Blessed New Year!

How have you rang in the New Year?
We had a great party with our extended family on my husband's side, his brothers and sisters and their families, a huge clan! Great good fun and family time!
Our own little family tried to have a new year's reflection over lunch, we shared our thanksgivings for last year, what we have learnt and what we want for our new year - the boys were a bit reluctant at first but soon got into the spirit. It was so good.
Then I brought out the list of words from Ali Edward's blog from her One Little Word for each year idea, and we enjoyed looking for our word! Dh chose Passion, I chose Intentional, Ryan chose Confidence and Jared chose Forward.
I'll just share mine - I'm thinking that I want to be spending time in 2011 more intentionally, not just enjoying life and letting it pass by. It is rather easy for life to pass by when we are enjoying it, not sure if you understand what I mean? Usually we forget to stop and smell the roses, to create more meaning to our days, to make time for blessing others. So, here's to a more internationally lived year, prayerfully and humbly, for me!

We're having a most hectic time, tomorrow the actual renovation starts and it will be done in 8 days! The fun part was planning and designing what we want, the hard part is all the packing and throwing out of 'stuff' ( hard to part with!), the scary part now is if we will like how it all turns out!! Haha, no turning back!

I am making a wall art for our new Family room - dh agreed that we should have Micah 6: 8 (my favorite verse) and I did up a few versions like here - and the family voted - the one on the right won! Which do you like? For the one on the right I used Emily Meritt's Painted On on a paper by Creashens from her Newport kit. I will be sending it to be blown up and made into a canvas print. Really loved the idea and if it turns out well, I might make some more.

I loved making the word art and thought I would share these with you. I used the fonts dear joe4, Futura lt, and Charlemagne Std. Hope you like them! Download these two word arts  here

Now to scrapbooking- I've only had like 4 nights the past month to scrapbook, and using my own templates I had been able to complete 5 layouts that I'm very happy with!
More photos from our day in Otaru - one of the highlights was finding an icrecream shop that had incredible flavors : Squid, Kimchee, Crab, Sea Urchin .. and so on!! Sad to say, we did not have the guts to try them out, and chose safe flavors . Only dh was the bravest, and tried Salt flavor - he reports that it was yummy. :)

Having our first snow ball fight!

Making our first snow angels in a beautiful public park

More snow fights! I think these were the best times in the whole trip for the boys!

Spending quality time indoors (it's cold outside!)

Now this one below of the boys trying their hand at cookie making is a new layout template

This template is now available as a set in the store HERE