, and to my surprise when I looked at the LCD screen on the back of the camera the colors were there. Of course I took many photos over the 2 hours we watched. (midnight to 2:00.a.m.) This was the first time I have seen the Northern Lights and hope to again to perfect the pics I take next time. I will admit I did some photo editing as the photos were very grainy. I will try different settings on my camera next time.

As a child with 8 siblings, I don't recall having visits with Santa so it's a special treat to get to share that special occasions with grandchildren. This morning Santa patiently waited for us to bravely get closer to get our picture taken.

What a wonderful gift. I got tears. You did an awesome job with the photos and the story. I think you should get it published for libraries and such. Can't wait to see "Dad's" reaction.