Scraps Away!: pregnancy

The First Page

My Uncle Edel G. made a poem for her. It was so sweet of him that I had to include it in the album for Oona to read when she grows older. He's supposed to be gruff and tuff but then he goes all intellectual gooey like this!

The Second Page

Here was the eve of and the day of the big event! I was already having contractions early during the week but it was only on Tuesday that I felt pain. It was still manageable but we already called our OB and was timing it to the minute.

I was already cranky and the taxi driver was no help. he was driving like a maniac, if I weren't about to give birth, I would have strangled him with the steering wheel.

The Third Page

By this time, RF and I were both groggy. I was given medicine because I had incredibly high blood pressure. The doctors were waiting for it to go down. Meanwhile, I was still a few cms closed and they were threatening to send me home to wait it out because they couldn't induce me and risk having a seizure.

RF on the other hand, came straight from night shift to a cranky wife having contractions. So, I had him sleep while I was busy doing deep breathing.

I told him I'd just wake him up when it was time to hold my hand while I screamed at him and he can emote in all Lamaze earnestness (Breathe! Hoo! Hoo! Huff! Huff!).

The Fourth Page

And there she is! Our little bundle!

It took me a few minutes and two pushes to get her out. RF was a bit put out because he wasn't able to emote. He said it happened so quickly, he had no time to feel the emotion of the moment when he heard Oona cry.

It went according to routine. By this time, I was as high as a kite with the lovely epidural. RF took longer to get dressed in scrubs andwe had to wait for him because I refused to push without him. Crazy Mama.

All I could say was "Oh my God! Oh my God!", over and over again. RF on the other hand was teary eyed, following the nurses around and trying to take pictures. I told him to make sure they put the tags on her and not lose our baby because I didn't spend nine months carrying her around just to lose her!

Suffice to say, we made it through. Our brand new, little family.

{Credits: Shabby Princess Piece-A-Cake In the Groove Album}

My name is Laya and I am a Scrapaholic. (Hellooo, Laya!)

This happened beacuse we just had way too much footage of Oona being the triggerhappy proud parents of this little girl. We hardly knew what to do with the batches of pictures we accumulated.

I was surfing through arts and crafts websites to see what I could see, when I came across digital scrapbooking.

When it came to photographs, I was a glue-and-scissors kind of girl and it never crossed my mind that I could do this digitally. I was calling myself all kinds of stoofid because I used to jazz up static pictures with graphics in my video editing days! Duh! Why didn't I think of that in the first place?! My creative mojo really IS on an all time low!

But where to start, where to start? I couldn't possibly be making ribbons, buttons and stuff from scratch! It would take me too long and I was stumped for design. (Really no mojo to speak of).

It was after beating myself up for running out of creative juice that the universe pointed me in the direction of ScrapFlai r. Maybe the universe got sick of my self-pity because not only was it a free downloadable program, ScrapFlair had ready-made templates and elements that were included in the package!

Oh joy and happy days!

Additional freebies are downloadable on the site too. So as soon as I started figuring out the program, I was downloading as much stuff as I liked.

It helps that you join the online community as well even if as a non-member, you can still read through the posts under a lot of helpful topics. The forum posts are very helpful and informative. As a member though, you can post your own questions, ask help for your specific concerns regarding tips and tricks and post in your own gallery to get feedback. You also get an email newsletter with what's new at the site and new kits that the designers launched.

At this time however, I'm still building up my own collection of pages inspired by the Scrapflai r designs to post in my gallery. So far, I managed to finish Oona's First 9 Months, an album of my pregnancy.

I'm glad everything (except layout templates) are in a format that's editable. I wanted greater elbow-room so I ended up using Adobe Photoshop to make my own layouts, to resize and add effects to the elements themselves.

Since I wanted to add a lot more stuff to the scrapbook I was making, I had to make some of my own "stickers", labels and other graphics.

I also mixed in other elements I downloaded from other design templates.

Using ScrapFlair is a great way to get started on digital scrapbooking. This was all I needed to get me out of the creative funk I was having. From then on, I was able to move on to other projects using other resources that the scrapbooking community selflessly share!