puppy

I have several favorite scrapbookers besides Stacy Julian, and Cathy Zielske happens to be one of those at the top of my list. I love her clean style, and I always look at her layouts thinking "wow, that looks really nice and simple, yet I love it". She started teaching a class over at Big Picture Scrapbooking called Design Your Life, all about becoming a better scrapbooking layout designer. Although I do tech support for BPS, I haven't really taken a lot of classes (I peek in at a bunch though) since I haven't had the time, but this is one that I'm jumping at the chance to do. I figure I can attempt to keep up with it at least until the baby arrives, and then I'll have to finish the assignments sometime next year. :)

In any case so far I'm doing pretty well. The first assignment came out today about balance and symmetry, and I've already completed the first layout.

I'm not 100% happy with my title - I was going to go with "Doggone Weird", but I'm trying to use up stuff in my stash, hence why it's "King of the Castle" instead. Thor does think he's the king though, even now at 11 months. He always has the "I'm so cute, so you can't be mad at me" look.

Thor has definitely taken to Loki for everything related to playing. They're really funny to watch in the backyard. Loki retrieves the ball, brings it back and drops it at my feet. In that split second, Thor casually saunters over, takes the ball, and casually walks away. Loki starts barking at me because he wants me to throw it, so I point out to him that Thor now has it. Loki runs over to Thor and tries to get the ball from him, but since Thor is so small, he can turn in extremely tight circles. The first time he did this we couldn't stop laughing, but I finally brought out the camera and took some video

I decided to test out the video option on my camera, and took a decent video of Loki playing with Thor. Although it did take Loki a couple days to get over his "these are MY people" complex, he and Thor are now best buddies. Thor really enjoys the roughhousing with Loki, and then he goes over to Odin, plays nicely with him for a few minutes, and curls up next to him to sleep.

This is Thor:

As of yesterday, he turned 9 weeks old. We picked him up last week, the day after we got back from Cozumel from Merriman Labradors (Carolyn and George are great btw). Leif for some reason insisted on getting another dog, even though we already have 2. He did make a good point - Loki and Odin are getting old-ish (they'll be 8 this year), and he wants to get another one while they can still play with him. However, there's a few things new puppies do which I really didn't miss. 1) they can't sleep through the night. Around 3:30am he has to go out, and around 6:30am. 2) they chew on EVERYTHING. 3) they're not housebroken.

However, even with all of that said, they're really cute.

When they sleep....

When they play...

And when they snuggle up next to their big brothers...