Baby Shower!

Well, the baby shower was two weeks ago yesterday. But what with work and life taking up most of my free time I hadn't gotten all the pictures onto my computer, and what's a blog without pictures. (Still a blog, but not a very interesting one...) So here's the baby shower scoop.

On Friday, Nicole drove up from Oregon with her friend Renee and they stayed the whole weekend at our house. Mom and I ran to grocery stores for all the fixings and then off to Good Friday service as they had planned to get to our house late. Mom baked the cake from scratch that night so it would be ready to frost the next day. Saturday morning we got up and had a big breakfast and I started the decorating. I had planned on a tea party/garden party theme but with it being early April there were no flowers blooming or trees leafing out. I bought flowers instead and we had enough to give it the garden atmosphere. I also made favors that looked like daisies in glass flower pots with a candle in the middle and I set these around with tealights on the tables. Nicole had shown me a "diaper cake" that you could buy and she thought that if they had added wash cloths or burp cloths it would have been better. The "cake" was too expensive but I googled around until I found one website where the person gave me the number of diapers that was in the cake (insert evil laughter "Mwaaahahaha"). I was going to buy burp cloths for the middle layer, but they were quite pricey too, so I bought some flannel at the fabric store and Mom made them. We put it on the coffee table as the centerpeice and it turned out pretty well if I do say so. Mom spent the morning frosting the cake. I had gone to Wilton.com and found this amazing cake that you use fondant on. We had never tried that out before so I bought all the items to do this cake from Wilton. We made the bow on the top a few days before so it would be hard and then did the fondant on the cake that day so it would still be soft enough to cut. Thank goodness my mother takes all my great ideas in stride because I think I would have been frustrated with the fondant. But never fear, she did it all and it turned out fantastic. While she was cake decorating I was making the food. I did it all as "baby" finger foods. We had cucumber sandwiches, scones with butter and jam inside, parmesan balls, creme puffs with chocolate and triple berry sauce, a veggie tray, a fruit bowl and of course strawberries dipped in chocolate. I also had a punch bowl and bottled water.

Nicole's mom and dad came over early and were thinking of leaving before the party but after guests started arriving they stayed. There was about 11 people at the party and we had a very good time. When they arrived everyone was given a bracelet with diaper pins and pacifiers on it and anyone who said the word "baby" had to give up one of their items with the person with the most at the end winning. We also played "diaper bag memory" where a diaper bag full of stuff was passed around and they had one minute to write down as many items as they could remember was inside. Nicole got the diaper bag as a gift at the end. Then we played "Guess how big Mommy is" where a spool of ribbon was passed around and everyone cut off a length they thought would fit around Nicole's tummy. The person who was closest won. After all the games Nicole opened her presents and was very suprised at all the gifts, especially the last one which was the stroller/car carrier system she had on her registry. Overall it was an excellent day and Nicole could hardly fit all the gifts into her car to take home.

Is it really April already?

So somehow I sort of missed March... I shouldn't have because it's my birthday month and all but life suddenly got ridiculously busy. I have been planning a baby shower for my best friend Nicole and was hand making the invitations. Great idea right? I mean if Martha can do it why can't I? Well they started out with a really cute stamp on the front that I was going to color and lots of borders. Well after making the first one I didn't really like it. And I was going to have to do this 15 more times. So I had purchased a Cricut that was sitting on the floor collecting dust and decided to look through the images that came in the two cartridges that were included. There happened to be a cute little baby in a blanket and a stork that went together on the front very nicely. So back to Craft Warehouse for more cardstock and away I went! That Cricut is sweeeeeet. It's so fast and all I did was cut and paste. The invitations went together freakishly fast and I got them sent out in time. I thought I had saved one to take a picture of for this blog but I can't seem to find it and randomly remember one more person being added to the guest list. I will try and get a picture from Nicole of hers. **Update: I finally got pics of the invitations!**

Then my birthday came! Happy Birthday March 19th as a relative of mine would say. I worked that day and everyone that found out it was my birthday was like "why didn't you take it off?" Cause then I wouldn't get all you people telling me happy birthday...duh. Mom and I went out to the Olive Garden for dinner which was very tasty and then I opened presents! I got a portable personal DVD player (which is pink!) for the plane ride to Hawaii and then I got a Kromski Harp loom. It is a rigid heddle, which means there are only two "sheds", up and down. With different colors and actually holding up certain strings you can make designs, but if you want just a really easy way to weave it's very nice. Here are the pictures of my first project I call "Pacific Sunset" cause of all the different blues you see on the ocean as the sun goes down in pinks and reds. More to come on trips and the baby shower!

Yeah! It's February!

I am so happy that it is not January anymore. It's just a depressing month. Now in February the days are getting long enough that I can come home and do some stuff before sunset. And I get to plan all sorts of fun stuff to get Mom for her birthday. This year we are going to go to Seattle for her birthday and eat at the Spaghetti factory, go through Pike Place Market, go down and walk through the piers and probably hit the Alderwood Mall cause it has a Yankee Candle store. I have also been thinking about getting my major plans for summer projects in order. We've got gardens to plant, a pergola to get up (finally!), and decks to clean and stain and move the stairs on them. Life for the most part here is boring and same old, same old and other than a mildly sore throat it's pretty good.

Good Grief!

Well my year has gone ridiculously quick already. After a great Christmas (Wii!!) and a few days off from work to enjoy it life ratcheted up a notch. Our set-up guy at work who receives all the new specimens and plates them, among other daily very important duties, took a leave of absence that may be permanent to go to flight school in Texas. We had known this for awhile and did manage to get a guy that had previously worked in set-up to come back for 3 months to fill in. The problem was he couldn't start until two weeks after our other guy left. That was okay. It would be hard but there were only a couple of days where there were only two microbiologists to run the entire day shift micro lab for a 220 bed hospital, most days there were three, which was ideal. Well then one of our micro techs broke her leg. So the first two weeks of the new year I got to put in between 1 to 2 hours of overtime everyday. And this last Thursday I was going to be the entire micro department (reading about 100 cultures and setting everything up) until one of our techs graciously came in to work an extra day. I have some great paychecks but no life. This, along with the holidays, set my blog back 5 weeks! My life consisted of getting up and ready, being to work at 6:30 in the morning, working until 4 or 5 pm, coming home and making dinner, playing some Guitar Hero and going to bed, all to be repeated the following day. One of the things holding me through all this was turning in the papers to schedule my vacations for the coming year. Starting in March I am going to the beach every other month and in May it's Hawaii!!! Warm sand, warm water, balmy breezes....

Christmas come early

This last weekend Mom and I and the puppies drove up to Spokane to visit my cousin David and his wife Leslie and two kids Justin and Tayla. We spent the night at their house and the next day visited my Aunt RaeAnn who is in a nursing home because she had multiple strokes which paralyzed her right side. The real reason we drove up was to bring her Christmas early. We bought a small fake Christmas tree and decorated it. I got some small tin cans that look like presents and we put some candy in them that she can eat or give away, whichever she feels. Then we had her Christmas presents with us and had her open them, which is the best part about giving gifts. She was so happy, mostly with just seeing us, but also with the tree and presents. David and Leslie helped us bring her back to their house and we sat around watching Harry Potter and talking, just being together, which I think she misses the most. Leslie made a great dinner that RaeAnn can eat. See the paralysis also affected her throat and her food needs to be a certain consistency for her to eat it and even fluids need to be thickened so she can swallow them. After dinner we all piled into Mom's van and drove around Spokane looking at the beautiful Christmas lights. Some of the houses really go all out up there, but the best house was a barn way out of town. The guy living there has all the lights on this barn, the trees around it, a whole row of small trees in front of it and an entire cast of characters hooked up to a computer. You tune your radio to the station posted in lights and listen to the music as the Christmas lights and characters "dance". It was a-freakin-mazing!!!!!! The characters would sing some of the songs and the best song (at least our whole van agreed) was the song "Sandstorm" by Darude. If you listen to it you get the gist of what the lights would be doing. After all this fun we drove RaeAnn back to the nursing home. She had told David that she was getting really depressed, but with all the joy we brought her, she thought that she'd make it. She was always a bit dramatic ;)

Happy Thanksgiving!

I hope everybody's Thanksgiving was full of turkey and pie! My Uncle Fred and Aunt Carla and cousins Erin, Patrick and Jonathan came over to our house this year for dinner. We had so much food that the table didn't have a single space left for anymore dishes! I took pictures of the full table and then the opening of the party crackers, complete with paper crown, really bad jokes and a surprise! We ate our traditional dinner of turkey and spaghetti and then collapsed into the living room. I got to try out Mario Kart on Wii and didn't do too badly, though I over-corrected a lot which resulted in me driving off the course into lava, or a canyon, or space where I burned up on re-entry. It was a good time! And now time to take down the Thanksgiving decorations and get the Christmas ones up!!

The tale of Edward the Chicken...

So if you don't already know I am totally obsessed with Twilight, the book series by Stephenie Meyer. And I managed to get my Mom hooked on them as well. So this last August she hatched her own chickens using an incubator and has been letting them grow up on the "safe" side of the chicken coop. Well since we grew these ourselves the chance of getting more than a couple of roosters was high. We already have two roosters that live with their own ladies in separate chicken runs and we really can't afford to have any more cause they will eventually start fighting with each other. The baby chicks (which are almost full size now) seem to have three roosters in their bunch. We managed to give away one rooster, but we still have the other two. So one of the baby roosters is a Leghorn/Araucana mix and my Mom thinks he is gorgeous. She had just read the first book when she saw this rooster crowing and thought, "Wow that is one beautiful rooster...must be an Edward." For those of you who don't know, Edward is the main male character in these books and is described as your own personal Greek god. So my Mom now has a rooster named Edward. Also once she names any of the chickens it makes it really hard for her to give it away.

On another topic, we recently decided to replace the floor in the parlor with a hardwood laminate. After ripping out the old carpet, removing the 30 or so pictures and paintings from the walls, and repainting the room we found out that the laminate we bought was going to be nearly impossible for us to install. We are planning on having family over for Thanksgiving and most of the furniture for that room was in the dining room. So we called Home Depot and got an installer. We were thinking it wasn't going to be able to be finished until after Thanksgiving, but the guy was in between jobs and when he saw how far along the room was already he said the only day he'd be able to do it was Monday. Hurray! We are both off on Mondays!! So yesterday our new floor was installed and the dining room will be fit to have guests soon. Enjoy the pics!