Journaling reads:

We’ve got a lot of pictures of Wyatt looking happy and calm, having fun, learning something new. But we don’t have many pictures like this. One’s where he’s angry or sad or miserable. And the fact is, when you’re a little guy you spend a great deal of time angry, sad, miserable and frustrated. Maybe that’s not how he feels most of the time (I certainly hope not!) but it definitely adds up. Part of the reason we don’t have these photos of course, is because when he starts crying our last instinct is to grab the camera and get a few photos. But another reason is that these aren’t the memories I look back on and relish. It’s hard when Wyatt cries. It’s hard when he throws a tantrum. Hard on him and hard on us. We don’t like to see him sad and hurting or so angry he can’t do anything but scream and flail. As a parent you want to smooth everything over and make life easier for your kid, but we’re learning early on that sometimes there’s just nothing we can do. Sometimes your kid is just going to be miserable….

In these photos, he wasn’t crying for any real reason. There were taken on a day when he was sick and nothing was going his way. A few minutes earlier, he’d gotten a bucket stuck on this head, but that trauma had passed by the time these tears came along. And just for the record — I already had the camera focused on him when he started in.

We don’t much like the onions on my side of the family. My dear old dad especially despises them and is known far and wide for it. This layout is mostly for him.

A quickie while Wyatt naps. If you haven’t noticed yet, whenever a do one pagers they end up square. I am incapable of linear layouts it seems. And don’t even get me started on asymmetry.

An Ali Edwards-style collage layout from our trip to the SF Conservatory of Flowers a couple years ago. The cardstock is actually a pale yellowish-green but it didn’t come out in the photo.

Mmmmmmm…I have recently rediscovered the joy of cinnamon toast.

When we were kids Lance was a cinnamon toast fiend. I remember him going through long stretches where he would eat it for an afternoon snack every day after school. He would carefully mix together his secret proportions of cinnamon and sugar in the little green bowl and then sprinkle it in a thick, even layer across his hot, buttered toast. He always sprinkled it over the edges of the toast and onto the paper towel below and then he would pour the sugar back into the bowl. I was never as into it as he was, but because he liked it, I ended up eating a lot of it too.

The other day, Wyatt was sniffing the spices and he wanted to eat a big spoonful of the cinnamon. I obviously wasn’t going to let him do that, so instead I suggested a piece of cinnamon toast. After an internet search for the proper proportions to use, Zach made up a big batch of cinnamon sugar. (It ended up being a little light on the cinnamon for my taste — probably Lance’s influence again.) We made Wyatt the toast and, of course, as soon as it was done he decided he didn’t want it, so we found ourselves in the odd position of trying to convince our kid to eat sugar bread. At one point, I actually said, “Wyatt — it’s like candy bread!!” Sometimes, you do weird things when you’re a parent.

Of course, once he tried it, he loved it so today I made him another piece for breakfast. One for me too.

New layout, old photos. Wyatt was 8-months-old in these. When my Aunts Judy and Lisa came to visit us for a weekend, we took him to the beach for the very first time. We went to Natural Bridges down in Santa Cruz because it’s so dang pretty and we wanted to show it off to my aunties.

I used some really old paper on this (yay!) along with some Heidi Swapp ghost letters for the title. For some reason, I’m really digging how the adhesive looks showing through. I saw this on someone else’s layout on a blog somewhere, but now I can’t remember where.

Edited:  Yes! It was Robyn’s page. I’m so glad she let me know. See her comment and link below. What’s funny is that when I went back to look at her page I saw that I copied her color scheme too! I guess I really liked your page, Robyn.