CKCB Advent Kit Day #18

It's only a week before Christmas! Are you ready??  Are your presents wrapped?  Mine aren't.  We have a "tradition" of waiting until Christmas Eve and doing it last minute.  Maybe we'll be better this year.  Probably not.  LOL!  

Twenty five years ago today, I brought my first daughter into this world.  She was 5 weeks premature and so very tiny.  She was also very sick for a few days.  However, she is a fighter and was soon keeping up with her big brothers. She's a beautiful young lady now and still quite the fighter.  She just battled brain cancer this year.  And she fought.  She fought for those she loves.  She fought for herself.  And God showed up big for her.  As traumatic as this experience was, it wasn't as bad as it could be.  She went through a major brain surgery to completely remove the tumor and 33 radiation treatments that were an hour away.  My girl is strong.  Our God is even stronger.  She's had few of the side effects and is already back at work in her salon.  God is so good.

April 2021

 Today's prompt is Sticker Sheet.  I have a sticker sheet or three...or four to add to my kit!  Ha!

Thank you for stopping by my blog today! Have a great day.  Please stop by the CKCB blog and our FaceBook group for more inspiration.  

July 2020 CKCB Kit-Challenge #2

This month, Master Forger Clair has taken over the reins at the blog and has given us a beautiful kit to curate as well as a couple of challenges to play with.  I was tasked with Challenge #2:

You can choose to take this literally, and scrapbook about the 'adventures' you have had in your own back yards; or you can take it a little more loosely and talk about the local adventures that you've in your local area. While we're not able to travel as widely as we normally can, it's nice to focus on the fun to be found closer to home.

I actually did two layouts for this challenge.  The first one is just so so but meets the challenge in a more direct way.  I scrapped some photos of my family making S'mores in our backyard.  It's a two page layout that features lots of product from my Color Add-On Kit as well as some neutrals. 

One of my goals this month is to use up those large block letters from my kit.  They've actually appeared in several CKCB kits over the past couple of years.  There was only one letter of each and I hate that!  LOL!  I chose a grid design for this two page layout. 

If you came to my blog from the CKCB, then the above layout is not the one that you viewed for this challenge.  I did a second layout which I truly love.  I played with my stencils, inks, spray, paints, etc and created a layout of my youngest child "tolerating" a photo session in our backyard.  This poor girl has sat still and posed for me as I learned how to use the manual functions on my Nikon DSLR. 

Lots of details added to this layout.  I even broke out my sewing machine.  I decided I hated that lower right corner of my layout, so I tore off that corner and added a scrap of the neutral patterned paper from a previous layout and I used my sewing machine to tack it down fully.  Then I decided it needed a line in the upper left hand corner as well.  LOL!! 

You can see my gel medium and stencil work a little bit more in this photo. 

The extra line of stitching that I added.  ;) 

So, this brings me count from my July kit up to ELEVEN layouts!  Thank you for stopping by my blog today!  I hope that this beautiful Saturday finds you well rested and ready to take on next week!! 

Trains and more trains….

We have a train lover in our home.  It all started with Thomas The Tank Engine.  Now he’s into all trains.  Last weekend, Pat discovered that there was a historical thing going on at the old Baumholder Railhead behind his office!  A real live Steam Engine came and it was scheduled to return a few hours later.


We rushed back to the railhead with the little ones and Courtney at 6:50 p.m. Sumday to see the steam engine up close and personal, but unfortunately it broke and they brought this one instead.

I wouldn’t know a THING about the little ones sticking their tongues out at the photographer…nope, not me….batting my innocent little eyes.



Emily was just now looking at these pictures with me and said, “I was FREAKING OUT”.  Indeed she was.  She wasn’t thrilled being in front of that train on the tracks.  It was running.  LOL

Seth, on the other hand, was TICKLED to be that close to the train!

So you can see how old and dilapidated this railhead is…..

Seth watching the train coming…

The two of them posing by one of the passenger cars.


And JUST for the purely sweetness factor…

The Tower!

I can tell you that I am absolutely glad I did the tour and climbed this tower.  Would I do it again?  NOT ON YOUR LIFE!  293 stairs up a narrow, marble staircase (SLIPPERY!!!) and I am afraid of heights.  LOL!!  But I wanted my kids to see this phenomenon for themselves! 
The outside of the tower is absolutely beautiful as you can see from my pictures.  The inside is dark, narrow and slippery…scary slippery!  LOL.  I almost fell several times. 
Do you know why the tower leans????  Here’s a quote from the official website-in English:
The inclination
The problem of the inclination is the one that over the centuries has most fascinated and intrigued visitors, art lovers and experts and that has made this monument so famous all over the world.
All this is also due to the fact that the reasons for the inclination of the building are still fairly mysterious.
The experts have discussed for a long time, especially in the last century, whether such inclination might be due to the static problems of the building while it was built, in other words whether the incline of the Tower was an effect that the builder had deliberately wanted to achieve or if conversely it was the consequence of an unpredictable or otherwise progressive subsidence of the ground.
In the last century, the increasingly accurate measurements of the building and the surveys of the subsurface conducted with a wide range of devices, combined with historical and archival surveys, have shed some light on the matter. The Tower was presumably initially designed as a straight building; however, it must have begun to subside right from the first stages of the building work. The subsidence was due to the special morphological features of the ground, composed of several layers of clayey materials and silt, run through by groundwater levels at about one metre deep. These conclusions can be drawn from an observation of the soil, and the corrections made to every floor of the building. What is certain, based on the scarce information we have, is that over the centuries the oscillation of the building was minimal, since it must have eventually settled on the ground. This situation is corroborated by the accurate survey conducted in 1817 by two English experts, Cresy and Taylor. A few years later, in 1838, some event must have occurred which must have abruptly accelerated the oscillatory motion of the building, bringing back the need to carry out some decisive protective work. On that date, based on historical and aesthetic needs, it was decided that the bottom of the tower had to be cleared of the mantle of soil that had been hiding it for centuries. This work, that caused the Tower to lose its balance, involved the demolition of the buildings and constructions that stood next to the Tower and above all the draining of the brackish water that always surrounded the entrance of the building. The subsequent measurements showed that the inclination of the Tower had increased by approximately 20 centimetres: in the 267 years between Giorgio Vasari’s surveys in 1550 and those of the two Englishmen in 1817, the inclination had increased by just five centimetres. The leaning movement kept accelerating for a few years after the work of 1838, then decreased again to about one millimetre a year. During the XX century, better information and improved technical instruments, along with the support of governmental and safety authorities, led to a proliferation of studies, surveys and even special projects.
I took the following photo from one of the windows on my way up:

No matter what I tried, I couldn’t get this photo to lighten more than this without completely washing out the background:

Finally got to the top:

BTW, we were only able to take the older children into the tower.  I am eternally grateful for this.  I think I would have had a heart attack if Seth and Emily had been up there with me.  It’s dangerous.  Seriously.




Looking down the inside of the tower you are supposed to be able to see straight down, but they were doing renovations and so we couldn’t.  Here’s the bell.





This next picture….look really close at the hedge, if you can see the orange shirt, that is Pat.

NO?  Try this: orange-Pat, yellow-Seth, Pink-Em



After the beach and dinner that night, we walked up to see the tower at night.



Cathedral

Baptistery:

I have my dh to thank for the night photos.  He did these without a tripod or they would have been crystal clear! Next post is of the beach near Camp Darby.

Piazza dei Miracoli-Monumental Cemetery

I am probably boring you with these pictures of old buildings and the like…LOL.  Here’s a picture of Emily waiting to go into the next place….the Monumental Cemetery

The Monumental Cemetery was really interesting.  Seth enjoyed looking in there (as  you will see from the pictures).  The reliefs were not available to be viewed due to renovation. :(




As you walked through this open air building, you were actually walking on the monuments of those buried there.  Courtney was a little creeped out. 




This guy is renovating this crypt.














Here are a couple of pictures of some reliefs that we WERE able to view.


The beautiful courtyard!




There’s more but I’ll stop here.  Next post will be  more Pisa stuff.  Some museum pix and then some pix from the top of the tower.  THEN I will share a couple pix of our visit to the American Beach, near Camp Darby (I shudder every time I type that name…I hope we NEVER get stationed there).