R.I.P. Antonio "Toni" the Guinea Pig

Antonio "Toni" the Guinea Pig
born October 2005 - died February 25, 2009



The smallest furry member of our family passed away late this morning after being a part of our family for the past 3 1/2 years. Toni hadn't been doing too well the past couple of days and it didn't take long for his little body to shut down.

Toni was the first Guinea Pig that I've ever owned and I thought he was a great pet. He had such a great personality! Whenever we came home he would stand up in his cage and check to see who was here.





Toni had a huge love for baby carrots. He would use his mouth to rattle his cage when he wanted more carrots. It was pretty funny.

Toni wasn't much for coming out of his cage. We'd let him out, but he'd run back up his little cage door and hop back in. He was a little hard to catch when you did want to get him out, but for some reason Mateo never had any trouble getting a hold of him.



Chico could catch him, too and would hold him like a little baby and Toni would just lay there. How funny!





We'll miss you Toni. May you rest in peace.

Laugh Layout

I don't think I shared this layout I did about a month ago. It's one of my favorites so far. I have such great memories of this day at Riverside Park in LaGrande. The boys and I were visiting for a couple days and Grandma & Grandpa Slim had suggested that we take the boys and they had a blast! This was a park that I played at when I was younger and would visit them. I have to say that they've done a HUGE remodel of the play area and it's FANTASTIC now!!

This was about 3 years ago. Unfortunately I didn't get very good photos of Grandma with the boys on this day, but the one with my Grandpa has always been my favorite of him with them. I couldn't get the best lighting when trying to photograph the layout, but here it is anyway.







I love to add embellishments that add texture to the page. Some closeups...







All the products used were Close to My Heart items. I made a personal goal with my CTMH Unit that I wanted to do 8 pages per month. So far, I've not done it. I have one single page done since completing this one. I thought maybe if I write it on here I might feel even more accountable to work towards my goal. Time will tell...

I was just thinking that I made that comment about how fantastic the park is now, but the photos in the layout don't show any of that. Here are a couple of photos to show the play area.









Isn't it fantastic? I wish we had something like that near our house. You can click on each photo to see it better (click on the 2nd photo and see if you can spot Jaxon). Thanks for looking!

Flashback Friday

November 8, 2004 - My "twins"

A tiny bit of snow

Last Monday Chico was home with no work, so he and Jaxon hung out before Jaxon's afternoon Kindergarten class. They were surprised to see a little bit of snow falling outside. We had just borrowed Granny's nice DSLR camera, so Chico took a few shots of Jax. The quality is so nice. Isn't Jax a cutie?

Flashback Friday

Valentine's Day 2006

Everyone have a Happy Valentine's Weekend!

Bath time shenanigans

I love that word "shenanigans". I don't use it often enough. Anyway, I ran across these photos this weekend and remembered that I had never posted them.

My dear friend Alicia gave the boys some bath time stuff one Christmas and one of the items were those crayons you can use in the tub. The boys had used them in the past and drew some little pictures on the tub, but it had been awhile since they'd had them in there. They asked me a couple months ago if they could get those crayons out and I thought "what the heck?", "sure".

So they go about their business and soon I hear lots of laughing coming from our master bathroom. This is what I see...















So, I told them they needed to wash themselves off and I went back in to check on them after a while and now their bodies are colored. Jaxon's chest is colored solid half purple and half green. I don't remember what Mateo's had on it. I didn't take photos this time. But needless to say, after this bath, they needed a bath.

My latest card workshop

Just sharing the cards we made yesterday at my monthly card workshop. One of the participants last month suggested a monthly theme, so this month we tried a BABY theme.

I didn't have a lot of ideas ready, so it took me a couple of days of "research" to find ideas. I got some templates off the internet and a couple ideas from some fellow Close to My Heart consultants (one card was copied exactly because I loved hers so much). I used all Close to My Heart supplies and I just love how they all turned out. If by chance anyone reading this is interested in coming to one of my monthly workshops, just leave me a comment here on this post or email me at kandi@mctmh.com

Here they are... You can click on any of the photos to see them closer up.

This was my favorite card, CASEd (COPIED AS SEEN EXACTLY) from a fellow consultant named Melanie Logan. That bunny (from A Birthdy Wish) is so cute and the Argyle pattern was made using 3 different stamps (Argyle Backgrounds) and it was a lot of fun. I'll have to try more things with it.



This was a simple litte card. I used Liquid Glass on the Baby Buggy (from Random Thoughts) and it gives a nice shiny 3D effect.


A little closer up to see the Liquid Glass.


Isn't this adorable? Another fellow consultant (Deneen Treble) came up with the templates for the next two cards. I hand cut the template and traced onto cardstock and embelished with some cute accessories. Love the little flower on the dress (made with Just Blooms flower, crochet piece from White Daisy My Accents and a baby pink brad). Also we embossed it using my Cuttlebug (not a CTMH product, but I love it!).



A fun boy card! This paper is from one of the new paper packs called Stardust. The cute frog is from Fun Times.


And last but not least, I actually came up with this one myself. I love this new little bird stamp (Bird Basics)! That stamp comes with 3 different bird bodies, several different wings, feet and tail combos, too. Some of the participants used different sentiments (using For Every Occasion stamps) on the front of the card like "Hello" to "Get Well"... It's a pretty neutral card.


Thanks for looking!

Flashback Friday

I was looking through some older photos this week and ran across these photos and a little video clip of the boys. I remember thinking it was a little quite downstairs one morning, so I went to investigate. I found Mateo in Jaxon's crib and they were having a good ol' time together. I didn't even know Mateo could climb up in the crib, since he'd never tried to escape from it when he was younger.

I wanted to get a photo of the two of them in the crib, so I told Mateo to stay there and ran up to get my camera. As I walked down the stairs I started to reinact what I had just done moments before and recorded a little video clip on my camera (sorry the quality is pretty bad). The boys thought this was HILARIOUS!! This was October 3rd, 2003. Jaxon was two days shy of being 7 months old and Mateo was three days shy of being 3 years and 7 months old.

Enjoy!



Here's the video clip...