Sweet Shoppe Designs – The Sweetest Digital Scrapbooking Site on the Web

good morning everyone!  laura here with my first ever blog post as a Sugarbabe!  i’m just a little excited!  thus the extreme usage of exclamation points! :/

the one thing that has always been the most important to me is my family.  not just my immediate family, but the family that you don’t see or talk to every day.  i have a big family….a very big family.  the joke growing up always was that we had to ask our parents before we dated someone, just to make sure they weren’t related to us somehow.  the joys of living in a small town! LOL  growing up we always had ‘sunday supper.’  we’d head on over to my grandparent’s house and after everyone had stuffed themselves silly, we’d all just sit around and play games or watch something on tv.  that wasn’t the only thing we did.  every year we went to family reunions.  it wasn’t ever all one-sided either.  i was one of those weird kids whose parents didn’t get divorced and we had really close relationships with both sides of our family.  my dad has 4 brothers and my mom has a sister and a brother, so, as you can imagine, there were always lots of kids around!

there’s a reason why i mentioned all that.  i swear there is.  being that i had grown up that way and have all these memories that i cherish, it was really important to me to have my kids grow up the same way.  our families all live close to us.  my in-laws just live 4 blocks away from us, my parents live about 10 minutes away from us, my siblings are all within 10 minutes and it’s the same with my husband’s sibling.   now, we don’t get together every week, it’s just not feasible in this day and age, but we do get together at least once a month (sometimes twice a month) for a family supper on a sunday night.  we celebrate birthdays, holidays, and even just ‘it’s a gorgeous day, let’s have a cookout’ days as well.  sure, we get on each other’s nerves, but i couldn’t be more thankful that my children are growing up knowing that their family is there for them no matter what.  they always have at least one grandparent around for grandparent’s day at school, they have someone to watch them when mom and dad need a night out, and well, when things get rough, they know who they can turn to.  that’s what matters most in the end, right?

anyway, here’s a layout i did to show some of the times we’ve spent together and you can tell by the look on everyone’s faces, they love this time just as much as i do!

while i’m here, i’m going to go ahead and introduce this week’s layout of the week.  this week’s LOTW was an easy pick for me.  the crispness of the layout, the colors with those gorgeous photos and the amazing shadows just really stuck out to me.  i’ve watched alisa grow so much as a scrapper in these last few months, and this layout truly shows that!

congrats again alisa!  you’ll be receiving a pm from me shortly! <3