1. Elliora playing on the floor of Brenda‘s living room while we worked on party prep for the Summer Fiesta on Saturday evening.

2. Annalie and Noah were playing companionably in his room. I asked them to smile for a picture. Annalie smiled; Noah adopted an expression that made him look as though he feared for his life.

3. Annalie playing in the supercool fountain in Sonja‘s backyard.

4. Brenda was happy to hold Elliora for me while I went to the bathroom after our arrival Friday night, but the poor baby was so very tired I thought she’d probably cry if I handed her off to someone she hadn’t seen since she was five days old. So we distracted her with keys.

5. Even though it had been a year since these four had all been together, they got along like they just saw each other last week. I love that.

6. Brenda’s cat Aqui had her kittens on our first full day here, the day of the fiesta! She had five total, all gray and white. Mama and babies all seem to be doing really well. We look forward to playing with them before we go home.

7. I took a bunch of photos of the girls in their matchy-matchy fiesta dresses, and they were all so hilariously adorable that I had to Flickr them all, even the ones that were nearly identical.

8. Fish and Elliora.

9. Ready, set, go!

10. Oh man. This is hilarious to me (and probably anyone who knows Madge and Fish) on so many levels.

Whack!

12. Madge brought flan. I had a bite just to try it. I thought I didn’t like flan. Turns out, good flan is delicious. Who knew!?

13. I finally met THE Yara . And she’s awesome, duh.

14. Fish, Sonja, and Madge may or may not have been laughing a little more than usual because there was alcohol being consumed. Probably not though. These three are some of the funniest people I know even stone cold sober.

15. Sunset in the Sticks.

16. A blurry but happy photo, taken by Fish. I’m pretty sure the alcohol had nothing to do with the blurriness. I know the happiness was all due to being with good friends.

More photos in the Flickr photoset goin’ back to Cali 2.

Last week, my friend Rebekah threw a baby shower…for Annalie, who is expecting her first baby sister.

A couple of weeks ago, when we were painting pottery with my mom at our favorite studio’s Ladies’ Night, Bekah asked if I was interested in having a baby shower with our friends in Southern Maryland. I said I’d love that, but I didn’t see how there was time to plan that before it would be getting too close to the baby’s birth for me to be comfortable driving that far for a party. And then it would be December, when everyone is crazy busy anyway. I suggested maybe we could have one after the baby was born.

A couple of days later, I emailed Bekah to confirm that I’d be in her town in a few days for my last pre-baby haircut, and asked if she wanted to go out to dinner afterwards. She replied…and asked if it would be okay if she planned a baby shower for Annalie’s first baby sister for the afternoon after my haircut. She happened to know that most of the friends I’d want invited were free for that block of time, because they’d been talking about possibly getting together for something else on that day. I responded that it was a fantastic idea, that I was sure Annalie would absolutely love it, and I would too.

If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you might remember that Bekah is the one who, a couple of years ago, invited me to my own surprise birthday party. She knows me well enough to know I don’t really appreciate surprises, and I don’t love being the center of attention. So she read between the lines of my reluctance to plan a shower before the baby arrives, and planned a fun party for Annalie and her friends. Not only that, she did it with about three days’ notice.

We were originally going to meet at a park, but there was rain in the forecast, so we decided to meet at a pizza place with a party room and a kids’ play area instead. That ended up working out just fine (except the light would have been much better for photos at the park, but probably no one cared about that except me), and the food there is delicious, which was a nice bonus.

Rebekah did a great job planning fun games for the kids. They seemed to enjoy themselves a lot, and all the grown-ups appreciated not being made to play corny shower games. There was a match-the-baby-socks game, and a memory game in which Bekah sneakily made everyone think they’d have to remember items under a blanket but asked questions about me instead—what I was wearing, what color were my eyes, etc.—while I hid in another part of the restaurant. There was another game too, where they were passing an item around a circle based on certain words said in a story Bekah was telling, but I missed most of that one because I was too busy talking.

(Yes, I crocheted that flower headband on Baby Ashley in the above photo. Bekah asked me to make a headband for her with a “big ol’ flower” on it, so I did. I’m going to make a few more that are a little bigger, because I underestimated the size of a 4-month-old’s head.)

Thanks again for whipping up one of the world’s fastest baby showers, Bek! It was a fun party for kids and grown-ups alike, and those orange-coconut cupcakes were delicious. I’m glad you know me so well, and I promise never, ever to underestimate your party-planning skillz again!

Good job, Erin! Now, would you please come visit us since you have time to have a life again!?

In other news, I really would like to post some photos from my second week in California, and tell you about all the fun stuff we did (even though a lot of the fun stuff was just Annalie running around playing with her friends, while I sat and drank coffee and laughed with my friends) but I am still editing photos. I feel like I’ve been editing California photos for several years now. It’s all good, though. I’ll finish eventually.

So if you need me I’ll be over here, editing photos in between the usual cooking and crocheting, homeschooling and watching Veronica Mars on Netflix Instant, being weirded out at all this movement in my midsection and taking three weeks to maneuver myself from sitting on the couch into a standing position. (I’ll be 28 weeks as of Monday—that’s officially two weeks into the third trimester, and only eight weeks before Annalie was born.)

Just a little taste of the dotty baby shower for you, already blogged by Brenda and Bonnie, and Flickred by Summer and Katie as well. I’ll post many more photos as soon as I finish editing the thousands of photos on my hard drive. (This photo was taken by either Brenda or CC with CC’s camera.)

July 1: Our early-morning flight to Omaha allowed us to see a lovely sunrise at Dulles.

July 2: Aurora approved of the plate I painted for her; cousins chilling together.

Photo taken by Joe Sands

July 3: Painting pottery (and drinking Starbucks, and talking nonstop) with Kassie and Katrina has become a tradition when we’re all in Omaha at the same time, long may it continue.

July 4: Happy Independence Day! Grandma Carol & Annalie; sparklers galore.

July 5: Annalie and Grandma Val laughing; Old Man Annalie; Aurora making a face at the water we were giving her from the end of a straw, even though she apparently liked it.

July 7: Annalie monkeying around, Aurora watching and wondering how much longer till she can monkey around with her.

July 8: We took Angie out to lunch and introduced her to pottery-painting as an early birthday present, and did some handprints with Aurora and Annalie.

July 9: Lunch with Rachel; an impromptu visit with T and her kids.

July 10: A triple-the-fun birthday party for Zach, Josh and Alex; playing at the sprayground.

July 11: Lunch at Godfather’s with the Kay family (including Mike, who took the group photo); Krista cleverly disguised with a gumball-machine mustache.

July 12: Annalie hanging out with the mariachi band at the Mexican restaurant where we met Nancy and Ben, Angie & Aurora for lunch; shooting off some leftover fireworks at Ed & Leslie’s farm.

July 13: Katrina and I got pedicures and then went to dinner at an unexpectly busy Olive Garden all by ourselves and it was awesome. I think a new tradition has been born.

July 14: Starbucks for the moms, Slip’N'Slide for the kids—perfect on a day when the high temperature was near 100F and humidity was 91%.

July 15: We’re heading home.

I hope to write more detailed posts about our time in Omaha eventually, but for now you can enjoy many photos in my Flickr photoset Omaha July 2010.

The last weekend of June, we packed a lot of fun into a few short days. In addition to teaching the dottery class, we attended two birthday parties in one day and then drove four hours to the beach to hang out with Anna and her family, before driving three hours back home the next night. Whew! It was crazy but totally worth it.

First, we went to Karalyn’s 6th birthday party. It was a puppies-and-kittens party! The kids did puppy- and kitten-themed crafts and played games. The parents who hung out either helped as they were needed, pretended they were paparazzi, or hung out chatting, eating snacks, and passing around baby Kate.

Jill decorated Karalyn’s cake with an assortment of Littlest Pet Shop toys and candy bones, and there were also cupcakes with puppy and kitten toppers.

The weather was HOT that day, so the classic fill-the-buckets water relay game was especially welcome.

The party officially ended after a couple of hours, but we stuck around, eating Jill and Andy’s food and visiting with friends. It was particularly nice to see Angela and her girls, who had come from Indiana for a long visit just in time for the party. It was so nice to see them, in fact, that Angela and I lost track of time as we blathered away and we were late leaving for the next birthday party…

…for Jack! It’s hard to believe our adorable godson is already four years old, but it’s true.

We celebrated by climbing all over the PlayPlace and eating Happy Meals and Ronald McDonald cake and sundaes, because that’s the kind of birthday party smart parents plan when they have a tiny newborn daughter to take care of!

Did I mention the sundaes? They came with mini M&M’s and Oreo bits for topping. Those sundaes were a big hit.

Can you tell these two goofballs are related? They both posed like that, without prompting, when I pointed my camera at them.

Basically, a great time was had by all—what kid doesn’t love a McD’s PlayPlace?—and no one had to clean up their house or clean up after the party. Win! And with that, we said our good-byes and headed out to our minivan to make the long drive to the beach.

I was gonna write about the beach too, but this post is long enough and our trip to the beach deserves its own post. Standby…

Annalie’s 6th birthday party ended up being a bit of a flashback. Her 3rd birthday happened to fall on a 10%-off-day at our local pottery-painting place, so I let a few friends know that we were planning to go paint that morning and then have lunch at a nearby Mexican place.

Photo taken May 9, 2007

As it turned out, a few of our friends decided to join us, so the whole thing ended up feeling like a party. It was much more fun for me than her actual 3rd-birthday party, because I was sick that day. I powered through the playgroup party and then crashed hard when everyone went home. I don’t even remember it very well, honestly. But I have good memories of the painting day.

We debated several options for Annalie’s birthday party this year. But since we’d just moved, the only friends we wanted to invite were our old friends from when we lived in Maryland. That means all the guests live an hour and a half away from us, and it would have been hard on them to make a 3-hour round-trip drive for a birthday party. So we decided to meet halfway…for pottery-painting and Mexican food.

Most of the kids in this group are experienced pottery-painters, so they quickly chose their pieces and settled down to paint. Annalie finished so quickly that she was bored and begging to open her presents. I wanted her to hold off just a few more minutes, till most of the kids were done painting, so I handed her my camera and told her to take pictures.

I especially like the last two. They’re self-portraits she took with the timer.

Finally, it was time to open presents!

Annalie even had a present from Gabby and Annie to open, despite the fact that they live in Indiana and weren’t at the party. They gave her a cupcake-making kit, proving that they know both Annalie and me well. We have the best friends!

At the Mexican restaurant down the road, we all ate our fill of chips and salsa and cheese dip and whatever else we ordered, and then it was cupcake time! And history repeated itself just a little bit.

Originally we were going to have butterfly cupcakes, but Annalie decided at the last minute that she wanted daisy cupcakes instead. She even came up with the frosting design on her own, and it was much cuter than my idea. The ‘Feliz Cumpleaños’ plates were on clearance at Target for 58 cents, and Annalie thought it was cool to have birthday plates with Spanish on them. Works for me!

Old friends, painting, and good food were a great way to celebrate Annalie’s birthday. Thanks, everyone!

Isn’t this skirt great? I bought from Rebecca Brayton’s Etsy shop as a birthday present for Annalie, hoping it would take the place of the tulle underskirt that goes with the Cinderella dress CC made for her three years ago, the one she wears all the time, despite the fact that it’s got a waist-high slit and is not a skirt but a petticoat. Anyway, this seems to have done the trick. I have not seen her wearing the increasingly ratty petticoat since it arrived. And it’s fun to twirl in!

I just looked at the date on my previous post. How have I not written anything new for four days!? The time, she gets away from me. It’s partly because we had a birthday party to attend this weekend out of town, which meant an overnight stay in a really nice hotel with a great swimming pool, which I would have enjoyed a lot more if Annalie had not woken up at 5:50am (after not falling asleep till 10pm the night before) asking if it was time to go swimming yet. Oy. But then my mom and I got to go paint pottery tonight with my friend Rebekah, which was awesome. I forget how painting makes me feel all calm and energized at the same time till I’m doing it again. And tonight I even painted something non-dotty, which I don’t do very often so whenever I do I’m all pleased with myself for breaking out of my rut.

Also, that cold that Troy had for four days a couple of weeks back, the one that required him to blow his nose a dozen times or so? I caught that cold, which means I went through more Puffs Plus on my first day of being sick than he did in the whole duration of his cold. If I’m lucky I’ll be all better by June. So instead of staying up late to blog about Annalie’s birthday party which was last weekend, I’m going to bed. If I don’t post anything new for a few days, just assume I’m busy blowing my nose and drinking mug after mug of hot peppermint tea with honey. And let’s all hope that before I know it, I’m back to feeling like Annalie looks in this photo.

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.