Christmas Card

I am so tired today. Yesterday was a long day. During the day we found out that Jacob's uncle had a heart attack while he was at his dialysis appointment yesterday morning. I guess he turned blue and stopped breathing. We were told he was without oxygen for anywhere from 5-7 minutes. That isn't good. The doctors put him in a coma to stabalize him. He was in the ER all day. He was not doing good at all. Jacob went to the hospital after he got home from work to visit with him. Me and the kids went up there about an hour later. The kids couldn't go in, but we sat with Jacob for a long time. They finally moved his uncle to the ICU at 730 pm last night. More of the family came to the hospital. I did go in to see him once he was in the ICU. I was told that he looked a lot better once they moved him from the way he looked in the ER. They did an EEG on him and won't know much of anything until today.
Jacobs grandma and aunt are flying out here today from Oaklahoma. I think they are going to be staying with us while they are here.
Nobody knows anything that is going on yet, but he is in our prayers right now for sure.
We didn't get home from the hospital last night until around 11 pm. So it was a long day for sure. Now we have another busy day today.

I have a few things to pick up at Target today and hope to find a few more Christmas gifts I need to pick up. I have a doctors appointment as well. Guess I should get off the computer and go get into the shower here pretty quickly then.
But quickly I want to share a card.
Even though I haven't mailed out all my Christmas cards yet, I am still going to share them.
Ok so I have decided that even though I love the creative process, next year I am definatley doing photo cards and just buying them all printed out . I made one card and really like it and it was farely easy, but this was such a long process to make 60 of them. I always get like that too. I love making a few, but as soon as I have to mass produce alot of them, I don't love it so much anymore. It seemed like it took me forever to make the cards too, because I could only work on them some here and some there. So it was a long process from start to finish.

First I heat embossed all the sliver snowflakes, then I went back and heat embossed all the red snowflakes. Then I went back and stamped all the white snowflakes with white Staz-on.
I had precut the silver glitter paper with the border punch. I had precut the ribbon as well.
So after all the stamping and embossing was done, I still had to assemble them.
I did them here and there as I could sit and glue a few together.
After it was all assembled I just tied the sheer white ribbon in a bow and tied in a piece of twine. I attatched the jingle bells to the twine and then tied that into a bow as well.
The inside of the card is just stamped with a red Merry Christmas.

In one night I got them all filled out, photo included inside and all the envelopes addressed as well.
I was feeling pretty good about it all finally and happy I finally got them all done...until I went to the post office. Because of the bulk from the jingle bells, each card was going to take 3, yes 3 stamps to mail them out. Many people suggested to just take the bells off the card....well that would require me to take the entire card apart...so I didn't. I bought some stamps and mailed out a few. Then a few days later I bought a book of stamps and mailed out some more. Now I only have a few left to get into the mail.
I hand delivered the ones to friends and family that we often see to cut the cost there. I am also going to bake some goodies hopefully this weekend and hand deliver some of those with the cards to doctors offices when I have my appointments next week. So it really didn't end up costing too much to mail them out since I took out more than half to hand deliver.
But next year I am so doing the photo cards. I have seen some beautiful ones out this year. I am doing the same with the baby birth announcements as well. I was going to make them ahead of time as well, but I just don't have the time right now and I know I won't have the time after she gets here. Plus to buy all the materials to make them, usually works out to cost a bit more than to just have the photo cards made. So that is the plan for next year.
Off to hit the showers and get the busy day started.