The obligatory introduction...

Hola, soy Dora! This is my friend, Boots!

Okay, okay, my name is Kristin - not Dora. But I hear Dora nearly non-stop, sometimes even in my sleep. So excuse my momentary lapse.

Want to hear a little about me? Well...I'm 30 years old, and it hasn't been as bad as people make it out to be. I've been married for nearly nine years to Gene, who I absolutely love but don't like much sometimes (like when I'm fishing balled up socks from underneath the couch.) I'm a stay-at-home mom and, even though it's by far the hardest job I've ever had, my bosses are absolute tyrants, and there are no benefits or pay...I love my job, and I feel blessed every single day that I'm able to be at home with my girls instead of slaving away in an office somewhere and missing them terribly. I'm a homeschooler, which just increases my list of reponsibilities, but it would be a disservice to my older daughter (who is a little brainiac) to put her in public school at this point.

My girls? They are Rachael, who will be six next week...I'm not sure how that happened, since she was just born. She is a princess, first and foremost. She is also a gymnast, a Girl Scout, a first-grader (yes, we started school a year early), a drama queen and a bookworm, and not necessarily in that order. She's also a darned fine big sister to Amelia (more commonly called Milly or Boogie), who turned two in December. Milly is the family diva - her middle name should have been Attitude. She's also clever and funny, sometimes snuggly, and quite possibly loves Dora more than food, clothing or shelter. She wants the next episode like she wants her next breath.

And they are the subject of 99.999% of the layouts that I'll be sharing here. :)

I resisted scrapbooking for a while. It was actually a friend who started first and more or less demanded that I let her show me how. So, we sat down one afternoon in 2005 with a few baby papers and stickers and some belly pictures and newborn pictures of Rachael. A few hours later, I had my first three 12x12 scrapbook pages, and I was in love. I went plumb scrappin' crazy, and Gene let me have all the scrap materials I could hide from him. The same friend who sparked the obsession enabled me by giving me one of those ridiculously oversized scrap bags (complete with handle and wheels) for Christmas one year. I filled that bad boy up and nearly gave myself several hernias hauling it back and forth to crops. Forget romantic gifts - I asked for a Cuttlebug one year for our anniversary. Life was good.

In September 2007, at seven months pregnant with Milly, our family went to DisneyWorld. I came home and scrapped like a madwoman, determined to have our trip documented and in the pink princess album before the new baby came. And it was a darned good thing I did, too...because those would be the last pages I would scrap by hand.

Milly was born and I didn't have the time to scrap for a while. Then, I just plain didn't have the energy to scrap. Who wants to dig out aaaaaaall of that stuff, scrap a couple of pages, and then have to put aaaaaall of that stuff back - fighting to keep little "helping" fingers out of it the whole time? UGH. Not me!

Milly turned one year old. I had a good cry, because I realized that I hadn't scrapped a single moment of her first year. None. Nothing. Nada. I had taken pictures of her every single day of her first year - the same as I did with her older sister - but nothing was documented. I was an utter failure as a mother.

I had heard of digi scrapping, of course. I had even played around with it a little, but never really liked anything I came up with. But...I had Photoshop, and I knew how to use it. I had already been editing pictures and playing with their colors and even making blinkies...so, why couldn't I do this digi scrap thing? I decided that it was time to learn.

So I did. I sat down with my laptop and gave it my best shot. My first few pages...well, they weren't terrible. They weren't very good either. I started haunting the Digi Scrap board at JustMommies, and picking up little tips and tricks from the amazing digi scrappers there. I learned the art of the scraplift and, later, of templates. I became more and more confident with my pages, and it wasn't long before I was accepted onto my first creative team (CT).

A year or so later...I've scrapped more pages than I can begin to guess at. I'm on several CTs for wonderful designers. I try to scrap something every day. And this is where I'm going to share it all with you. :)