I have done so much and taken so many photos in the past couple of weeks, but have not had time to write about anything! Since I was sick the first couple of weeks of December, I put off pretty much all my Christmas shopping till the last minute. Not to mention that I keep getting orders for crocheted snowballs, which is great! But I kinda forget I have my own crocheting and crafting to do before Christmas and keep agreeing to more custom orders. I’ve done my last Etsy order of 2008, though. So in the four days left before Christmas, I’ll be making and wrapping presents, getting them boxed up and addressing labels, all that jazz.

Before any more time passes, though, I need to tell you what we did last weekend! If you follow me on Flickr or Twitter or you happened to read Brenda’s post the other day, you already know that last weekend we were partying with friends to celebrate Heather’s 30th birthday!

Heather happens to be Brenda’s sister-in-law, which is how I met her. But she has become a good friend over the last year too. Heck, every member of Brenda’s family is a friend of mine now, and all my family members are her friends too. That’s just how we roll.

Anyway. Brenda called me a few weeks ago, wanting to know if I had any great ideas for Heather’s 30th birthday party because she was stumped. I suggested painting pottery and then somehow ended up inviting them all to come down here for the weekend and offering to make a chocolate cake. I’m not sure if it was really my idea or if I was tricked into it.

Just kidding! Even if it wasn’t all my idea, I was totally jazzed about it. I love making homemade birthday cakes, and I love having people come to visit, and I love painting pottery. I’d been meaning to have Heather and her girls down for a visit since we moved here in July so this was our chance, and we took it. So what if everyone was either just getting over or just coming down with a horrible cold!? It’s December, that’s life. We managed to have fun anyway.

We all had dinner at an inexpensive but yummy Chinese restaurant and then went back home for cake. It might have been the ugliest cake I’ve ever frosted, but it was tasty! After the cake was consumed, we planned to head to my favorite pottery studio. But Annalie and Superchic were having so much fun playing that they didn’t want to stop. They stayed home with my mom and Troy and built forts and dressed up and doctored Annalie’s stuffed animals in their clinic and watched a Christmas movie. The rest of us, including Bug, had fun painting. We ended the night with the kids playing musical bedrooms but we all got to sleep eventually.

The next morning we went up to Snail Mountain. It was a chilly, windy day so we didn’t get coffee and doughnuts first. We just climbed around a bit, took a few photos, and danced on the stage.

That afternoon, Sue (who was getting over a bad cold and cough) and Brenda (who was coming down with a cold) stayed home while Bug took her nap, and the rest of us went to lunch at one of our favorite Mexican places. Then we explored Old Town for a while, since Heather and her girls had never been there and it really is fun to wander there, exploring the Estudillo House and poking around in the shops.

Oh, and somewhere in there, Heather opened her presents. Brenda had gotten her a french press coffee maker, while we got her a red electric kettle just like mine. We didn’t even know about the other’s gifts, they just happened to match up perfectly.

It was a busy weekend, but totally fun. I hope you had an awesome 30th birthday weekend, Heather! As Brenda said, welcome to the Middle Ages.

Many more photos from the birthday-bash weekend are in the photoset CC’s 30th birthday on Flickr.

We had a super fun Halloween! First, my mom and dad are in town. My mom being here isn’t that unusual, but my dad being here is a rare occurrence. He’s not much of a traveler so we usually only get one visit out of him per city. Now that he’s retired we’re going to drag him out to visit us more often, but it was still a fun novelty to have both my parents here for Halloween—the first one they’ve spent with Annalie.

Second, Brenda invited us to come hang out with her crew so we went to the beach.

Trick-or-treating is always more fun with friends, don’t you think? If we’d stayed at home we probably would have gone to the mall and trick-or-treated with Gramaw and Grampaw. I guess that would have been fun in its own way. But when it comes to putting on costumes and begging candy from strangers, I’m a traditionalist. There’s just something about walking down a street at sunset, seeing all the decorations and jack-o-lanterns, ringing doorbells, having people say, “Ooh, aren’t you guys cute! Go ahead and take two, there’s plenty where that came from!” I don’t know if a mall experience could come close.

Hard as it may be to believe considering that Brenda has become one of my closest friends and now holds all the secrets to our house, Troy had not yet met Brenda’s husband Toby, her mom Sue, her sister-in-law Heather, or her nieces Rapunzel and Superchic (not their real names). And Brenda hadn’t met my dad yet, either. We all needed some context.

I’m a big believer in having context. I love to meet my friends’ parents, siblings, co-workers, or anyone from other parts of their lives, just to get another angle on understanding them. Erin is big on the context thing too, and when we visited her and Rocco recently she knew I’d want to see her office at school, meet her mother-in-law Rosie, eat at their favorite pizza joint, and so on. So now when she talks to me about going to Rosie’s house or her office mate Alison, I have mental pictures of what she’s talking about. Context is important.

By now Brenda and I have a decent amount of context on one another’s families. We’re just catching up the rest of our families on each other.

We got there early to beat the crazy California rush-hour traffic…so early that we had time to go to the beach! My mom grew up in California, just a couple of towns over from where Brenda grew up, actually—I originally got hooked on her blog because I recognized the mountains in some of her photos of the Sticks—and she loves the ocean. She will go to the beach at every available opportunity. That’s pretty much how Rapunzel feels about it too, so we all walked down to the beach.

Annalie has a funny relationship with the ocean. Some days she loves it, some days she’s petrified of it, and most days it’s a little of both. Luckily on Halloween with Gramaw and Grampaw there she was mostly okay. She even went climbing on the rocks by some tidepools with Troy and Rapunzel and Grampaw and had a fine old time.

Brenda and I had walked back to the house with Baby Bug and SuperChic by then. We had to make the Halloween-themed dinner. There were mummy hot dogs and zombie brownies. Heather brought fancy homemade caramel apples. There were also sweet-potato oven fries and salad, but those were just regular non-Halloween items.

After that it was finally the time the children had all been waiting for. Time to put on costumes and trick-or-treat, woohoo!

Annalie was so excited about her costume. She kept telling everyone that she was a Japanese girl, even though I kept trying to tell her that her dress was actually Chinese. But our friends who used to live in Japan had sent it to her, so as far as she was concerned it was Japanese. (I guess there’s no reason a Japanese girl couldn’t wear a Chinese dress.) What she was most excited about was that she got to wear some of my make-up. A little eyeliner, a little mascara and lip gloss, and voila! She’s ready to give Daddy a heart attack at suddenly looking like a teenager.

She was also quite happy that she at last owned a parasol. She’s been wanting one of these for ages, and when I told her we could get one for her to carry on Halloween I thought she would faint of happiness.

Of course when it came time to leave for trick-or-treating and I reminded her to not forget her parasol, she looked at me like I was nuts. “I’m not going to carry that with me, Mom. Someone could get hit in the eye!” Ooooh-kay then.

There were lots of dark houses in the neighborhood where we were, but there were plenty of lights on too. The houses where we stopped, the people inside were always glad to see us and often mentioned that they’d hardly had any trick-or-treaters at all. Most people were generous with the candy, and all the girls got plenty of loot. Annalie was ready to go home after about five houses when I told her we couldn’t eat anything till we got back home and Mommy and Daddy checked out her candy, but we convinced her to keep going a while longer. Eventually all the girls were ready to head home.

We ended the evening with candy, caramel apples, and a showing of the new TinkerBell movie, which got a thumbs-up all around. Annalie fell asleep on the drive home after telling us, “This was my most favorite Halloween ever!”

I think she’s told us that about every single Halloween of her life. Which is just as it should be.

These photos and many more are in the photoset Halloween 2008 on Flickr

Annalie’s 4th birthday party was a success! The kids all had a fabulous time at the JumpYard, especially Annalie. The rain stopped long enough that we were able to have our picnic at the park pavilion as planned. Even the fact that the wind kept us from being able to light the candles didn’t slow us down. Annalie just pretended to blow them out. The food was yummy and Annalie got some really fun presents.

There are lots more photos on Flickr, in Annalie’s 4th birthday set, for your vicarious partygoing pleasure.