If you’re seeing this in a feed reader, you might not be able to view the slideshow below—I couldn’t see it in Google reader, anyway. Click on through to see the photos!

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR from bethany actually’s Flickr photoset farewell fiesta.

Brenda and Toby hosted a last-minute Mexican-themed going-away potluck for us this past weekend, and it was completely fun. I’m not going into detail describing it, because most of what I’d say would probably be pretty boring, and I think the photos above give a good idea of what it was like. Also, Brenda wrote a wonderful post about the party that makes me smile and tear up a little each time I read it, and there’s no way I could top that, so I’m just gonna send you over there to read her post. Before you click over, I’ll just say this: we have awesome friends here in California, and we’re going to miss them a lot. Thanks, you guys!

Last weekend was Bug’s 4th birthday, and there was a party to celebrate, of course. Being the unique kid that she is, Bug had a unique theme in mind: rainbows and seeds. Brenda, although she is the queen of themes and is crazy about planning parties, had pretty much the same reaction you probably just did. I believe the technical term for that reaction is, Huh?

But after some sketching and thinking and researching, Brenda figured out a way to do the rainbow-seed theme that made both her and Bug happy.

One of the party activities was planting seeds in small terracotta pots, which the kids then got to take home as their party favors.

Another activity was making mosaics on paper plates with a variety of dried beans, AKA seeds.

Incorporating seeds into the food was easy. Brenda served a variety of nuts, a two-bean salad, hummus (made from chickpeas!), and sesame-seed bagels with peanut butter and Nutella. To go with the other part of the theme, there were fruits and veggies in a rainbow of colors…and a rainbow candy bar! You can’t really see it that well in any of the photos I took, but there was a line of jars at the back of the food table filled with Skittles, colorful chocolate-coated sunflower seeds, Jolly Ranchers, and Pixy Stix.

Needless to say, the candy bar was a BIG hit. Annalie kept asking me who was going to eat the giant rainbow lollipops that Brenda had stuck in a vase as a colorful centerpiece. I told her that they were as big as her head, and no one was going to eat them. But the rest of the candy definitely got sampled. Especially the chocolate-covered sunflower seeds and the Pixy Stix! The kids could not get enough of those.

Did you know, by the way, that Pixy Stix were originally marketed as a fruit drink mix under a different name? And that the powder in Pixy Stix is the same powder in Lik-M-Aid pouches? And that SweeTarts are a compressed form of Pixy Stix powder, originally invented because moms were complaining about the sticky, gritty powder? I learned all that just now from the Wikipedia page about Pixy Stix when I did a quick Google search for the correct spelling of the candy name.

Brenda performed some magic with paper and her sewing machine to make these fantastic rainbow-cirle dingle-dangle decorations. (She details how she made them in her post about Bug’s party, if you’re interested.) Then at the end of the day she took them down, folded them up, and gave each party guest one to take home.

That’s Brenda’s secret to having an uncluttered home, by the way: she gives most of her art projects away. I currently have about 37 different wreaths, mobiles, cardboard ghosts and Christmas trees, and milk-jug angels that Brenda made and gave to us that Annalie will NOT let me throw out. I think some of that stuff is going to get “lost in the move.” That is why my home isn’t more cluttered than it is: every time we move we have to unpack a zillion boxes. That is a great incentive for getting rid of a bunch of stuff, so we won’t have to unpack so much the next time! And it’s easy to get rid of stuff as you’re unpacking boxes. I actually look forward to that part of moving.

Brenda also made coloring sheets, and I should really have a picture of Annalie’s sheet to show you, but I don’t. Normally she’s not that into coloring and does a pretty haphazard job. That day for some reason she took her time and the end result was great. Maybe it was because Superchic was there coloring with her, and she was taking her time and making her picture look pretty. Annalie does respond well to competition, which is totally foreign to me because I don’t. Give me a little competition and usually I will back away and go find something else to do, just out of stubbornness.

My main contributions to the party, as you may have figured out from the title of this post, were cupcakes and crocheted rainbow balls. Brenda came up with the fun name rainballs, which I like because it kinda matches the snowballs I also crochet.

I was originally going to make a 6-layer cake with each layer a different color of the rainbow, but at the last minute Brenda got these cute little rainbow lollipops and decided they’d make great cupcake toppers. The rainbow cake would have been fun to make, but I love cupcakes so the last-minute change was fine by me. I made the same Lemon Cupcakes with Lemon Cream that I made for my birthday last year, with lemon cream cheese frosting (a couple of teaspoons of lemon zest added to my favorite cream cheese frosting recipe).

A note about the cupcake recipe: The original recipe said it would make four cupcakes. (Jen’s reaction to that was an incredulous, “Why? Why on earth would anyone want to only make FOUR cupcakes!?”) I wanted to make 24, so I multiplied each of the ingredients by six. That resulted in a recipe with 4 1/2 cups of flour, 3 cups of sugar, 12 eggs, and 3 sticks of butter. That’s an entire package of eggs and a whole cup and a half of butter, people. I knew, just from looking at the amounts, that this recipe would not make a mere 24 cupcakes. I was going to get at least 36 cupcakes out of it. But I figured it was better to be safe than sorry and it’s not like the extra cupcakes were going to go to waste, so I forged ahead. In the end, I made 36 largeish cupcakes and eight mini-cupcakes.

The moral of my story is, if you make this recipe you’re going to get more cupcakes than you were promised. But you really won’t mind because they are delicious. In fact, I think I’ll go get one of the extra cupcakes out of my fridge right now.

We used the rainballs for a ball-toss game. Brenda told the kids they’d get a piece of candy for a prize when they got a ball through, so at random times throughout the party kids would walk over to the game, shove a ball through one of the holes, then run over to their moms and ask if they could have a prize. It was pretty funny, but at least they were working a little bit for their sugar. And then at the end of the party, each kid got to pick one rainball to take home.

The rainballs were originally going to be part of the flowerpot party favors, but for reasons it would take too long to explain, the plan changed. I’m glad I made them anyway, because the ball-toss game was fun and the kids all loved the colorful, soft balls. I was already thinking of making more when someone emailed to request a custom order of five rainballs and five snowballs.

Even though I roll my eyes a lot at Brenda when she’s in party-planning mode, I have to admit that I’ve really come to enjoy her particular brand of crazy when it comes to themes and parties. I will never be as detailed as she is, but I have learned a few tricks from planning a few parties with her. I think I might even use those tricks for future parties. In any case, Brenda is only an email away if I need help.

Thanks for inviting us to your 4th birthday party, Bug! We’re so glad we were still here to be a part of it. We hope you had as fantastic a time as we did.

I guess I’m not a very good Chuck fan. I neglected to mention on Twitter, Facebook AND my blog that the two-hour Season 3 premiere of Chuck was this past Sunday, and that another episode aired at the regular time on Monday, on NBC. So, um, watch Chuck next Monday!

I have good reasons for not mentioning it though. I was busy enjoying the last few days of my visit with Lauren, who sadly had to fly back home before the Chuck party.

Then I was getting ready for the Chuck party. We grocery-shopped and made magnets and put together some goodies for the party favor bags.

We got t-shirts made with the awesome graphic that Brenda designed. She also designed the bitmap art (inspired by the Chuck opening credits) for the favor bags.

We did some house-cleaning and some cooking.

Then there was the actual partying, woohoo! Along with me, my mom, Annalie and Brenda, Sonja and Noah, Jen and Emily, Heather and her girls, and Brenda’s mom Sue all came down for the Chuckaganza. (Troy came up with that one.)

We showed off our kung fu moves.

Then there were the mustaches. Oh, the crazy mustaches. I think Brenda came up with the idea, and then I said, “I have this cheap felt that’s been sitting in my cabinet forever…here, cut up some mustaches!” We got double-sided tape and the rest is history. Much to Sonja’s delight.

No one—and no thing was safe from Sonja’s mustache-ing fervor.

See? There were also mustaches on the kitchen trash can, Annalie’s piggy bank, and a drawing of a teddy bear taped up in the hallway. Though I think the trash can might have been Brenda’s doing.

And after we put the littles to bed, we settled down with our coffee and chocolate souffles to watch the two-hour premiere. It was, in a word, awesome. The episode that aired the next night was even better. I think this is gonna be a good season for Chuck. I’m so glad I discovered this show (thanks again, Mike!) and have been able to share the fun with so many other people.

Not to mention the mustaches.

For more photos of the weekend, go to the photoset Chuck Party 2010 in my Flickr.

If you want to catch up on Chuck, you can see the first three episodes of this season, plus the last few of Season 2, on NBC Video Rewind. A few more are available on TheWB.com.