Birthday birthday birthday birthday

Here I am, reporting faithfully from Cloquet! Where it's cold. The high was like, low forties today. Expardon me? Our house is frozen, we're covered with blankets, stubbornly refusing to turn on the heat this early in the season. Plus, we're not quite ready to start poking around and trying our luck with all these radiators yet.

It's nights like this that call for a rich hot pan of brownies. You know? So I would have made them tonight, except for we're doing this new thing where we don't really eat any snacks and when we DO eat snacks, it's stuff like pistachios and low fat pretzels. It's just that time of life. You know? The time where you realize that the best thing to do is make good eating choices, however sad and drab that might be.

But sometimes life is just more manageable with a big chunk of brownie in your mouth. You know?!?

Anyways.

Birthday pictures! I have birthday pictures. There's a lot of August birthdays in our family. Sometimes we like to combine most of them together for a large conglomerate of birthday party. In this case the conglomeration celebrated the births of myself, my brother, my cousin, and my daughter. And this is how it went - my brother, cousin and I opened a few cards and then we all watched as Paisley opened what was probably an unruly amount of gifts. Unruly! But it was delightful, it really was. She opened them all ever so carefully, and sweetly enjoyed and said thank you for each one. Even when she pulled clothes out of the gift bags (clothes, typically the boring gift until you get to about....say the 13 or 14 year mark), she was thrilled and immediately started pulling them on at her feet.

I'm sure my girl will always be this polite and wonderful and gracious. Always. Forever and ever amen.

I also am including some pics of a little celebration we had just for Paisley a week later with Brian's parents. The way you can tell the difference between the two events is by the varying length of Paisley's bangs. Also by the cake pictures expressions. She certainly knew what to do with the birthday cake the second time around! Her new favorite song is the "happy birthday" one, I sing it to her when I'm trying to get her to behave or be quiet in the grocery store.

Or in Target. Or Old Navy. Or a restaurant. Or our house. Our somebody else's house.

I'm glad we had this talk.

Yes I am wearing the same shirt for both birthday parties. I'll address it. I guess it might be turning out to be my birthday party shirt, or something else to that effect. 

Until next time, sweet dreams! Many, many thanks to all you folks out there who shower lots of love on us and our girl.

Birthday Extravaganza

Paisley's birthday party was almost two weeks ago already! August did that thing that it always does where it becomes so busy that you abandon any type of routine or discipline in your life and just wing it for three weeks straight, hoping you'll make it out on the other side with everyone still alive and eating frozen pizza no more frequently than once a day.

Veggies are always the first to go in these types of situations. At least in our house. Who has time for veggies when your to do list is miles long but all you can focus on is getting the lake smell out of your swim suit?

Must...get...lake smell...out...of...swim...suit...so help me God.

But fear not, the veggies are back! I bought veggies from the store this week like you wouldn't believe.

September is start over month.

But I digress.

Paisley's birthday party was a smashing success! The heat index got incredibly high and the wind got blow your skirt up silly, which caused us to reconsider eating outside in our yard as per our plan. A plan, we had a plan! My type-A-list-making-planner personality got admittedly flustered for a good ten minutes or so, but once we made the decision to yes! Let's move everything in! And use the piano bench for extra seating! it all went swimmingly.

Baby girl received lots of wonderful gifts and ate lots of delicious food but most importantly, had lots of people around her who love her a whole lot.

Seriously, they all really love this girl.

And I can totally see why.

So without further ado, here are the pics! I'll give you a hint, the one of her face while she very seriously awaits her birthday cake is the best one.

Something new.

For the longest time I've been intimidated by color when it comes to the fine arts. My safe zone is my gray graphite pencils and in my sketchbooks you will find pages and pages of grayscale drawings.

But I've been starting to feel bored. And held back by my grays. I'm tired of shading and shading and shading and trying to get all the dimensions the image requires with a single color.

There's only so much grayscale shading one can do before one starts feeling annoyed.

Also, I'm trying this new thing where I'm not letting myself be held back by the fear of failure? Trying to not be held back by the fear of failure has been good to me this summer. Very good indeed.

So I asked my mom for some pastels for my birthday. I've worked with pastels a bit before but have never had any of my own. Yesterday during baby girl's nap I gave them a try, and people. I have a new boyfriend and his name is called drawing with pastels. Don't tell the hubs.

I didn't want to waste a ton of time pondering what to create (I often have problems wasting time because of my incredible indecisiveness) so I used a foxy sketch from a couple months ago as my inspiration. Here is the original sketch:

Here are some progress shots. I was worried that I wouldn't have enough knowledge of color to know what to put where, but I pushed that aside and just did what I thought might look awesome.And here is the final outcome! I was surprised with how quickly it came together and how pleased I was with the result. I think pastels and I are going to be spending a lot of time together.   

And don't worry your pretty little head about the hubs, he already knows about us.

Birthday/Mother's Day Weekend!

This past weekend was a blast and a half.

First up! We had the hubs' birthday. To celebrate his journey into what I'm calling extreme adulthood (28 folks. Look out.) we went to Nickelodeon Universe at the Mall of America. To go on rides! To remind us of our youth. To irritate our poor, aging stomachs.



Our youthful evening included screaming and laughing on speedy roller coasters, waiting in lengthy lines amongst throngs of middle schoolers, trying out the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ride (the hubs loudly sang the TMNT theme song the whole time we were riding this one, as was his prerogative, being the birthday boy), pondering the fact that the turtles are not only mutant ninjas but also TEENAGERS, going on the haunted ghost ride where you get to shoot the bad guys with laser guns (and as you can see from the picture above the hubs beat me by literally almost 1,000 points), and talking about how very tired and worn out we were.

My double dose of Dramamine lasted me about six or seven rides before it completely gave up and I declared myself unfit for any more shenanigans. But luckily I didn't puke, which is more than I can say for the last time we were there!

...

THEN! It was Mother's Day. My first one, positively. And it was filled with bright colors, tulips and sunshine, as a first Mother's Day should be.



After church and small group we headed over to my Grandma's house where the rest of the day was spent eating delicious food, getting my first Mother's Day corsage, squishing Paisley's squishy cheeks with kisses until she was completely squished and then passing her on to the next potential cheek squisher, and playing fun games.


Such good things to make up such a great weekend.

And how was yours?

Update

My blog posts these days just seem to be random updates here and there, but I'm a-ok with that for now. Time to just go with the flow!! And eat some cookies.

My 27th birthday was last week and it was certainly a good time. Some of the festivities included a fancy dinner with the hubs, seeing the new Batman movie, homemade dinner with a couple of friends, shuffleboard with the extended fam (though I did not participate but instead sat and watched in a pregnant haze), eating (engulfing?) made-from-scratch chocolate eclairs from my mom (she makes them for me every year - it's my happy place), and dinner at Chino Latino's with my bro, sis, mom and hubs.

Not all of these things happened in one day. That would have been busy. Too busy for an apparently almost 30 year old.

Here's the hubs and I at my birthday dinner at Muffuletta. Delish? Yes. One of our last date nights without having to hire a babysitter? Perhaps. My oh my how life is about to change.

Other things I've been up to are as follows:

Finishing up the baby's room (I'll be sharing pics soon!)

Thinking about all of my old clothes and how soon I might be able to fit into them once my bowling ball stomach is gone.

Trying to run errands and do useful things but often failing because of general fatigue and killer back pain. I complained to the hubs the other day, "It's hard to do things." "What?" he said. "It's just hard to do things," I repeated.

"....." was his response.

Finally making it to the beach with my sister. We've been trying to make it there for awhile but because of a series of unfortunate (although usually comical) events it took us a long time to finally make it happen.

Here's us.

Here's Hannah posing with Lake Calhoun. She approves.

Hope all is well in all of your worlds! Not sure how often I'll be around here for a bit, as I am at 37 weeks and little girlfriend could pretty much make her appearance at any time! Now that's crazy talk.

Chocolate Chip Oreo Cookies

The hubs' birthday was a couple of weekends ago, and as he is an oreo fiend I usually try and make him something oreo related. Last year was Homeade Oreos, this year I tried Chocolate Chip Oreo Cookies. I put them out at his birthday party and they were a huge hit! AND they disappeared super fast. So fast that I felt compelled to make them again, so that the hubs and I could enjoy a batch to ourselves.

Ok that last sentence makes us sound...like we eat an unnecessarily large amount of cookies.

It's nothing but the truth yo.

I originally got the recipe here and followed it pretty closely - the first time using double stuff oreos and the second using regular. Both were great, but if I were to make these again I would use the double stuff - you get more of that "cookies and cream" flavor.

Chocolate Chip Oreo Cookies

1 stick of softened butter
6 tablespoons sugar
6 tablespoons brown sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/4 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
11 broken oreos (I prefer double stuff)
1 cup chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Cream butter and sugars until well combined. Add egg and vanilla, mix well. Combine flour, soda, and salt into a separate bowl, then add slowly to the wet ingredients. Add oreos and chocolate chips and stir until just combined. Scoop onto baking sheets and bake for 8-10 min.

Photo booth traditions.

Yesterday was the hubs' birthday! We had a great time last night hosting lots of friends at our place for the evening. There was food to be eaten, ultimate frisbee to be played, rock band to be rocked, conversation to be had, jokes to be laughed at, and bouldering caves to be bouldered.

Here's the hubs blowing out his ice cream cake! There's a lot of flaming candles on that thing. He's all wet because the weather had to be a big fat bummer and rain on his parade. And when I say his parade I mean his ultimate frisbee game.

That's the only picture I managed to snag of the evening because I'm just. that. good.

Today I made him breakfast which included Buttermilk Bacon Biscuits with Maple Glaze (recipe here). Yes they are just as good as they sound, especially served with a couple extra slices of bacon and an egg. Then we set out to complete our "Brian birthday" yearly tradition.

That tradition being photo booths.

!

We started going to photo booths for his birthday before we were even married. Or engaged! Actually. That's a lot of documentation of funny faces going on. Last year I finally started compiling them all into a Brian's Birthday Book.

I snapped a few photos of some of my favorite pages. Our first ones are from 2005, so this will be our eighth year of photo boothing together! We are getting pretty durn good at squeezing both our butts onto the same little stool and centering our heads in the screen (mine a little behind Brian's on account of me having a MAMMOTH sized noggin...let's hope the baby doesn't take after me there...Lord help me), and waiting for the countdown to each little flash. Silly faces at hand.

The book was simple and quick to make - I just bought a big orange (his fave color) three ring binder, some black paper and sleeves to put the paper in, and some scrapbooking scraps for labels and captions. Then I started gluing and labeling away, and painted the cover with Modge Podge. I don't do much scrapbooking myself, but this was fun and easy to put together.

I think 2009 has my favorite pictures so far. Brian's face in the picture in the right column, third down makes me laugh. So much.

There are lots of pages in the back for coming years! If photo booths ever cease to exist I don't know what will happen. There will certainly be no way to carry on.

So. Today we set off to the mall which holds the closest photo booth (that we know of anyway) to our house. And...it wasn't working. Nurts. Not having time to find another one before the hubs had to run off to work, we sadly hung our heads and left without any 2012 photos in hand.

We're hoping the mall people have it fixed by next week.

!

Do you have any birthday traditions that can't be skipped?