Moving over to a new user name here on LJ:  Adventures of Ang

Yeah, I know, super creative on the new name.  It's the best I could come up with.  Which is one reason why I've stuck with this name for so long, even though my band geek days are far, far in the past.

Feel free to follow me over there!

This whole Thanksgiving/Christmas/Peanut's First Birthday planning has got me spinning around in circles.

And spending money left and right, because it all needs to be PERFECT since they're his final first holidays.  And they're the BIG holidays.  My favorite ones that we've been looking forward to all year, and that suddenly snuck up on us!

I've been kicking myself because I didn't buy the cute Thanksgiving outfit when I saw it.  I figured I'd wait until it was marked down before buying.  Great idea, except for the part where the only sizes they have left are newborn and 18 months.  Great.

Apparently the clothing makers also think that only small babies have first Christmases, because I've looked at several stores now, and the biggest "First Christmas" outfits are 9 months.  Peanut can still wear 9 month onesies with no problem (heck, he can still wear several of his 6 month onesies), but anything with pants is already starting to get tight.  I don't want to buy a 9 month outfit and then find out that he won't fit into it a month from now.

The birthday planning is going a little better now, which is good for my stress levels.  I've got so many things I want to do, though, that I'm not sure how I'm going to get it all done in time.  Or even how best to go about doing them.  You know the kind of projects - the ones that sound really good in your head, but then are not so easy to execute in real life?  It doesn't help that I've never been a big party person, so the idea of having to throw a big birthday bash is a little overwhelming.

So much to do, and so little time!

DH and Peanut just got into an accident with a deer.

They're both fine, but my car?  Not so much.

I just wanted to go to the store to pick up a couple of things.

The trip itself was uneventful.  Walked through the Christmas stuff (again), looked around at random things, had two older ladies stop me to tell me how cute the baby is (why, yes, he is!), and picked up what I came for and a few other things that just looked good.

While I was in line at the checkout, I noticed that there were a couple of birds flying around the rafters, which I found somewhat amusing.  The cashier wasn't too pleased that they seemed to be hanging out above her register!

Loaded up the car and headed home.  The drive was business as usual until I was getting ready to turn off of the main road.  I noticed that the car behind me had a VERY loud engine, but didn't really pay much more attention than that, and just hoped that he'd keep going straight when I made my turn.

No such luck.  In fact, the two cars behind me both turned off on the same road as I did.  This is not a heavily used road, since it is fairly new and leads directly into a nearby neighborhood.  It also has a low speed limit and is often patrolled by the police because no one ever actually drives the speed limit.

Guy tailgates me for a couple of minutes, and then suddenly slows way down.  Weird.

And then I saw that the guy behind him had pulled over into the oncoming traffic lane (which was, as is typical, empty).  They pulled up even with each other, stopped for a moment, and then both gunned it and started hauling down the road.

THEY WERE STREET RACING.  In broad daylight, in a residential area, behind a woman with a baby in her car (that would be ME).

Then they literally ran me off the road.  If I hadn't pulled off, I'm pretty sure that I would have gotten rear-ended, because they were not slowing down at all as they rapidly came up behind me.

I was so ticked off at the prospect of them putting Peanut in danger that I didn't even think to try to grab a license plate number before they were out of sight.  Bah.

That's my excitement for the day.

I just realized that I left my job exactly one year ago yesterday.

Wow.  Time does fly, doesn't it?

Peanut and I had a list of errands to run yesterday.

We headed out and made our first stop at the post office.  There was no line at all, so we got to mail our package in record time.  As we walked out, though, I was fumbling for my keys and ended up dropping them.

In the ONE spot that there's a two-inch wide drainage grate.

Yup, down the keys went!  The drain isn't too deep, so I could see where they landed, but they were too far to reach without using something to fish them out.

Of course, this was also in the middle of the driving lane of the parking lot, so I only had a second to look down in despair before realizing that I should probably get out of the middle of the road before trying to figure out what I was going to do.

As luck would have it, there was a gentleman right behind us who saw it happen, and probably saw my somewhat frantic reaction when I realized what had happened.  He asked what was wrong, and I told him that I'd dropped my keys down the grate.  He went over to take a look, and said that he had a hanger at home, which was only a couple minutes away, and would be glad to go grab it and come back to get my keys for me.

And he did just that!  He was only gone for about 10 minutes before returning with a magnet retriever (genius!), and it took him two seconds to pull the keys back out.  I thanked him profusely, and we headed our separate ways.

Isn't it amazing what just a small kindness will do?  He could have just walked on by and gone about his day, but he took 20 minutes out to help a complete stranger when he didn't have to.  Do you think he had any idea just how much that meant?  I went about the rest of my day feeling great, because what could have been a real problem actually turned out to be a blessing.  I believe that the Lord sent that gentleman at just the right time (because He knew I was going to be a klutz and drop my keys) and it really brightened my day.

Heck, I'm still smiling about it today.

Our trip to California went really well.

Peanut did great - only a couple of meltdowns the entire time!  Dad and Stepmom enjoyed getting to spend some time with him, and we got to spend some time with our little niece, who is 19 months old and a little ball of energy.  She is such a cutie!

And of course we spent some time with the Mouse as well.  :-)

Now I've got about 500 photos to sort through!  I'll be posting some to Flickr as I go through them.

I love to travel, but it is good to be back at home!  Peanut was so excited to see that we were home that he squealed and giggled and was just generally in a fantastic mood for a good hour before we fed him and put him to bed.

I made this one much larger than the first one that Peanut shunned.  It measures 18x20, and I used a satin-like fabric for the backing.  I figured that might be more interesting than having both sides made of flannel.

I also found some darker blue grosgrain ribbon to add to the mix.  Poor lonely grosgrain, mixed in with all the other pretty, shiny ribbons.

A new Mickey bib!  Too bad I did a terrible job with the velcro.

I thought I'd try sewing it on before putting the bib together, just to see if that would work.

It didn't.  Mostly because I forgot to allow for the seam allowance, so I sewed the velcro pieces way too close to the edges.  Once the bib was assembled and turned out, there was only a teeny bit of velcro that can be used to secure the bib.

But it's (barely) enough to do the job, so it's going to have to do.