You Are My Sunshine, Paper Craft Crew Challenge Sketch #133, PCCCS133

Hi friends. I hope that you are doing well today. As usual, my design team work for the Paper Craft Crew is every Wednesday and we would love to have you join us. It's a weekly sketch challenge blog and everybody knows that a good sketch is key to making a great card. I really enjoy our sketches and I know that you will too. Instead of sharing with you the sketches on my blog, I have linked above for you the challenge blog so that you can go there yourself and look at the sketch and all of the beautiful work that our design team has created to inspire you. We have a large design team that will fit your style, no matter what it is, since we are all unique and have a very well-rounded design team.

My card has so much sentimental meaning to me. I have 4 kids and I sang to all of them as babies, "You Are My Sunshine." Then when they could talk, they would sing it with me. Then they would sing it to me on their own as they grew. I get all teary-eyed just thinking about it. I really miss them so much. They are all grown up now and forgot that. I really want to sing this to my grandson and just look at his big baby smile. I attended a girls night only Valentine's Day party on February 15. A few of the girls there are my adopted grand-daughters…and while I love them, I want to be with my grandson. Babies were scaring me, even though I had 4, but you get to this age, like me, where you're kind of over little kids and then you have a grandbaby and you are all about babies again. Honestly, I never wanted kids. I was so shallow. I wanted to travel the world and get rich. What an empty and lonely life I had set up for myself. It's not much better now not having my kids near me and going through a divorce after 27 years of marriage. That's not necessarily true. I have a lot of great friends that I do things with. When I found out I was pregnant with my oldest son, that all changed instantly and I didn't stop there. I went on to have 3 more kids in 5 years after 30! We had a lot of good times with lots of fun stories to tell. I think they need to remember that because I cherish them. There's a ton of those "you had to be there to get it" stories. I have no problem admitting I'm a bit neurotic about things and a total organizational freak. I had to be with 4 kids. I could fill up one grocery cart to feed a family of 6 for two weeks and after the groceries were checked and paid for, the bag boys filled up 3 carts. And I bought everything in bulk. I never had to do the lunch rush. I had a basket in the kitchen and every Sunday, I would fill up bags of snacks and other items for the kids' lunches on Sunday and just grabbed them in the morning for each kid as I packed their lunch. They ate a lot of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and hated it. I was really afraid to use meat and mayo on sandwiches because I worried about food poisoning, even with a cold pack. I never let them have hard candy either since I was afraid of choking. After Mackenzie choked on a gummy bear one time that was pretty serious and I absolutely panicked after doing the Heimlich maneuver on her several times with no luck and even the paramedic next door had a tough time, they were banned too. Of course my husband went against that rule and choked on a giant fire ball one time that scared him, but went on to eat them behind my back and putting them in the trunk of his car to hide them. Then I would find them and throw them away and he kept on doing it anyway. Then we would argue over it and I'm like fine, go ahead and choke. I give up. I don't think it's normal to keep doing something that almost killed you. And he still does it.

So when we lived in our little farmhouse in upstate New York a long time ago, we had barn cats, a lot of them. I went to BJ's, which is like a Costco in California, and picked up about a hundred cans of cat food. We had shelves set up in the basement for extra food storage. I always unloaded and unwrapped the groceries. As I was doing this with the cat food, Mike, my oldest son, said, "Dad, you're not going to believe what mom is doing!" Without missing a beat or breaking stride, my husband said in a deadpan voice, "I know exactly what your mother is doing." I was lining up the cat faces on the cat food cans to all match and face forward. In my defense, my younger cousin alphabetizes his frozen vegetables. I never went that far.

Back to my song, I changed the wording to the song here and there and made it special for all of my kids individually so that it just wasn't another generic song, but it was our favorite song to sing. There is no sweeter sound on the face of this earth than your baby singing with you and then to you.

On my card, I did end up adding 3 Pumpkin Pie Candy Dots to the bottom right corner since it looked so naked. I did the rock 'n roll technique on the sunrays, heat embossed my sentiment, sponged some ink around my sunshine for a little depth, dimension and texture, found some treasured Pumpkin Pie textured card stock and stamped my butterflies, punched them out and then layered them up. I added ribbon around the middle and then colored in a few Basic Pearls (which I forgot to add to my Supply List) using the Crumb Cake Blendabilities and adhered them to the ribbon that wraps around the center of the butterflies. I think the banners on the right side of the card are pretty cool and the gold star clip ties in some additional sponging I did with gold ink on the stars. I kept the inside pretty simple so that there would be plenty of room to write a message to the recipient. This card is also 5 x 5 in size, which is something I don't do very often. I finished off the inside for you too. Enjoy!