In Full Bloom

It really is pathetic how slow I've been to record any recent events in my life.  All I can say is that I'm very slow, very waddle, and it's taken a very long time to get my house somewhat recovered from the bathroom renovations.  I have a new a profound dislike of drywall dust.  That stuff gets in every crevice and demands to be scrubbed off rather than simply dusted.  I'm convinced I'll be finding the stuff hiding in corners for the next three years.

But I digress.

A couple of weeks ago, my friends threw me the loveliest baby shower (my Mother-in-Law hosted it at her house).  The theme was "In Full Bloom," which was perfect for the first sunny day we'd had in weeks.  Adrienne is an interior designer and Tiffany is a party planner, so as you can imagine, it was a gorgeous shower and I felt incredibly lucky to be celebrating Maybe Baby's arrival.

One of my favorite blogs is a hilarious but also terrible place on the internet called GOMI (Get Off My Internets) where people go to snark on other people's blogs.  It can be quite cruel, but it's often extremely funny.  My favorite is when snarkers begin calling bloggers "Cara de Pan."  For the longest time, I thought it was a reference to a specific fashion blogger, but then I finally realized that it's a translation of "Bread Face."  Well, look at these photos and call me Cara.  I'm positively puffy.

Also, I make the funniest faces when left to my own devices/when I don't realize I'm being photographed.  I've spared you most of my funny faces, but just believe me when I tell you there were quite a few pictures that had me giggling to myself as I flipped through them.  This is all proving to me the underlying/subconscious reason I don't "remember" to take many photos with me in them.  Oh well.  There's a certain charm to being able to remember oneself just as puffy as one actually was during month nine of pregnancy.

Back to the main event: as I said, the shower was beautiful.  The food was amazing. I have the most talented friends who can bake and cook with the best of them.  There were dark chocolate coconut macaroons, fruit tarts, turkey and brie sandwiches, raspberry french macarons, Italian sodas... I'm getting hungry just thinking about all of the delicious food I ate that morning.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I have the most generous friends.  Maybe Baby will be the best dressed and most well-read baby around.  A lot of the women at the shower were members of my book group and it was fun that so many of them brought their favorite baby books to add to Maybe's collection.  It's fun to have old favorites that I remember from my childhood, and so many new others that I hadn't read before.  I can tell I'm going to have lots of fun reading to her every day (or to myself at the beginning?).

It's hard to believe (but extremely exciting) that we'll be meeting her in less than a week!

The 2014 Ugly Christmas Sweater Party

Blake has been hosting an Ugly Christmas Sweater Party for as long as I've known him (and I think all the way through college, so maybe 13-14 years?).  It's become one of our favorite Christmas traditions and we look forward to it every year.

It gives us the excuse to decorate the house and to make all of our favorite holiday treats that we couldn't otherwise justify having in the house (I have been known to eat a whole batch of cookies on my own...).

Bear is still at the "I will jump all over you, lick you, and steal your food" stage, so he spent the party in his crate, but had no shortage of friends petting him and sneaking him snacks through the openings.  I'm hoping that next year he'll be grown up enough to wander around the party un-watched.  But maybe that's wishful thinking.

The ugly Christmas sweater that my mom sent to me last year was looking perilously short after covering my growing bump (and love handles), so I had to wear a long undershirt so as not to flash our guests with any unexpected skin.

If I were better at remembering such things, I would have taken pictures during the actual party, but I'm sure it's not really that surprising that I didn't make it that far.  Frankly, after spending the day cooking and setting up, it's a miracle that was even awake through the party.  My bedtime has been no later than 10:00 lately, so staying up 'til all hours socializing was a welcome change.

I'm having a hard time believing that Christmas is less than a week away.  Is it just me, or does the Christmas season fly by faster and fast each year?  It's one of those times of the year when I wish things would slow down, but they always get so jam packed with fun activities that they proceed at a neck breaking pace.

We've got a handful of fun Christmassy outings planned for this coming week (along with another ultrasound - yippee!) and then on to the main event.  Bear's getting a new elk antler from Santa Paws, and I bought myself some luxuriously large Christmas jammies, so everyone around here is looking forward to the big day.

Doggy discourse

This rascally ball of fur brought home a prize from our walk yesterday.  He often brings home branches and nuts that he finds along the way, so I didn't think anything of it when he was throwing something around to himself in the living room.

But.  What I thought was a twig turned out to be a rat leg.

They way I know this?

Once he was done playing with it, I went to pick it up off the hearth to throw it away and realized that it had a paw and claws.  Shiver.  It was one of the more disgusting dog-owner bits of business I've ever come across (and that's saying something seeing as I have to pick up his poop every day).  There is not enough anti-bacterial hand soap in all the world to make me feel clean after holding a dismembered rat claw in my hand.

Other than that, though, Bear is a delight.  He followed us around all day on Saturday while we were preparing for our annual Ugly Christmas Sweater party and cried and moaned when he wasn't allowed to taste all of the treats.  I think he's finally figured out how much better human food is than dog food.

But enough about the dog.

The party was great - tons of food, tons of people, tons of funny white elephant gifts.  It's one of our favorite traditions every year and it really helps it feel like Christmas.  Plus, it's a good excuse to get the house all decorated for the holiday.

My mom sent me a new ugly sweater for the occasion.  I'm wearing it below.  I got a lot of comments saying it wasn't nearly ugly enough...and that's true.  I think I'd actually wear it on a normal day.  It's more kitschy than ugly, so it's a winner in my book.

Now that it officially feels like Christmas, I can hardly believe it's only a little over a week away!  Where is the time going?  December, how come you move so fast?!

Ahoy! It's a boy!

Way back in June (where is the time going?!) I hosted a baby shower for Adrienne to celebrate her baby boy.  He's due later this month and I, for one, can hardly wait to meet him.

Destiny, Jenny and I met in the singles ward and have been friends since I moved here six years ago.  Those were the glory days.  A big group of us (including Blake, Jenny's husband Tom and Adrienne's husband Colton) were inseparable.  We quickly and happily adopted Adrienne into the clan when she moved out from California after their marriage. 

As you can see below, I'm squinting from pure joy at having the gals back together again.

Although I ran out of prep time towards the end, I still had a grand time running with the nautical theme.  If only I'd had the time to take non-iPhone pictures of it all.  It looked better than these grainy pictures suggest, I promise.

I must say, I really have the nicest friends.  So many of them pitched in and brought the most delicious things to add to the spread - carrot cake cupcakes, fruit salad, brie and crackers, cinnamon rolls..mmm..it makes me salivate at the thought.

Because I'm a craft martyr, I made another crocheted baby blanket, but this time did it as a vertical pattern with a fatter chevron.  In true Rachel style, I cut it really close and ended up finishing it at midnight the night before the party.  Phew.  The fear of an unfinished gift looming over me - I've never crocheted so fast in my life. 

Here's to Ulysses Palmer (Ulysses is Colton's joke name for his unborn son - but I like it so much that I'm pretty sure I'm going to stick with it) and his wonderful parents!

Bow Ties for Babies

Last Saturday I threw a baby shower for Janelle to help celebrate the impending arrival of her baby bundle of joy.  She graciously arranged for us to have it in the party room at her apartment complex and I did my best to decorate the huge space.

Tiffany lent me a bunch of her party supplies (including her awesome collection of pom poms, which I strung into a garland for the buffet) and helped me with ideas, and basically just made my job easier. 

Combined the party-planning genius of friends with a trip to Costco, and party planning ain't half bad. 

Janelle has a picture on her desk of her husband, Logan, when he was just a little guy.  He's wearing a bow-tie and looking mischievous.  I wanted to make that the center of the party.  The animals on the invitations wore bow ties, the cupcakes toppers were bedecked in bow ties, and we all made bow ties for her little guy to wear.  You can see from the picture below that they all turned out really well.  She is going to have the most dapper little man around.

Of everything there, the thing I was most proud of was the grey and white chevron blanket that I made.  Mostly because I actually finished it on time (hooray!). 

Congratulations, Logan and Janelle!  I'm excited to meet baby M. in July!

Destiny's Baby Shower - Photo Edition

 

A shower for Destiny

There's nothing I love more than a chance to celebrate a friend - especially when there's a baby involved. 

Adrienne and I planned a shower to celebrate the much-anticipated arrival of Destiny's little one.  Destiny is being stalwart and is not finding out the gender of her baby until the birth, (I know for a fact that I'd never be able to wait that long...I'm way too impatient) so we kept the colors fairly gender-neutral and went for a "nesting" theme. 

I was happy to finally get a chance to use my bird chocolate molds to make little bird toppers for my double-chocolate-pumpkin cupcakes.  I had Blake take photos of everything with his nice camera, but I have yet to load those onto my computer, so these iphone photos will have to suffice.

We also decorated onesies for little baby Bachman and I was impressed by the talent all of the ladies possessed for turning a plain-old white onesie into an Etsy-worthy baby outfit. 

Decorating onesies ended up being so much fun that I made several of the peter pan collar onesies pictured below and am planning to send them to my friends that are currently expecting baby girls.  I never could resist a peter pan collar...and in newborn size?  Forget about it.  I'm smitten.