Anniversary in Paris

 Doug and I took a spontaneous, romantic 15th anniversary trip to Paris in 2003.
We left the kids with various family and friends (thank you again), and had a charmed, perfect trip abroad.
  Flipping through this old French textbook, I noticed lots of photos and sections about places we saw and ate and experienced. So I combined textbook photos with our photos, and it's a fun memory book.

Even some pop-ups!

 Here's tiny photos of us on the little boat sailing up and down the map of the Seine.

 There was a section in the French text about French-speaking places other than France. Here is a page about Quebec, with a picture of Chateau Frontenac, where we spent our honeymoon! So I dug up a couple of pictures from 1988.

Another peek-a-boo page.

We loved the Cluny

Altered Book

 Home to Texas

One spring break, the kids really wanted to swim. We live in MN. We can't swim outdoors until the middle of June. So we decided to throw them in the van and drive to Texas till we found a beach. (We made a lovely detour to Austin first to see an old college friend), but drove all the way to Corpus Christie - good god. I will tell you I don't ever have the need to visit Texas again. I wish Austin weren't there, because I like that, and we liked the River Walk in San Antonio. So the kids got their beach time and we even drove the 1/2 hour south of Corpus to cross into Mexico so the kids could say they'd been to a third country (the US being their first, Canada the 2nd, and now Mexico for an hour).

To pretend that I had a good time (I can't stand beaches, full sun, or Texas, or the states we had to drive through to get there), I created a photo album in this funny Western thrift store find: Home to Texas.

It had hilarious character names, like Dork Wallace (that's now an insult in our family, as in: "YOU'RE a Dork Wallace!"), and Austin Crabb, Ace Pease, Spang Cooper, Bucko Sollars.

Little Books

I love little. I still have a couple of little things from childhood (a 1/2" Scottie dog magnet, a little doll, some tiny animals, a tiny pencil from the Milwaukee Journal...). So, of course I like to make tiny books. Here are a few samples - a couple are wedding invitations. And there are a couple pages from a photo album of a trip to Paris, complete with pop-up Eiffel Tower.