Bonding with Teenage Sons

This post is for all my April layouts - I'm enjoying PL and being so up to date, so glad I plunged into it with my particular combination of digi and paper project life!

I have been subscribed onto Daily devotionals f rom - Daily Hope from Rick Warren, and a recent week focused on parenting. In one of them Rick said this "When my kids were young, they were never impressed with what adults are impressed by in my life. What they wanted to know is, "Is Daddy fun?" So I intentionally worked hard on this one." Simple and inspiring! Just because we never thought of it : Are we fun? Can we actually be fun to our teenagers?

Being teenagers, being boys (perhaps?), plus teenage angst and moods, plus being constantly glued to their laptops and phones, we do have to up our parental 'cool' factor, or risk being relegated to monosyllable answers and one-sided conversations (me asking, them gruntling), lol. I really want to turn our interactions to be less about nagging, setting boundaries, getting them to get things done, to more real, engaged conversations, more enjoying family together, before they totally grow up!

 So we are intentionally working on being fun : movies, breakfasts, cooking their fav foods, checking out you-tube videos, keeping pet fishes, ice-cream suppers, swimming, beach, walks, and for the first time in our lives, phone games, lol! After resisting it for the longest time, we're finally playing Angry Birds, Draw Free, Scramble, and getting so good we are beating the kids, and getting quite hooked! LOL

How do you bond and connect with your kids, especially if you have teenagers?

                 

Project Life & Project 365

Notice for my 365 digital pages, I've intentionally kept a theme of using graph/notepad papes as background, adding an alpha for the month, and only further adding some word arts and a couple of tags to complete my fortnightly layouts - this makes it really quick to pull together and keeps a running theme. In fact every time I open up kits or go through new kits I pull out any relevant elements and papers and keep them in one file specially for P365 layouts - power scrapping Katie style - it works!    

Apr 1-15                     

Credits: Blended papers by Amber Clegg and CD Muckosky, both from The Lily Pad's Things that matters most Collab, 'Livelaughlove' by Sahlin Studio, alpha by Karah Fredericks, everything else from RobynMeierotto-ChillKit

April 16-30

Credits: Paper by Jenna Desai, tab by Shawna Clingerman, paint by Emily Emeritt, tag and word arts by Gina Cabrera, arrow by Robyn Meierotto, alpha by Kaye Winiecki.

April PL pages

Pre-prepped my photos by using Paislee Press's free 4X6 templates to squeeze more photos into a 4x6 pocket.

Lots of photos from family outings - all snapped on my iphone, not the best photos, but definitely good enough :)

This page includes photos of Jared and his new gold fishes, screen shots from the iphone games that I have recently caught on, hehe;  also a bodum french press pamphlet from a new one dh bought, like including bits of stuff like that.

And this whole page was from a morning we spent visiting the Museum of Toys - fun and nostalgic!

Allergy alert! Jared went for a skin prick test and found that he is super-allergic to dust mite. We are now on full assault on his mattress, pillow, rug etc, and found this (below) - if you can't tell, that is the amount of dust we vacuumed out on that first day using our Rainbow. We had been slacking on the vacuuming since we moved. Totally scary.

I love this photo! Here's our family of Miffys checking their very own photobook (free from shutterfly!)

And more photos from a May Day (public holiday here) that we spent at home. The quote is lovely and is downloaded from Becky Higgins' free stuff.

See above bottom right showing Jared making his prototype for a school Lamp design project. And below is his 'poster' advertising his Lamp that is named 'FlexIlluminate'. Isn't he cool?

I got my 12x12 Project 365 layouts printed when Persnickety had their recent INSD sale! I actually cannot find anywhere locally that prints 12x12 and Persnickety's rates were reasonable so I went for it. Honestly I was very delighted when they arrived - perfect colors and solid photo paper, wow! Highly recommended! Just like printing photos professionally and the colors were very true and just perfectly saturated.

I am also very happy at how they looked in my Project Life album, next to the 4x6 and 3x4 photos, they did not look out of place at all, and everything fit like they really belonged together. Yay

I also did some 12x12 layouts like this one of a fun time in the pool, and these go right into the PL album too. Thus I will only have the PL album for 2012, and will maybe make a separate digital photobook for a long trip if we take one. Also, it looks like I will be able to fit the entire 2012 into one PL binder - another plus!

 Since I had 9 photos that I really liked for this afternoon we spent at the pool, I made a 12x12 layout  for it.

(credits: Paper by Bobita designs, alpha by Karah Fredericks and border by Just Aimee designs)

I really liked how it turned out, all it needed was a border, nice alpha for the title, and a simple kraft background. Use this template for fun, action-filled photos. Hope you find them fun to use and enjoy memory making and keeping!

This is now available as part of Template Pack 7 in the store. Thanks for your interest!