halloween backtrack

well... thanksgiving is in two days, so i guess now would be a good time to post some pictures from halloween.  they are incredibly overdue, but technically it is still fall, so this counts.  we did all the halloween things you would expect - carved pumpkins and hosted our annual halloweenie ice SCREAM bash, although we did not make it to a pumpkin patch this year and i am still pretty torn up about that.

all in all - it was a great halloween, another warm one and alex was a huge help in the construction of her costume.  she usually decides what she wants to be somewhere around august/september, but true to form we didn't really get to work on her costume until the night before the all school halloween party and costume contest.  luckily i have become a skilled glue gunner and pulling something together in a relatively short time frame is getting easier every year.

this year she was a frost dragon.  oh... you mean you've never heard of a dragon that breathes ice instead of fire????  well now you have.  

  

she's had some pretty unique ideas in years past, but i gotta say, this year was probably my favorite.  how was your halloween?  i'm not sure if i'll take any thanksgiving photos, but if i do, i'll be sure to post them by christmas!

more babies & more things

the weekend before last, i hosted two special baby showers for two very special gals.  and while baby showers tend to be about the babies, i wanted each to be as distinctly different as the moms-to-be, because really, that is who we were celebrating.  if you missed natalie's shower, you can see it here. but today, we're all about kate and the whimsical little forest friends who helped create her woodland themed shower. 

kate is awesome.  we met through a mutual friend and it took me two minutes and two sips of a martini to know that this was gonna be good.  she is ever so whimsical and suuuuper nice. and i have to be honest, finding really genuine people is sort of a rarity these days.  you could try to find something about her that you didn't like, but it would be pointless.  i don't think that something exists.  actually i know it doesn't.

so naturally, when kate and tim told us they were expecting, i jumped at the chance to shower her with love and whimsy.  and when i asked her if she had a preferred theme and she sent me paint chips, my little heart jumped for joy.  this is a girl who knows what she wants and knows i love a good mood board/color pallet for inspiration.  

what kind of person hosts two baby showers in one weekend is the question you might be asking yourself, but i assure you, there is method to the madness.  all of our friends are pregnant right now.  pretty much all of them. plus, weekends in the fall, fill up fast.  so what's a girl to do when you have two lovely people to celebrate and limited time - you select one weekend and just go for it!  

i wondered somewhere in the process if it was insane, but once they were both underway, i also realized it was a pretty great way to see a whole lot of friends in a very limited amount of time.  in addition, i can't be expected to clean my house twice in a single month, so really this was about efficiency.  

if you know of anyone who is having a girl right now, just tell them to give me a call in 25 years. with just about everyone we know having boys, there is bound to be a surplus of suitable suitors roaming around.  at any rate, i am super excited for my friends and the new adventures they are about to take on!  

congrats to kate & tim - we can't wait to meet little simon soon! 

this is eight

alex turned eight years old this past sunday and my emotions are mixed on the subject.  eight feels so grown up, and at the same time, so small.  it feels dangerously close to the end of many things, yet right on the brink of what is to come.

either way, it feels like eight is a threshold of not being little any longer.

eight years go by awfully fast.  one minute you're hoping they'll sleep through the night, and the next you can barely drag them out of bed before the sun rises.  eight is silly.  still a little clumsy.
full of laughter and at last, (some) reasoning has set in.

for alex's 8th birthday, we had the kind of day you just want to bottle up and re-open as the years go by - knowing full well they will get undoubtably more complicated with time.  we spent the day doing things she loves, and things i hope she'll always long to do with us.

eight, whatever you have in store for us, we're ready.   and alex, my wish for you is that you always enjoy what it feels like to be this carefree.

happy birthday to my big baby girl.

halloween recap

so halloween was two weeks a go and i guess we've been on a candy hangover because we haven't had a chance to detail what a great time we had --- until now.  there has been a lot going on, but we wanted to share some pics from our party and all the trick o' treating madness that ensued.

this year, we had  pumpkin puke, mummy dogs, more kids than you could shake a pixie stick at and even a mile walk to a haunted house literally inside the home of the january family.  i used to work with john back in my advertising days, but this was the first time we made it over to their Sweeney Family Horror.  check it out here: http://www.sweeneyfamilyhorror.blogspot.com/

alex went as a snowy owl (tutorial on the making of that costume coming soon) and evan and i went as google fiber - which if you don't know about you should totally google it to find out.  he was google, i was fiber.  together we were awesome.

overall it was another great party and we just want to extend a huge halloween thanks to all of our friends who come back each year to celebrate with us.  we love this tradition and plan to continue it for many years to come.

hope your halloween was killer too!