Keeping in Teutsch

Matt (nonchalantly): "I hit a person this morning."


Matt: "A person...on a bike."

The company My Memories contacted me recently about doing a giveaway, and I thought it would be great to give this software/program away to one of you guys who doesn't have access to expensive programs like InDesign and Photoshop (and desperately wish you did)! If you aren't a graphic designer and/or trained in those programs, design software can usually be intimidating, but this one is super simple and pretty much allows you to make the things you've always dreamed of being able to create (or is that just me that wishes I knew my way around InDesign and Photoshop better?).

First things first, this program was created for digital scrapbooking, BUT if you aren't a scrapbooker or prefer the good-ol'-fashion style of paper scrapbooking, it still holds an abundance of creative worth for you. If you can think it up, you can probably do it on here...mostly.

Now for some examples of what I threw together using the freebies that came with the program. (There are also freebies on their website that I found after the fact. And I'm itching to buy some of their kits they have for sale. If you aren't familiar with digital scrapbooking, a kit typically includes a variety of paper backgrounds and embellishments--like ribbon, buttons, photo mats, etc--and sometimes an alphabet. Basically everything you would buy if you were doing it by hand, but at a MUCH cheaper price!)

Here we have the "this is a digital scrapbooking program so I kinda need to show a scrapbook layout" example. (I made this the first night I downloaded the program and have learned a lot since then about how to use it, but this giveaway would never take place if I kept tweaking things, so I just left it as it was in its simplistic nature. There is definitely room for improvement, and when I get around to digitally scrapbooking Juliette's first day of kindergarten, I'll be purchasing one of the adorable school kits they have on their site.)




Now, on to the "other" stuff you can design with this, which I'm guessing is what most of you are interested in. Like I said, the ideas are endless and these are just a few:

-- I made Bacon Cheeseburger Roll-up recently. I loved it! Matt said it needed some Tony’s (he says that about everything!) and Juliette, in true fashion, barely touched it. Since I’m the one that cooks, I’ve deemed this recipe a keeper!

-- The Tuesday night before last we went to Buck & Johnny’s for kids’ night (and to use our daily deal voucher). Juliette got to make her own pizza. They brought her the dough, marinara sauce, cheese, and pepperonis to decorate it. They had some kids playing violins and guitar and singing Zydeco music. Juliette was not impressed with them. She took one look and then said, “I can do that. I know how to play violin.” (She thinks this because she has been in the “strings” class at school for these first three weeks.)

-- We finally finished the first book in the Boxcar Children series. Am I the only one that didn’t remember that ending? I seriously thought all this time that they lived in the boxcar forever and ever. We just started the second book last night and the kids are going to spend the summer living in a barn, sleeping on hay, for the summer! Craziness!

-- The Wednesday night before last we had to pick-up our packets and order our shoes for dance. When we got to the studio, a little girl from Juliette’s kindergarten class was walking out. Juliette was so excited to find out that the little girl is going to be in the same dance class as her!

-- Matt finally fixed his shark the Thursday night before last. I was so glad I was going to Bible study that night (my leader cooks for us)! The apartment, though, STILL smelled like fish four days later. Not cool!

-- The housing department put fliers on our doors the Friday of Labor Day weekend about the “tropical activity,” as in Tropical Storm Lee. Their advice: move stuff away from the windows and pick stuff off the floor. Both of which were incredibly unnecessary. Of course, we didn’t do that, but it made me wonder if anyone actually did what they said.

-- Over Labor Day weekend, Juliette and I went to my parents. Matt and I have a “garden party” reception to go to soon for a friend who is getting married in Florida, so Mom, Juliette, and I went dress shopping. I ended up trying on around 15 dresses and getting two that scream “garden party” for $10 each on clearance. I told my mom that I felt like a little girl on Easter Sunday putting them on. (They are white and have flowers on them; I’ve settled on the more floral one now because I couldn’t find shoes to match the other one.) Do you know how hard it is to find summer dresses right now?

-- While trying on dresses, Juliette picked one out for me to try on that she “loved.” It was green and ugly…really ugly. I tried it on just to pacify her and it made me look pregnant. (You know...the type of dress that only pregnant women or super skinny women can wear!) Juliette almost started crying when I put it back…she was not happy that I didn’t like her choice!

-- We have celebrated Juliette’s birthday about four times now. It’s bordering on ridiculous. I sent cupcakes to school on her birthday. That night we took her to Chuck-E-Cheese’s (which is now an annual tradition) and had cookie cake. Over the Labor Day weekend, my sister brought an ice cream cake to my parents for Juliette, and then Saturday we finally had her birthday party. At this point, it felt like it had been ages since her birthday!

-- Matt is studying for his comps (big, big tests) that start two weeks from today. He'll take one a week for four weeks and they are basically comprehensive, meaning he has to know pretty much everything about the areas he is testing in, which are Renaissance Literature, Rhetoric, Early American Literature, and African American Literature. He has not been in a good mood because he is so stressed. (He HAS to pass these tests or he can't proceed any further.) Anyway, yesterday he was in a bad mood and Juliette was jumping around (you know, being a 5-year-old) and he was trying to do something on the computer and he told her to stop and she came over to me and said in a low voice, with her hand over her mouth (almost like she was afraid to say it), "Tell Daddy to chill out!" My thoughts exactly! :)

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It’s the question everyone is asking today: Where were you? So, I decided to share my story.

Matt and I were living in Englewood, Florida, at the time. He had just quit his job as a youth minister at a church there and we were preparing to move back to Louisiana the next week. I was still attending classes at Florida Gulf Coast University in Ft. Myers (over an hour drive from Englewood), reluctant to resign until we were certain another job wasn’t going to come through for Matt that would allow us to stay until the end of the semester. I was driving to school that morning on I-75, when I heard on the radio station that a plane had flown into the one of the towers of the World Trade Center. The radio DJ didn’t know much, wasn’t sure whether it was an accident or not, and didn’t really have any concrete information. Florida Gulf Coast University was a brand new school and already had smart classrooms back in 2001, so when I walked into my first class that morning the news was turned on and being projected onto the enormous screen at the front of the room. The teacher said she had family in New York, that she didn’t know what the school was doing, but that she was cancelling her classes and she ran out of the room with her phone in her hand. It didn’t take long to figure out from sitting there watching the news what had happened, and knowing that I was more than likely going to be resigning that next week, I went ahead and went home, figuring classes would probably be cancelled. (And they were, like most universities did.) Like everyone else, I spent the rest of that day (and many weeks after it) glued to the TV. It was unbelievable and incredibly sad and a little scary…but being so far removed from the tragedy (in distance and in not knowing anyone involved), it was easy to go about living life. On that day, I never thought my life would intersect with anyone involved in the tragedy.

Ironically, three years later to the day, I was standing in LaGuardia airport in New York City, waiting on my flight out. I had just wrapped up my first media tour with an author that had left me emotionally exhausted more than anything else. (In those three years since 9/11, Matt and I had moved back to Louisiana, I had graduated with my bachelors degree, Matt had just graduated with his masters, and we were living in West Monroe, where I was working as a publicist for Howard Books and Matt was teaching at ULM.) The author was the grieving widow of the co-pilot of the first plane that was flown into the World Trade Center. (He was probably, when you think about it—and I don’t like to—one of the very first victims on 9/11.) While traveling with the author in the week leading up to the third anniversary of 9/11, I found myself having mixed emotions…empathy and sadness for her loss (and the fact that she was still very much in the grieving process); uneasiness over the fact that my job was profiting from her loss (since she wrote a book about it; although, technically, she was profiting to, but you get my point…not trying to make the author sound bad here—the book was part of her grieving process and allowed her to share her story and her strong faith); and frustration over working with someone who wasn’t sure some days if she wanted to talk to the media about her loss. (Which was understandable, but as a book publicist I was very much torn between doing my job and pushing her to finish what she started and as a caring individual protecting her from the media. I didn’t like being in that situation! There were still a lot of raw emotions, and I felt like a degree in psychology would have been helpful to get through that time.)

I was glad to have the experience behind me when it was over (and it helped me immensely in dealing with future authors who wrote books about their losses). As uncomfortable as I was with the situation, though, working with that author put a face on 9/11. I needed that! Although I was saddened by the situation and would cry sometimes when watching some of the heartbreaking stories on TV, it was still easy to push those temporary emotions aside because I didn’t know the people affected. My day-to-day life didn’t change, and aside from stricter airport security, it still hasn’t, but having a face on 9/11 helps give me a little more sympathy and compassion, helps me to not so quickly “forget” when national tragedies happen.

Every 9/11, I think about that author, and I probably always will. That book promotion was the toughest one I’ve ever done, but I need to remember the emotions, the author and her courage to tell her story…I need to remember that there are nearly 3,000 other families just like hers. I need to remember 9/11.