Fun Crop with Friends and Great News!!

I am a new Aunt! Yep!! So exciting!!
My sister, Susan, and her boyfriend, Evan, just had a little (or not so little) baby boy.  His name is Quentin Vlk (pronounced Vulk) Reitzell.  10 lbs 3 oz and 21" of joy with bright red hair and hazel green eyes. (That's a first in our family!) 
Here he is in his car seat to go home... It was cold in Dallas so they have him wrapped up very cozy!













Here he is with Mom & Dad...

















So I was excited because I got to scrap on Saturday (1/12) with some new and old friends for the first time in a long time.  It was an all day scrap and I got a TON of layouts done.  Scrapbooking with Ronnie, Barbara, Lisa, Katy, Shannon, and Sabrina was soo much fun.  I can't wait for Operation Smile in April when my friend Kristen is going to join the fun.   Barbara let me use her Revolution cutter, Ronnie let me try her Gypsy, and Sabrina provided lots of consulting on what should go where. Tee Hee!! Definitely the funnest table at the event!

Here are some layouts I got done:

I used a Gossamer Blue sketch for this one... The problem with birthday parties are there are so many cute pictures. So, I kept a bunch of white space this time and stretched the sketch to be 2 pages, instead of one.  I used a really old page kit that I bought at Target years ago in the dollar section and embellished it further with Liquid Glass (CTMH) to make the paper accents perk up a bit.

This next layout involves Annde and her BFF, Demola.  Since we moved to West Springfield Elementary, Annde has been trying to find that one special friend to be her BFF. I think she found it - Demola is such a delight! :)  We met her at the Holiday sing along and liked her instantly. Her and Annde are soooo cute together.
It was some surreal though, since the Holiday Sing-Along was exactly 1 week after Sandy Hook's tragedy.  We were one set of very few parents and to look around and see these very excited students belting out Christmas, Jewish, and Kwanza songs brought tears to my eyes.  There was so much joy and hope and love in the room.  I wanted to hug EVERY kid but had to settle just for mine and Demola. :)

This layout involves the love of leaves my kids have.   It doesn't matter that the leaves are wet or the cement is hard. They played all afternoon - hide and seek and jumping in the leaves - while Mom and Dad talked to the neighbor and cleaned the gutters.  The layout was from PageMaps sketch for January 2013.

The next layout is also one I did for Fall.  Meghan and Annde have so much fun playing in the leaves but did help cleaning them up.  Normally, I wouldn't scrap this part but the look on Meg's face is just priceless - she was so upset that all the leaves were gone! Don't worry, Meg, they will be back!

The next layout I did was using Close to My Heart paper was to commemorate the tree decorating this year.  Annde and Meg really got into this activity this year.  And, we only lost 4 ornaments during both setup and take down.   For this page, I used Alyssa's challenge over at Back Porch Memories -
* I used a lot of brown ink on this page to distress the accents/tags/etc. (my trendy thing - not sure if it's still trendy but I like the look anyway)
* I added jewels to the ornaments.
* A lot of the stuff I used on this page is at least a year old or older
* Pictures were taken in Dec 2012.

I did another layout involving Santa but apparently, I forgot to take a picture of it. Maybe next time...

See ya later!!