Sweet 16!!!

Remember the Crop for the Walk we did here? "Our" Rachel turned 16 yesterday!!!



Her final total was $3,301.00!!!!!

I am so inspired by this young woman, that she could raise that much money for the National Walk for Epilepsy at the age of 15!!!

If you'd like to send her a belated birthday card, just send it to:

Rachel Chiecuto
% Scrapbook Your Life!
3655 Camino Del Rio West, Ste A
San Diego CA 92110

Rachel never liked scrapbooking, but on my last trip out, we got her to decorating the huge paper mache letters and working with clear acrylic albums. So if you're inclined, drop in a little something she could use to embellish an album! Her favorite color is pink and she loves anything princess! Here's the album I made for her and she just loved it!

Any young woman who has suffered as many seizures as Rachel has endured in her short lifetime deserves to be a princess!!!

Crop for the Walk

UPDATE!!! We will be having a second Crop for the Walk in my studio on March 29. Same details as the one below....except a whole new set of prizes to give away. My vendor pals and my art pals have just gone over the top with insanely generous donations for this crop...you will not be disappointed at all!

Register by emailing me, or signing up at meetup.com/1950. But most of all, be sure to give your $35 to Rachel! She's at 96% of her goal....just $144 more is needed!

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It was so much fun yesterday afternoon and evening to watch the thermometer on Rachel's site double!!! Thank you so much!!!

And I am sooooo excited!!!

I'm going to offer a 12 hour Crop for the Walk on March 8th. 11 am - 11 pm in my studio here in Lafayette CO.

A fundraiser for the National Epilepsy Foundation and Rachel.

Here's the deal. Just click on Rachel's photo at the top of this blog and donate at least $35.00. It's 100% tax deductible.

Then email me and let me know that you want to participate in the all day crop. It's free!

We'll have pizza for dinner....

And I'll offer you a one time discount of 40% off your entire order from my Product Performers catalog....

AND...Liz from Scrapbook Your Life! is going to donate goodie bags to everyone who attends. Trust me...I've been the recipient of her goodie bags....they are wonderful!!!

There will be hourly prizes and we will even have a few contests! I have contacted 21 of my favorite manufacturers and asked them to donate for the day. As the prizes come in...I will post more here! (Update...After Midnight Stamps is sending prizes!)

Scor-It just emailed that they want to donate a Scor-it Mini!!! And I didn't even ask! Gotta LOVE a company like that!!!

There will be at least 2 make and takes (I'm sure my local artist pals will step up and volunteer for this!)

Seating is going to be limited to 20.

If you want to fly in for the event, my guest bedroom is available....and I have 2 sofas and I'm sure we can find an air mattress somewhere! So lodging is free!

If we fill this one up, I'll have a second crop on March 29. But the one on the 8th has to fill up first!

So....a chance to play and create for a full 12 hours in my studio with access to all my diecut systems, dies, embossing plates, folders and more.....what fun!!!

And we will be calling Scrapbook Your Life! in San Diego to give a shout out to Rachel!!!

I am so excited...



Trust me, I have a repetoire of funny stories about Jeff and his seizures. Not so funny back then, but just hilarious now. We had a system set up...3x5 index cards in our house and at each neighbors. Back then, if you called 911, it locked your phone and we did not have cell phones (oh my, how on earth did we manage?). So when Jeff had a seizure, Jason (5 years older) ran next door to Linda's house and Linda would call my husband at work while I hit 911 from the home phone. Then Linda would call a block away to my kids godmother, Kay, and her daughter, Julie, would run over to babysit Jason while I rode in the ambulance with Jeff to the hospital.

All quite well organized.

Seizures are 100% unpredictable. They can happen at any time. Back in the mid 80s...I was into curly hair and gave myself home perms about every 3 months. So you can only imagine what I'm going to tell you next! Yes....I had started a perm. In fact...I was in that 20 minute waiting period before you put the neutralizer on. And Jeff had a grand mal seizure. Just about the second I needed to apply the neutralizer.

Towel over head, baby in arms, I reached for the phone to dial 911 as Jason ran out the door to go to Linda's house. All I could visualize was lime green hair broken off about 2" from my head. I just knew I was headed for a complete disaster!!!

The paramedics knew our situation and could arrive in less than 2 minutes. They rushed in with oxygen and grabbed Jeff from my arms as I collapsed onto the floor in tears. Linda had called Kay and she was at my house about the time the ambulance arrived. She picked me up and lead me back to the bathroom where she applied the neutralizer and in such a calming voice kept telling me that Jeff would be just fine.

He was. And my hair did not break off. Or turn green or any other odd color. But I have not had a permanent since that day!!! Sometimes, a mom has to give up her "beauty" for her kids! And yes, that's me in the photo above, about 3 months after Jeff was born in 1983. Now you see why I was worried about my hair??? LOL!!!

My prayer is that there will come a day when no one has to give up anything. So again, click on the photo above of Rachel and give to this most worthy cause. You never know who might be on the floor as I was all those years ago. Let's help those we can!

And then let me know that you want to join our Crop for the Walk on March 8th!!!

Pay It Forward

Those are wires and probes coming out of my son, Jeff's head. He was 15 years old and a patient at Rose Hospital here in Denver. Born with seizures, but never labeled as epileptic, this was the summer (1995) that they took him off his "baby" drugs and put him on "adult" drugs. For about 6 weeks while there were insufficient levels of either drug in him....he had non-stop seizures.

I remember as a young mom, frightened beyond belief, sleeping on the floor next to Jeff's crib. I would sleep with my leg touching the leg of his bed. When he would have a seizure, it would shake the crib and I would wake up. Many nights I was standing with him in my arms before I was fully awake. Many nights I got less than 2 hours of sleep between his seizures. My greatest fear was that he would die during a seizure. Little did I understand that 25 years later, this is still my greatest fear. Yet I have learned that it will not be the seizure that kills him, it will be the environment around him.

I have also learned that I am not as alone as I once thought I was....back when my life revolved around caring for sick kids and nothing else.

One of my all time favorite scrapbook stores is Scrapbook Your Life! in San Diego. Liz and I met while I was teaching and she was playing on a cruise in 2004. How fun is that??



I'm not sure I remember the entire story, but something about fighting over a drink.......

Since then, I have spent many happy hours in Liz's store teaching what I know to her customers. Ok, I can't really call them customers because most of them have grown to be my dear friends over the years!




One of the things that bonded Liz and I is the fact that her daughter, Rachel, has epilepsy. There was an immediate connection between us....it just took us a few weeks to figure out what it really was.

Rachel is 15 now. The same age Jeff was in the photos above. She is going to take part in the National Walk for Epilepsy on March 29, 2008, and I am personally asking each of you to sponsor her!!! That is how we are all going to pay it forward!

Click here: Rachel Chiecuto

And then click under the photo on "support Rachel"

She has joined "The Crazy Brainwaves" and will be walking with Heroes' star Greg Grunberg who's son Jake also has epilepsy.

I want to make a special note about their by-line: "not another moment lost to seizures". My son, Jeff, had so many seizures and still does. He lost so much of his infancy that there is permanent brain damage. Moments that can NEVER be regained. But with research and walks such as this, there is truly hope that there never has to be another moment lost to seizures.

Rachel wrote that she cannot ride a bike, swim, or drive a car. These kids have to give up so much. Why not give a little back to them? Pay it forward. I can never get back the lost moments in Jeff's life, but I can certainly help prevent them from happening to another child.


Please support Rachel and this very worthy cause.

Don't cry for me......

Today, my youngest son turns 24 years old. So I thought I would write my story about him.

This dear, sweet child was born perfectly healthy and at the age of 8 months, he started having grand mal seizures. Out of the blue. For no reason at all. Other than it was 24 hours after his first DPT shot. Of course, back then, we didn't know there was a risk factor with these shots....and kept giving him his series of shots. And his seizures increased. He would have as many as 7 per day. He would seize, go into a coma, go to sleep, wake up, have another seizure. Because he was sleeping so much of the time, he did not develop, he did not learn. And he acquired a long list of additional disabilities because of this.

He never had the "epileptic spike" in his brain waves and was never diagnosed as epileptic...so none of those agencies would support him. He was 2 before he took his first steps. At the age of 4, he was still not talking. We communicated with sign language. They put him in special ed with kids in wheelchairs and he would come home at night and mimic those kids.

I cried myself to sleep so many nights. My sweet, sweet baby. When something was wrong, he would scream at the top of his lungs because he couldn't tell us what hurt. It tore my heart out. I tried the best I could to comfort him, but some nights he would scream and cry all night long as I held him in my arms and loved him the best that I could between his seizures.



Today, he is 24 years old. He still has seizures. But he lives on his own, works hard, and is a good young man. Because of his disabilities, he functions at the level of a 6th grade student. Of course, I still think he's the smartest 6th grader on the block.

Life was not easy raising this child. But he taught me so much. He taught me how to love unconditionally. He taught me how to be prepared for the unexpected. He taught me how to face my worst fears. He taught me how to be a better mom than I ever would have been. He is my sweet, sweet baby, who turns 24 today, he is the angel in my life that I worry about the most.

Don't cry for me.....I would not be the artist I am today if it were not for the journey this child took me on. He continues to push me to do so much, simply because there is so much that he cannot do.