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.

The local WM has their Christmas section up!  Not completely up, but enough to walk through, anyway.

Normally I cringe a little bit when I see the Christmas stuff up before Halloween.  I like Christmas and all, but it seems a bit much to be singing Christmas carols at the same time that the haunted houses are going on.

But today?  I was SO EXCITED to see it.  I made DH walk through all of the Christmas aisles with me.  I tried a Santa hat on Peanut (and it was VERY cute).  I showed him a jingle bell wreath, and he liked it (and then tried to eat it, so I had to take it away).  I almost bought him a Christmas stocking, but I restrained myself.  Besides, I want to see what the other stores have before I buy that.  And I saw at least 6 rolls of wrapping paper that I know I will have to have.  Wrapping paper is one of my big weaknesses.

This year will be so different than other years.  We'll get to go visit Santa Claus at the mall, watch Peanut's reaction to the Trail of Lights and spinning under the Zilker tree, show him the Christmas village, sing Christmas songs to him, help him open presents (and he'll probably want to eat the wrapping), and see him admire our tree (hopefully without knocking it over - we're not sure how we're going to babyproof it yet).  I know he'll still be too young to really understand what's going on, but I think it's going to be awesome anyway.

Our Christmas cards will have Peanut's picture on them and be signed from all three of us.  We'll have a Baby's First Christmas ornament on our tree.  I'll get to put a stocking together for Peanut, and DH and I will have new stockings that say "Mom" and "Dad."

I can't wait!

DH's grandfather passed away last night.  He was 92 years old.

PaPa was a delightful man.  He had two daughters, seven grandchildren, and several (I'm not sure how many, but 5 just on my MIL's side) great-grandchildren.  He was a Methodist minister, and we were honored to have him co-officiate at our wedding.

We loved it when he and his wife would come down for holidays.  It was wonderful to see how content he was to be surrounded by family.  We last saw him at Easter, and I'm so glad that he had a chance to meet Peanut in person.



Goodbye, PaPa.  You will be greatly missed!

It's a skateboard!

Baby brother only had one request of his birthday cake:  make it chocolate!

So I did.  Chocolate cake with mostly chocolate icing (I used one of those pre-made frosting tubes for the red because there was no way I was going to try to dye my own after the rainbow cake).  I wish I could say that I came up with the skateboard cake idea on my own, but I didn't.  I saw a couple of them online, and decided to give it a try.  I did do my own design, though.

I think he liked it pretty well.  You never can tell with a 13-year-old boy.

Cloth diapering is still going pretty well. We've found that we really prefer pockets over the other types, especially now that diapering the baby has become an Olympic event!  We've been using pockets and fitteds pretty much exclusively.  While I like prefolds, I think they're probably best for non-mobile babies who don't mind when it takes you 15 minutes to get the diaper on just right.

One of our fitted diapers has already needed a small repair, though. I wasn't too pleased when I pulled it out of the wash and found the velcro tab looking like this:



Bah. Not a big deal, but still sort of irritating, since we've had this particular diaper for less than 3 months! I fired up the sewing machine today, and it only took about 2 minutes to fix it.

It's officially fall!  Too bad it's still supposed to be in the 90s all week.

I'm so ready for cooler weather to get here.  I guess it is already a little cooler, since we're not in the upper 90s/low 100s, but it's definitely not even close to being sweater weather yet.  Hopefully soon, though!

Peanut has one of those plastic ring stacker toys.  You know, the kind with the white base, little yellow pole, and the rainbow-colored rings?

Of course, the rings don't stay on the pole for very long.  In fact, usually Peanut prefers to play with the base alone, not particularly caring where the rings are.  So we usually have rings scattered about.

Last night, I figured I'd re-stack the rings, and noticed that the orange ring was missing.  Couldn't find it anywhere.  Well, I figured it would turn up eventually, so I let it be.  And sometime in the middle of the night, I woke up to hear the jingling of plastic keys.  Turns out the cats think that once everyone is in bed, they have free reign of the baby's toys.  That gave me an idea.

Where do cats like to shove their toys?

That's right, under the couch.

I peeked under the loveseat, and there I found the orange ring.  And a few other toys of Peanut's.  And a million small mouse toys, just for good measure.

We went over to Kandace's last night for dinner and a swim.

We figured that the weather was still warm enough for swimming.  When we got to the pool, we were the only ones there, and when we got into the water, we figured out why.  It was COLD!

We put Peanut's feet into the water, and he was cold, too.  But he didn't like it when we tried to take him out, so we stayed for a little while.  The baby had a great time, splashing around and taking a short ride in his turtle floatie.  The adults froze their buns off!  We didn't stay too long, and Peanut had fun, so it was worth getting a little chilled.  I can't believe the pool was so cold already - it's still summery weather here!  I guess the cooler nights have been enough to cool the water down.

After our swim, we had a very tasty dinner and visited for awhile.  Peanut showed off his new crawling skills and generally did really well, even though he was tired.  He even had his first taste of watermelon!

The ride home was amazingly quiet!  Peanut didn't sleep, but he didn't have a meltdown, either.  We got home just before 9, and Peanut had his bath and bottle and went straight to sleep.

What a fun day!

Kandace and I had our second cake decorating class today. This was the one where we actually got to break the frosting out and attempt to make some stars, lines, and writing.  Our teacher was actually impressed with our writing skills, or at least she pretended to be.  It was so much fun!

Kandace did the pirate ship cake, which is adorable. I did the round rainbow cake, and I'm actually pretty happy with the way it turned out.  And I'll share with you (in FAR too much detail) just how it all went.

( Lots of photos behind the break... )

Kandace and I had our first cake decorating class today!

We've been talking about doing this FOREVER, and we finally signed up for it.

We didn't do any actual decorating in today's class.  It was more of an orientation and basic cake baking overview.  Turns out that we're the only two in this class, which is awesome since it means we'll get plenty of individual attention.  And we can let our hair down and be ourselves, though I'm not sure that the instructor will appreciate that.  Heh.  The instructor is really nice and seems to really know her stuff. 

We went and bought our supplies after class was over (and had a strange encounter with some lady who wouldn't leave us alone and was very...eccentric).  I really don't need another hobby that lends itself to collecting things, but looks like I found one, anyway.

Next week is when the real fun begins.  Kandace is bringing a shaped cake (a pirate ship, of course!) and I'm bringing a round cake.  The major things we're going to learn are writing and icing a cake with the star tip.  I can't wait!

Outside:


Inside (it's reversible!):


This hat turned out SO much better than the cherry hat that I made a few months ago. Same pattern, larger size. I guess that all the sewing I've been doing has helped me get a little better at it!

It's a little big on Peanut, but not too bad. Since the whole point of the hat is to shield him from the sun, having it a little on the large size isn't such a bad thing, anyway.

DH likes it, too. :-)  I made him model it for me last night when I finished it since Peanut was already in bed.