BUSINESS FIRST....

....then I'll share some vacation photos with you.

GUESS WHAT?
It's my turn to be the FEATURED DESIGNER at SBB this week! How cool is that? To help celebrate, here's a $2.00 Coupon good for anything in my store at Scrapbookbytes! Enjoy!

WANNA WIN THIS KIT????
This kit is so awesome! So many uses and I love that it is versatile enough to use for boy layouts, all around everyday layouts, not just Fourth of July. This is the July Elements Team kit at Scrapbookbytes, called "Americana", and I'm going to give a coupon out for ONE FREE KIT!!!! I'll have my son randomly pick a number depending on how many comments I have before tommorrow night (the 15th), and that person will get it all!!!! So comment away everyone, you all have a chance to win! VERY IMPORTANT...YOU MUST LEAVE ME YOUR EMAIL ADDY TO WIN, BECAUSE IT'S MY ONLY WAY TO GET A HOLD OF YOU. IF YOU DO NOT FEEL COMFORTABLE LEAVING YOUR EMAIL IN MY BLOG COMMENTS THEN COMMENT ANYWAY AND THEN EMAIL ME WITH YOUR RETURN ADDY AND LET ME KNOW THAT YOU LEFT A COMMENT ON THE BLOG (amycheese89@yahoo.com)

OK, On with the vacation photos! We had such a great time. Not necessarily relaxing, as we kept very, very busy every day doing something different, but very exciting and fun!!!! Now I'm taking it easy for a couple days. Zoe's Bday party was last night, I'll share photos of that one soon, and now we can just kick back for a couple days before getting ready for our joint yard sale with friends next weekend. We all came home with head colds too, mine just kicking in today, so it's been a great day to be lazy and go through photos and update the blog.

So FIRST, we went to my brother and his family's house to have a big Birthday Celebration. My niece's was on June 20th, My Mom's on July 1st, mine on the 3rd and Zoe's on the 11th, so it was a great opporutunity for us all to celebrate together. We had a big BBQ and then watched fireworks in their front yard. Lots of neighbors with kids letting off fireworks and doing sparklers. I, of course, didn't get any great night shots, but I did get a couple cute ones of my Mom and Dad who were visiting also and one of Jeff and Max watching the early sparks.

Next, we headed to OMSI (the Portland Science Center) for the most interesting, unusual, a little bit disturbing exhibit I've ever seen. You'll have to check out this link to know what I'm talking about because we weren't aloud to take pictures. BODY WORLD is an exhibit of actuall human bodies that have undergone a preservation technique called "plastination". Wow, I can't even say enough about this display. If you have a chance to go see it, do! The bodies are in all kinds of poses and situations so you can see (up close, some not even in cases) every muscle, vien, tendon, etc. Every part of them was real, except, I'm assuming, the eyes. Very educational. We commented on how many medical students we saw there with notebooks jotting down info. They also had many plastination cross slices of bodies so that you could see the insides of bones, brains, everything. The wierdest one, however, was where they had used plastic and injected the body's blood vessels with the substance. The rest of the body was removed, therefore leaving only a skeleton and the surrounding blood vein system! To top it off the had the person holding their actual heart in their hands. You'd have to see it to believe it! Not usually my cup of tea, but I'm glad I saw it!

OK, so then we went to Jeff's sister's house for a couple days. We are so lucky that all three of Jeff's siblings as well as his parents and my brother all live in the same area because we get to see everyone when we visit. I even ran into Dani Mogstad in the Target parking lot, that was weird!!! Small world! It's actually hard to see everyone in one trip, but this time we spent 5 days there, so it was so nice not to feel rushed. On Saturday we traveled south a bit to Jeff brother Steve's place. They have a pool and it was nice and hot. Here's some cousin photos that we took over the weekend.

It's so nice that our kids have 8 cousins, all fairly close in age. There's always someone to play with when we visit~! Wish we were closer.

Sunday we headed to Netarts, OR where we met up with our friends Corey and Amanda and Corey's boys. Jeff and Corey have been good buds since they were kids and it is nice to be able to stay in touch with them through the years. The kids get along great, and we four adults had three wonderfully LATE nights playing cards, which is always fun! It was a great time. We rented a boat for a few hours on the bay and got some great shots of the birds and seals. We were so close to them!!! The boat came equipped with three baited crab pots too, and by the end of the night we had 9 HUGE Dungenous Crabs and several Red Rock. I don't eat seafood (peee-eeeew), but Corey, Jeff and Amanda had quite a feast!

We visited the Tillamook Cheese Factory, how suiting is that? We got to sample several kinds and discovered that we all love the taste of cheese curds. They even sold packages of them and we loaded up on snacks to take with. We kept talking about how boring it would be to work here. The people (see photo) just stand there on conveyor belts and pass the cheese on down (while being observed by hundreds from the platform above). It's amazing, in a world like today when you think that machines do everything, there are still places like this.

notice....how crumby that photo is too? Well, my camera is freaking out! It is going through brief spells of the flash not working correctly in the auto setting. It is washing people out. It just started doing it at the cheese factory. This was my attempt at using a manual setting, LOL! So either I need a new camera soon, or I need to figure out how to use manual settings! LOL! Very frustrating!

We went for many walks on the beach and saw some amazing sunsets.

And we, of course, played in the water! We lucked out yet again this year with nice sunny weather. The water was so cold that it was numbing, but that's to be expected up here in the Pacific Northwest, and didn't stop us one bit.

After the beach we went back to the Vancouver area to split up the drive home. We took Zoe to see the premiere of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for her birthday and then met my Aunt and Uncle (up from Arizona) and my brother and family and cousin Rob for dinner at TGIFridays! It was great to see everyone.

It's good to be home, and I have tons and tons of computer stuff to get caught up on. I received a phone call yesterday from my admissions advisor at University of Phoenix and I'm all set to start classes on August 14th. Summer's a little shorter for me this year, but I'm already ready for it!

Oh, and that's not it, I almost forgot....
because I had my trusty laptop with me on those lond car rides, I actually got some scrapping done. I also have my next set of "MONTHLY MEMENTOS" up at PDW if you want to check them out! I have a fun little "Designer Special" to announce tomorrow so stay tuned. And don't forget to leave a little comment (and your email addy) so you can win the July kit!

You'll find complete credits to all these layouts in my SBB Gallery HERE.

and here are the two I did using my May Monthly Mementos Templates.