Floral Baby Shower

My friends threw the CUTEST baby shower for me and baby girl this last weekend and I wanted to get some pictures up before I go into labor, ha ha (T Minus 6 DAYS TO DUE DATE). We chose a floral theme which fit in perfectly with the floral theme I chose for the nursery and everything was seriously adorable.

And I’m realizing I never told blogland the name we decided on! So here it is as part of the decoration. It was basically the only name John and I could agree on, but we’re pretty happy with it. ;)

And yes, since parties are my jam, I totally helped out with a couple of things – like cupcakes and cookies!

Everything turned out SO CUTE! We had a pretty good turnout, and my mom was able to come, so that was really fun for me. My mom also insisted on taking pictures of me with every single one of my gifts, like I was 12 and it was my birthday, but I’m not going to post any (sorry Mom) because to be honest, I kind of look like a doofus in most of them ;)

But it was super fun and it made me feel so special and loved!! Thanks to everyone who worked so hard to put this together and to everyone who came to celebrate our baby girl!!

Spencer’s Birthday Party/Weekend at Nana’s

Yes, more birthday celebrating for Spencer. The weekend after our day at Hershey we went down to my parent’s house to have a little birthday party for Spencer.

It’s always fun at Nana’s house! I worked on a furniture refinishing project (more on that later), we played with toys, and I sorted TONS and TONS of Legos. Nathan has really gotten into Legos since his birthday and my mom has kept lots of them from when my brother and I were kids. We found sooooo many Hogwarts legos! Nathan insisted I try to make the Hogwarts Express, which then caused me to start sorting all the legos by color so that I could find the pieces that I needed. It took forever, but was so satisfying when I was done ;) There was swimming outside and riding trikes, making pina coladas and getting ready for Spencer’s party!

We did a racecar themed party this year. It was really fun to put together, but the bummer was that none of our invited guests were able to come! It was a combination of getting the info out too late and the regular summer busy-ness that it just didn’t work out for anyone that day. But we had a good time together as a family and we ate like kings from all the food we’d prepared :)

I made a cake for the occasion – I’ve been having so much fun getting back into making cakes again :)

Spencer was soooo excited for his cake! I made a chocolate cake with peanut butter mousse and he loved it!

I think he liked it ;)

We had the kiddie pool and the water table out and Spencer got to open the last few presents we’d saved for the party.

I think he had a great time! And I had so much fun celebrating my crazy little man!

A Surprise Harry Potter Baby Shower

I helped put together a surprise baby shower for a friend of mine last weekend and I was so excited when we decided on the theme of Harry Potter – because, as you probably know by now, I’ll take any excuse to through a Harry Potter party ;)

I worked with two other girls to put this together and they had some great ideas and I think we put together a great party! It was SO fun to put together such a fun surprise!

This was at the front door when our Mom-to-be got home


They really had the perfect house for all my decorations from our surprise party for my sister-in-law last year – they had the perfect doorway for the train platform brick wall :)


You stepped through the platform and found yourself at Hogwarts, just in time for the feast!
And what a feast we had!


I took the opportunity to make more Harry Potter cookies :)


My cupcakes were rather ill-fated…we were given a temporary passcode to get into the house to decorate and I was the first one to get there. But I couldn’t get the keypad to work! As I attempted to get it to work, I ended up putting down my carrier full of cupcakes onto the ground to try again, but bumped something on the way down, and spilled half my cupcakes over themselves!! :( I was able to salvage most of them, but then later when we were all set up and waiting for the shower to start, one of our floating candles fell off the ceiling…right onto the cupcakes!! Oh well, they still tasted good!




One of the girls got a copy of the first Harry Potter book to use as the guest book – isn’t that such a fun idea?!
And some fun favors for our guests!

I think everyone had a great time chatting and eating and showering our cute mom-to-be with gifts. Yay for baby girls!! :)

Nathan is 4!

Oh my goodness you guys. I have a 4 year old! We’ve had lots of birthday fun going on this week that I’m really excited to tell you about.

His birthday was earlier, and we did a few things to celebrate on his actual birthday. I had to run a few errands, but he got to pick out a couple of new cars to bring home. We got Chick Fil A and took it to John’s office to meet him there for birthday lunch. The boys always love to visit Daddy at work, so that was really fun. We had Nathan’s favorite meal for dinner (pasta with tomato cream sauce, aka “Nathan’s Favorite Pasta”) and brownies for dessert. After that was PRESENTS.

Spencer getting in the way… ;)
I think this has been his favorite thing so far. I was hesitant to get Legos, but he loves them and so far Spencer hasn’t tried to eat any…so…I guess we’re okay for now.
I think all of John’s dreams for fatherhood were starting to come true right here…at least until Nathan got bored with the building part and just wanted to play with the finished product, so I sped along the building process because Spencer was waving bags of Legos in my face saying “open NOW!”.
 
So they had a good time playing with his new presents. :)

Today we had a large-ish little party for Nathan and his preschool friends. I kept telling myself that I needed to keep it simple, but then I kept thinking of things I wanted to do and it got bigger and bigger (at least with the food – I just can’t help myself)

My biggest self-imposed task with the birthday cake. I had so much fun doing the Tiffany’s bridal shower cake that I was itching to make something else.

So I decided to go all out and make a pirate ship cake. SO FUN, right?!
If I had actually taken the time to plan this out better (I basically found a picture on pinterest and was like “oh yeah, I got this”) I would have done a few things differently, but overall I’m really happy with the way it turned out since I was totally ‘sailing’ by the seat of my pants here. I was realizing that even though I decorated a sculpted cake at pastry school, I have never actually made one with real cake (most of that one was styrofoam). So again, I was just kind of putting it together as I went along. ;)
And Nathan LOVED it, and that’s all that matters :)

Nathan doesn’t really do group party games, so I didn’t plan any games, but I had the kids make pirate hats and hooks and they all seemed to really enjoy that. Say “ARRRRGH!”

And they mostly just played – we had plans to go to the park for the first half of the party, but it RAINED ALL DAY TODAY. Lame. But I think they all still had fun playing here.

I had a fun table spread for lunch. This would be where the rest of the self imposed complexity happened. I love setting up themed food tables ;)

Chicken salad sandwiches for the moms and “sea serpent” (chicken) nuggets for the kids :)
I realize this is a misnomer, as it’s supposed to be citrus that prevents scurvy, right? Just work with me here…
I just HAD to make cookies too, you know ;)
I’m pretty sure the treasure map numbers were my favorites – I LOVED the way they turned out!
Spencer was SUCH a stinker and kept swiping cookies from the table. But he’d only take one bite of each one before moving on to another. After the 5th cookie I finally moved the whole platter back into the kitchen. He was kind of mad about that…

After lunch we had cake!! I put the candles into the sides to look like cannons :) We sang (and at the end of the song, Nathan got a surprise kiss on the cheek from his little preschool crush! eeek! All of us moms were DYING) and had cake and there was general chaos until it was time to send everyone home.

I’d say it was a success! Now to clean up alllll the kitchen mess I’ve made in the last week ;)

Happy birthday Nathan! We love you and are so glad you are a part of our family!