Birthday Dinner #2

When I first met our friends the Cooks and learned that Christopher has the same birthday as I do, I won't lie...I was probably a little put out.  I mean, there was an understood rule that March 15 was supposed to be all about me! me! me!  And when it came to birthdays, I didn't really wanna share. But as it turns out, Chris's wife, Allison, is really creative and likes to go all out on birthdays.  And since we're pretty good friends and I share a birthday with her husband, I, by default, get to benefit from all the goodies and celebrations she plans for Chris.  We're a few years into this whole shared birthday thing now and guys?  I'm not complaining anymore.  Sharing a birthday with Christopher is AWESOME!  Maybe even one of the best things that ever happened to me.

For proof, you can read about how last year's birthday dinner turned into a Bowling Surprise Party for me (and Chris too, I guess...) and about this year's Birthday Dinner #1 that Allison cooked up for us at her house.  As if that weren't enough, this year's Birthday Dinner #2 was all planned by Allison too!  I guess technically Doc taking me out to dinner on my actual birthday was really birthday dinner #2, but I didn't take pictures at it.  So dinner last Saturday night (on St. Patrick's Day) officially gets the Birthday Dinner #2 title and for once, I'm actually beating Allison to the punch and writing about it first.  Blogging victory!

Since Chris turned the big 3-0 this year, this was supposed to be a big dinner celebration with all of our in-town friends.  But because of St. Patty's Day and the way Spring Break vacations fell, our group size dwindled down to just 8 of us.  But we still had a great time!

In attendance were the Earls,

the Solomons,

me and Doc,

and of course, the Birthday Boy and Party Planner Extraordinaire.

I didn't realize the party was on St. Patrick's Day until about an hour before we were supposed to be there.  I was feeling the luck of the Irish when I A) found a green shirt in my closet and B) the scoop of said green shirt mimicked my ridiculous tank top sunburn line from our beach vacay.  It's the little things, you know?

When we arrived at the restaurant, this fun little pack of M&Ms was waiting for me at my seat, and there were lots more scattered on the table.  They're customized Happy Birthday M&Ms and half of them said Chris is 30 and the other half that I am 29.

Out of the corner of my eye, I spied this display of push pop cupcakes.  I rushed through my meal since I knew those were on the horizon!

The ribbons on the push pops matched the wrapping paper and the flags on the age labels coordinated with the M&M packages.  These details were not lost on me!

And ooooh wee, were the cupcakes tasty!  They were all homemade chocolate cake and icing, but half had a layer of caramel in the middle and the other half had a layer of cherries.  Yummo!

For anyone confused, you just pushed the cupcake up like you would a push pop.

Doc took down a whole cupcake in one bite at our wedding, so it didn't surprise me at all when he did it again with this.  The boy's got mad skills.

He makes me so proud. :)

That's where my pictures from this birthday dinner stop.  Chris and I did get to open more birthday gifts before relocating.  Since the weather was so nice, we spent the rest of the night sitting out on a patio people-watching (one of my favorite pasttimes, and St. Patt's Day did not disappoint). 

I've got pictures to download from my last birthday party of the year.  Hopefully I'll get to do that tonight!

Dear Beach House...

...It's so hard to say goodbye!  At the time that this posts, I'm probably sitting in the front seat of our rented minivan boo hoo-ing as we drive towards our house that's not brand new, doesn't have a pool in the backyard, and isn't within walking distance of the beach.  And, last I checked, it was raining cats and dogs at home so we'll likely be greeted by mud puddles and foot-high weeds.  Sigh...why can't we just stay here forever? This week was the kids' spring break so we brought them (and Doc's parents too) to see the beach house for the first time.  During building, we kept it a secret from them so they had no idea it even existed.  I mean, they knew we were headed to the beach and that we were staying in a house, they just didn't know it was our house.  As we pulled up, we told them we were all going to take a quick tour of the house and then we had to meet out on the patio for a family meeting.  Doc used his serious voice thinking he'd make them nervous (especially since last week we'd had a family meeting and told them about the new brother or sister they'll be getting in September!) but I think they just thought he was going to go over the "vacation rules."

Before telling them the house belongs to us, we asked them what they thought about it so we'd get an unbiased opinion.  They both thought it was really cool...they got their own rooms and it had a pool!  I had my camera poised to snap a pic when Doc told them that the house belongs to us.  I was ready to catch their excitement on film!

Um yea, not really the picture I was expecting.  What we actually got was about a billion questions.  "Wait...so this used to just be an empty lot?"  "You've seen this house before?"  "We can come here anytime?"  "Other people can come here too?"  I guess it was a lot to take in.  We asked them if they remembered all the mattresses and couches that used to be in Mimi and Poppy's (my parents) garage.  "Yea?"  Then we told them those were the mattresses we'd be sleeping on the couches that were in the living room.  Slowly but surely it all started to make sense to them.

Then they got excited!  And also wanted to know why didn't build a third floor.  We tried to point out the positives; tweens don't really get mortgages and things like that.

We also told them that noone had swam in the pool yet so the race was on to see who could get suited up first.   Wyatt was first but we made him patiently wait for his sister so they could jump in together.

Finally she made it down and we counted them off.  They made sure I had my camera ready so we'd know for sure exactly who went all the way under first.

Three, two...

...one!  Looks like Anna's off the ground first.

But Wyatt's catching up.

Looks like Wyatt made it under first.  The camera doesn't lie.  Just don't tell Anna, ok?

It didn't take long after they jumped in for us to realize the pool heater wasn't turned on.  Pool water on March 14th is COLD!  Doc spent a while on the phone with the pool guy.  Turns out the gas wasn't hooked up yet.

Wyatt became the pool boy and got to work cleaning out the leaves.

The rest of us pretty much just sat around and watched.

I spent about an hour out by the pool the first day.  I was finishing up a book on my kindle and just had on shorts and a tank top since it really wasn't that hot.  As it turns out, the sun was doing a job on me and it looked like I was wearing that tank top for the rest of the trip.  That, or a bright red bib.  Lemme tell you, it was awesome.

Before we got the heat turned on, Anna mastered the art of getting onto the raft without getting wet.

Poor Wyatt got soaked every time.  Luckily, he didn't seem to mind.

The second full day of our vacation was my birthday!  My sneaky little family turned into busy little bees while I was in the shower that afternoon, because I walked outside to a surprise party on the porch!

 

I wish I'd had my camera to show you things from my point of view.  Doc told me to come outside and I saw the balloons but noone was there.  And then Lala appeared from behind the bike shed, Anna and Papa rounded the corner of the house, and Wyatt pulled up the driveway on his bike.  And they all had presents!  (Anna's and Wyatt's were even wrapped in paper they'd decorated.)

Lala took lots of great pictures at the party but yea, I'd just stepped out of the shower so must of those will remain unposted.  One of the presents I opened was a new pair of TOMS ballet flats.  Super cute!

I also got a Built bag for my laptop.  Really excited about finally having something to cart my computer around in!

Doc baked brownies for the party and Anna arranged my candles into a 2 and a 9 (last year in the twenties!).  Unfortunately, there were no matches so I had to pretend to blow them out.  That just means I got them all and my wish will come true!

Later that afternoon Doc took me out for a quick shopping trip and a birthday dinner.  Of course I didn't take a picture of us actually showered and cleaned up, but it was a great date night!  It was a really good birthday and I'm so glad I got to spend it at the beach with these guys!

As for the rest of the trip, we did as little as possible.  We spent a day or two at the beach and lots of time lounging around the pool.  I spotted three of these guys (or maybe they were all the same one?) hanging out by the pool with us.  To be so afraid of snakes and other creepy crawly things, I actually think these little lizards are pretty cute.

We bought two more bikes while we were in town so now there's a total of four at the house.  There were lots of bike rides while we were there.

  

As always, Doc was the head cook and whipped up some great seafood meals.  Like the pool, we also broke in the dining room table and ate dinner at it a couple nights.

While I was in the back taking that picture of Doc grilling, I also snapped a couple of the back walkway since I left it off our tour (Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four).  This is the view from the back door looking towards the pool.

We've got an outdoor shower with both hot and cold water.  Wyatt took a couple of ten minute "rinse offs" after swimming in the freezing cold pool; I think he liked it.  Next to the shower is a rack for you to hang your towel.

    

So that was our quick spring break vacation!  I'll leave you with this picture of Little Miss Sassy.

Birthday Dinner #1

Last Sunday night, my sweet friend Allison invited us over for a birthday dinner.  Her husband, Chris, and I share a birthday and our friend Charlie's is 2 days earlier.  It's a perfect excuse for us to all get together! Charlie and his wife Sarah live a couple hours away so we don't get to see them as often.  We were really excited to see them this time because they were bringing the newest addition to their family, Mr. Gus.

Doc LOVES babies when they're fresh out tha oven and still a little squishy.  And Gus was on his best behavior which made him even easier to love on.

Jenny took her turn with baby Gus.

I always love eating over at Allison's cause I know the grubs gonna be good!  For this dinner, she whipped up a Mexican meal and I think we did a decent job and knocking it all out.  The highlight for me, though, was definitely dessert (isn't it always?).

Here's Jenny and Darrin post present opening but pre-dessert.  See those mason jars in their hands?  We all got one with our name on it and inside was an ice cream cone.  (Also, see that orange box with 2 silver bowls in it?  I got one too, but we'll come back to that.)

Sarah and Charlie were also excited about birthday presents and dessert.

This one's blurry but Chris and Allison were there too.  Thank goodness since it was their house...

I've gotten really bad about forgetting to ask anyone to take a picture of me and Doc.  We were there too.  I was even wearing a cute new scarf.  Boo.

Anyway, while we wondered about the cone in our jar, Allison and Chris started scooping out homemade ice cream into bowls.

By the time our ice cream made it to the table, it had been topped by some kind of awesome homemade caramel sauce.  Allison had a fancy name for it but I can't remember it.

Then we were told we could open our jars and found out the cones were full of pecans that we could pour on top.

And then we were instructed to crumble our cones on top too.  Yum!

Not gonna lie, it was a pretty awesome dessert.  So much so that I wanted it again for breakfast the next morning.

So remember that orange box in the picture with Jenny?  That's a custom food bowl holder that Chris made.  Back when Allison posted about the one he made their cat, I not-so-subtley hinted that Lolli kinda wished she had one of her own.  And it worked! Allison mentioned it to Chris and he made her one!  I'm so glad because she's been eating out of heart-shaped bowls for over a year. (It made sense at first since we got her around Valentine's day.  There's really no excuse for why they became her permanent food bowls.)

Since she's only ever eaten out of her heart bowls, she was a little confused at first and had to investigate.

Hmmm...kinda gotta paw it to make sure it's ok.

And face plant!  I think she approves.

Just so we're clear, Lolli wasn't the only winner from that birthday dinner.  I also got to bring home a really cute L mug and a snazzy new bracelet.

Thanks for hosting us, Allison!  I'll be back soon with more birthday celebrations!

Pinterest Challenge: Winter Edition

It's that time again!  Sherry (from YHL) and Katie (from Bower Power) have announced yet another Pinterest Challenge...

The Pinterest Challenge was dreamed up by Katie B. in an effort to get us to stop pinning and start doing.  You may remember that for the Summer Edition, I set my crayons out to melt in the sun only to result in a Pinterest Challenge FAIL.  (Thankfully, I was able to redeem myself the next week.)  I completely missed the Fall Edition of their Pinterest Challenge but this time, I'm all in!

Tha basic idea is to take somthing you've pinned on Pinterest and bring it to life, all while putting your own spin on things, of course.  Easy enough, no?

The problem for me is that, while definitely a big fan of Pinterest, I'm much more of a "looker" and not much of a "pinner."  In fact, save for a few things from my first couple times to log on, you won't find anyting on any of my boards.   Mostly, I just get on Pinterest without even loggin in, do some looking around and then call it a day.  Because really, how many times do people actually go back to things that they've pinned?

All that said, for my Pinterest Challenge project, I couldn't really pick a project from something I pinned since there's nothing there to choose from.  So I just picked something I saw on the home page that I liked.  And it's actually something I've seen pinned several times.  But while there are different versions, the first one I saw was here, by JK JK.

The pin links directly to Jen's post on how she did it and in her first paragraph she mentions that her inspiration came from Anthropologie.  So we'll give Anthro credit for the original idea, and Jen credit for bringing it to my attention.

Enough chatter, let's get to the dang project already!

Actually, before we do, I just need to throw out there that I really, really wanted to participate in this challenge, but I only had one night to crank out my project.  And also, every minute that I spent working on this Monday night was a minute not spent packing for the beach or watching The Bachelor Finale - two other Very Important Tasks.  (And don't even get me started on Crazy Courtney...)  So this project is faaaaar from perfect.

I didn't want to put a whole bunch of nail holes in my wall, so I decided to make my letters on a piece of wood.  To beef up the 1x12, I framed it out with 1x2s so it'd sit off the wall a little bit.  The picture below shows the back side and how it's framed out.

Here's the end of it.  I did not miter the corners of my 1x2s, there was no time for little details like that.

I painted the wooden "box" using the same method I explained here.  A coat of red+black, and then three coats of red.

Then I took my electric hand sander to Big Red to rough 'er up a bit.

A coat of polyurethane (water-based cause it dries faster) later, and I was ready to add the letters.  I used my Silhouette machine to cut them out of regular typing paper and then just eye-balled the spacing.

I wanted to use a nail with a big head on it so my yarn wouldn't slip off, and the only ones we had on hand were roofing nails.  The pain that comes with roofing nails is that they're all stuck together (to load into a gun maybe?) and you have to pull each one off.  Thankfully, the hubs stepped in and separated the nails for me.

I used the paper letters as a guide for where my nails needed to go.  Basically, every corner got a nail, and the curve of the R got several.

I just lightly tapped the nails in at first and then, after removing the paper letters, I hammered them in further to make them good and secure.  It really didn't take long at all to get all the nails in, especially since I was not being a perfectionist about it.

Adding the yarn was the fun part!  I used a cream yarn I had left over from knitting hats and opted to do four rounds on each letter.  I tied a knot on the top left nail of each letter, wove the yarn around the nails four times, and tied off again on the same starting nail.

I made this to hang above the bed in our bedroom.  I've never felt that the bed needed anything over it since the headboard is so chunky, but it couldn't hurt to add something, right?  Plus, I'm running out of other walls to decorate.  Oh, and the chunky headboard was another reason I framed the 1x12 with the 1x2s, so it'd look more substantial hanging up there.

(Please ignore our tired, worn, desperately-needing-to-be-replaced bedding.  Hopefully a room makeover is in the semi-near future.)

By the way, I toyed with doing "DREAM" instead, but I already have that on another sign somewhere.  RELAX seemed like it'd be good, easy block letters to do.

I really like the side view since you can see all the layers of string.

So there you have it, my quick and easy yarn letters.  As far as this Pinterest Challenge project goes, I'd say I nailed it.  Har.

I'll be linking up over at Young House Love and Bower Power.  You should swing by and check out their projects (Sherry's awesome bean bag project can be found here and Katie's very cool watercolor painting is here) and all the other ones too!

March!

March is my favorite month (I'm pretty sure I've already explained why) and so far, March 2012 is shaping up to be pretty swell.  Now that we're all moved in to the Beach House, I've got all this extra time on my hands and since the weather's been semi-decent, we've been able to enjoy doing some fun stuff!  I haven't been great about taking pictures but I'll go ahead and get caught up on what I do have pictures of... Last weekend was our weekend with the kids.  We invited my parents to join us for dinner (flank steaks! and homemade ice cream!) and after they left for the night, I took this picture.

It's not a very good picture at all, but here's what's going on:  all four of us (five if you count Lolli who was sitting on my shoulder) were sitting on the couch using some kind of tech-y device.  The tv wasn't even on.  Wyatt was on his laptop, Anna had her iPod Touch, and Doc and I both had out our iPhones.  It's no secret that I'm terrified of technology taking over the world, so this was slightly alarming to me.  Hopefully this is not what family nights of the future will look like.

Speaking of sitting lined up in a row, the next day we ventured out for a family movie.  We haven't had time to do this in forever!  (In fact, I've already been to the movie theater twice in 2012, which is some kind of record for me.)  We brought Jett with us and the kids voted to see The Lorax.  In case you can't tell by their craned necks in the dark picture below, our stop at the concession stand before going into the theater meant we got front row seats.  Super!

The movie was really cute if anyone's thinking about going to see it.  I would recommend it, especially if you have kiddos in tow.

Yesterday we were invited to join some friends on a trip to the zoo.  You know what's crazy?  This was the first time Doc and I had been to the zoo since our wedding day back in 2009!  As much time as we spent there prior to the wedding getting things planned out, it's weird that we hadn't stepped foot there since the big day.

It was a great day to be there.  The weather was great - a little cool but perfect if you were in the sun.  The animals seemed to enjoy the sunshine as much as we did.  First we saw the panda who was going to town on some bamboo.

Little Alice crouched down close for a good look.

  

Did you know you could ride a camel at the zoo?  I had no idea.  This could've totally changed my entrance into our wedding ceremony...

Andrew's smiling in the picture below, but rumor has it that the back seat of that camel is no luxurious ride.  Apparently there's some sort of bar down the middle that hits in all the wrong places.

Alice loved the camel ride so much she went for a round two on the carousel.

I would like to buy this elephant some moisturizing lotion.

My favorite, the giraffe!  Next time, I'm definitely feeding one.

We ended our zoo trip with a stop by the fountains.  So fascinating when you're so little!

That pretty much gets you caught up on what we've been up to the last week.  Tonight we had the first of several birthday dinners but I haven't downloaded my pictures yet.  Maybe tomorrow!