Maya Road and Me

Pinterest Interest

Hello there. It is me.

I am back here as I come up for some air after a busy couple of weeks. As I look in my to-do list everday, posting on my blog has always been on the list but it seems when 2 am rolls around, my eyes are too tired to even allow me to look at the computer any more.

But I was determined today I would get to my blog post so here I am at 10:30 pm on a Monday night to let you know what I have been working on.

 

1. Maya Road Pinterest Boards

When my friend, Katie, first told me about Pinterest, I was a bit confused as to what it was. She told me I needed to check it out and I signed up for an account. After about 2 days of pinning I totally got it. Pinterest is a visual bookmark/style board all in one place.  

 

Before Pinterest, I had all my bookmarks in Chrome all nice and starred. But the problem was that I couldn't remember why I bookmarked something just based on the blog name (for example - half the time I couldn't remember why I bookmarked True Up - until I clicked on the link and remembered it offered me the latest fabric sales online.) 

Pinterest was different in that way - it allowed me to virtually "cut up" ideas and pin them to a "board" and catagorize them with photos. I personally have boards for party ideas for the kids, things I would wear, cute hello kitty stuff and things I want to make. 

And related to my ever growing to-do list was the Maya Road Pinterest Boards. So over the weekend with some input from the Design Team, the boards were all set up. It is a changing process but so far we have over 20o pins of inspiration for everyone.  I wanted to make sure it was released with more than an anemic amount of pins. I love that we can categorize how it looks and our products so that you can get ideas easily.

2. Scrapfest With Archivers

So last week, I spent the weekend in nice and cool Minnesota at MOA with Lisa, Ronda and Emily. We were there for Scrapfest to do make and takes and teach some classes (well Lisa was teaching - I was just there for moral support).

 

Scrapfest started out with a bit of an errrr well a road trip for us. The event started on Friday so we had gotten there on Wednesday evening which would give us all day Thursday to get set up. Everything was going well. Fabric was being torn for pins, trims were cut and sorted and we decided to go to Target around 4 pm on Thursday for a snack run.  We were just waiting til around 10 pm to start getting set up as we had shipped our pallet out a week before.

 

The event coordinator called me while I was at Target (stocking up on wasabi snacks) to ask me where my pallet was. My initial response was "errrr, in your stock area b/c our tracking shows it arrived" After a series of calls, I finally had to sit down. The pallet hadn't arrived. Our freight company misled us. The pallet was sitting at a freight terminal IN WISCONSIN waiting for us. The loading docks in the Mall of America was closed. I could either wait til 7 am and hope they would deliver or I could pick it up myself.

 

So Emily and I went on a road trip to Wisconsin from Minnesota. Now thankfully, WI is pretty.close.to.Minnesota. We drove the 40 miles one way to get to the terminal and one of the guys unloaded the boxes into our car.

 

He was skeptical that all 18 boxes would fit. I told him I didn't care if we had to cut each box apart and handstack them, they were coming with us!

 

So after that happened, everything else went pretty smoothly at the event! We met so many wonderful scrapbookers and paper crafters. Here are a couple of photos from our hopping make and take booth (thanks to Ronda for the photos).

 

Here are some of the medallions we made as one of our make and takes:

Here I am working the make and take booth with a customer:

And finally here is a zipper trim brooch I came up with as I was demoing one of the days:

I think we did close to 2000 make and takes over the 3 days we were there. It was so much fun. 

 

3. Video Tutorials

 

We have so many fun ideas we want to share with you all with some video tutorials. I worked on a couple of videos today including one for that zipper trim brooch you see above. Stay tuned so you can be making some cool things of your own using our Maya Road stuff!

 

4. Mud Run

This weekend, a friend of mine and I did this Mud Run in north texas. A 5k mud run is exactly what it sounds like - running, mud and obstacles. While I have done marathons, dualthons, century bike rides and more, this was a bit intriguing to me. I really really wanted to bring my ipod to take photos during the run but seeing as how we were dodging cow patties, barbed wire fences, 3 pools of mud to swim through, a 12 foot tall rope course, monster truck tire climbing and more, it was probably a good thing I didn't bring anything. We also ended up running an extra half mile since the wooded part wasn't marked well and we were directed by different officials in different paths and had to turn around... I will just wait for the official photographs. I think the one of me falling into the final mud pit would be extremely hilarious.

 

I did capture this photo of my feet right after I had hosed off and was done:

It was a good experience. I am sore today as I think I used some upper body muscles that hadn't been worked out in a while. This is definitely something I will do again!

 

5. Artistic Journey

 

In 4 days a bunch of Roadies will be descending to The Crafty Scrapper for the Artistic Journey Event! 3 days of creating, learning and shopping. I am so blessed to have such an awesome set of teachers coming - Lisa, Dina and Shelley.

 

I also love the partnership I have with Carolyn (the owner of the Crafty Scrapper). We are like ying and yang. I do the spreadsheeting and organizing and her staff gets everything ready! Love it. And super excited about it. We have a lot of surprises for the attendees including a one of a kind make and take. But speaking of that, I need to go finish mine so I think that is what I will do tonight!

A quick idea - noah wonders what his cars do all day while he is at school. They in fact go on adventures while he is gone and we document it. Noah then writes a story to go with the photos and tells us what they have done.

firsts

Wow, I can't believe it is already September. Since my last blog post, my baby boy has started kindergarten already and my baby girl is back to preschool most of the week. We are also starting to enjoy some cooler weather here in Dallas. It was only 85 here today so compared to the rest of this past summer, we took advantage of the beautiful long weekend with a couple of bike rides/runs with the kids.

Noah is super happy with school - the earlier hours versus when he was in preschool has been a bit of an adjustment for us. We are very thankful that we can walk him to and from school every day. 

People often ask me how you can spark the learning with our kiddos - what we have found is a mixture of working with them after school and then leading them down the path of some fun experiments. 

So Noah does work on math worksheets some days of the week:

And Olivia does her counting too:

And we do fun things too like make Angry Bird puppets:

And we have been growing our own basil so that Noah can learn to make some of his favorite food in the world - pesto (with pasta and bacon).

I truly believe that the love of learning does not have to be confined to the walls of a school. A couple of weeks ago, we embarked on learning more about the scientific method. I was inspired by a project I saw on pinterest where there was a photo of crayons glued to a box and left out in the sun to see what would happen. And we hoard collect all the crayons we get from restaurant visits (they are good for friends coming over to color, birthday party coloring and experiments like this) so we set up our own box:

We cut open an Amazon box we had. We added different colors, brands and styles of crayons that I hot glued to the box. And then we decided to add our own twist. WE added some "obstacles" to the box to see what would happen when the crayons started dripping:

And then we added some Texas sun which of course we are in no short supply of:

And then we talked about the scientific method and Noah wrote down what he thought would happen with the crayons:

And we waited and made observations every hour. At the end of it Noah made a couple of surprising discoveries:

1. Texas sun will melt everything in about oh 2 hours:

2. That certain colors melt more than others and the same goes for brands. Yellow for example seemd to melt the least except for a certain brand.

And with that Noah has been asking to do more experiments and learn more about the scientific method which for a geek mom like me is pretty darn cool. And Olivia wants in on the action too since she wants to do whatever her big bro wants to do so she even enjoyed our visit to the museum to see a math exhibit:

Things have been busy here for us. We are headed up to Minnesota for Scrapfest with Archivers in about a week. Everything will be shipping tomorrow for the show. Can't wait. We have so many fabulous classes and make and takes planned!

Then in about 3 weeks we will have Artistic Journey at the Crafty Scrapper! Everything is being kitted up in about 2 weeks and we can't wait for that special event.

As I reflect on September, I think abut the fact that a little over a year ago, my dad called me coughing to tell me "hon, I had a biopsy yesterday, the doctor just wanted to be sure it wasn't lung cancer." When I think about that time from a year ago, I realized how little that affected our lives. My dad wasn't at risk. He never smoked but sure enough, he was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer. 

And it has been a year. Albeit a long year. My parents live in Dallas now. We see them a couple of times a week. And my dad is going to be one of those who makes it longer than a year since his diagnosis. Everything has been going well so far. The last MRI scan does not show any more spread of cancer so the treatments he is doing is helping him to control what he does have.  There are no words to describe how much of a miracle this year has been. WE have been blessed with the gift of time by God as well as the urgency to appreciate it.

My kids know their grandparents very well now. They get excited to go see gung gung and paw paw in their apt when we meet up. My dad barely has felt any pain except for the couple of times he has been in the hospital for bronchitis and electrolyte imbalances.  Except for the required every day nap, my dad and mom have been doing good. 

They go and do yoga with their friends. They play cards. And in about 6 weeks, they will got to meet their new grandbaby girl (my sister's daughter who is coming soon).  

So many things to be thankful for. I am reminded of that any time I start to feel a wee bit grumpy or hopeless. 

With that I am getting the last bits of stuff ready to ship to Minnesota! For those of you that are going, I will see you soon!