Valentine's Day Prep!

Well, it's February 1st so that means Valentine's Day is just around the corner! This year I wanted to make it extra special for hubby and I because it will be our first with baby Ethan. Also I feel like sometimes I don't adequately show him how much I appreciate him and all that he does for our family. Currently he's unemployed and is a stay-at-home dad. I say this with tongue in cheek, but he does a better job at it than I ever could. He's the best dad, and does every stitch of housework. So needless to say, I need to show him some appreciation!
I stumbled across this blog Love Actually and have stolen several of the ingenious ideas! This blog is a must-see if you're in any kind of relationship!

Although mine is not as pretty as the one on her blog, here is my Valentine's Day advent countdown wall calendar! Be forewarned my crafting skills are all I can afford "budget friendly" seeing as how I'm on one income!

So today's task was this:

(Yes, that's a rock...that I thought kind of resembled a heart)

(Sufficiently cheezy,no?)

And this is what I made!

Another thing I made hubby is also from the Love Actually blog. He won't get this until the big day, but I thought I would share!

I'll give it to him at our dinner at home tablescape with a tag attached that reads "I'm so Fortunate to Have You!" In each "fortune cookie" is a little typed reason why I love my hubby.

So I'm hoping that with everything I have in store for Valentine's Day this year will make my hubby feel adequately loved and sooo very much appreciated.

And just because I can, here's a pic of my baby bear taken today. :-)

And done!

So the baby shower came and went, and it was a success! Planning and executing the shower was so much fun and makes me wish that I did this for a living. One can dream, right?
As promised, here are some pics!
Please forgive my lack photography skills! This picture is the drink station with sparkling punch and water in a baby bathtub mama keeps afterward!

This is the dessert table with chocolate fountain, fruit, and cake!

Close up of the adorable cake done by a co-worker!

Food buffet with baby shape cut-out sandwiches, and plenty of other food!

Presents!

Favor and sign-in table! Displayed are the couple's baby pics, wedding pics, Katubah from their wedding, and wish/advice cards from guests!

Favors! "About to Pop"!

MLK Day

Living on the outskirts of Atlanta means that Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a BIG DEAL where I live. One of these days I'm going to venture into the city to experience one of the many celebrations that occur, but today I spent it with my family enjoying the day off.
Tonight I realized that Ethan is becoming more and more human. I know that sounds weird, but when they're infants it takes awhile for their quirks to come through. Tonight at "Eat at Joe's", a local grill in Grayson,Ga, Ethan discovered that he absolutely.loves.pickles. I don't mean he tasted one with the tip of his tongue and smiled, I mean the boy devoured the soft bits until there was nothing left but the rhine! We only had a minor almost choking mishap, but thanks to a strong gag reflex he overcame. Unfit mothering aside, I love the fact that Ethan loves pickles like his mama has developed his own tastes. As much as I've enjoyed the past eight months, I can tell it's only going to get better.

Makeover!

Thanks to "I love my blog makeover" (see link to the bottom right) I've managed to make my page a little bit more "me." I've added some pictures and done some editing so hopefully this looks a little bit more presentable!
This past weekend has been quite a whirlwind.
I first want to address my heartfelt anguish for the people of and the people that love Haiti. My prayers go out to everybody affected by this disaster. Some of us live in a very comfortable bubble and will never know what the people of Haiti are going through. We can only reach out to those that are hurting and try and make a very horrible situation somewhat better.

Right now I'm planning my big sister's baby shower, and am having an absolute ball. I haven't really had a creative outlet in awhile so I'm enjoying being able to completely obsess over this event. This past weekend I managed to get all the shopping done for the big day, favors made, games organized and made, and the guest sign-in cards made. I'll post pictures as soon as I take some!
Being that I'm on a super tight budget I've really had to stretch my imagination to accomplish everything I  my sister wants done for the shower. I was on bedrest during my own baby shower, so this has definitely been make-up time!
The favors are my proudest product. I had seen  these cute popcorn favors but wanted to create something the guests could reuse. I purchased some plastic popcorn containers and filled each with tissue paper, a sealed bag of microwave popcorn, a box of Sugar Babies, and a tag that read "Ellen's About to Pop!" with a generic baby shower thank you poem. I promise to take a picture of said item and post it!
So the shower is this Saturday and the countdown in my brain has begun. I'm preparing everything from the food and drink to the decorations so I'll be a busy girl! I'm in absolute heaven though!

...And then it was 2010!

It seems like the holiday season literally flew by with the remainder of 2009. After I graduated high school I thought time was starting to go by very fast. I had no idea what I was talking about until I had Ethan. I literally can blink and feel like it was yesterday that we were bringing him home from the hospital! I mean look how much he's changed!

Ethan - One Week Old!

Ethan 8 Months Old!                                                                                        

We're on the home stretch sliding into the first birthday here in five months. I'm absolutely loving the stage Ethan is at right now. I try my hardest to freeze frame every memory and hold onto it because I know he'll change so much more in a few months. I've decided that the absolute hardest thing about being a mom is letting go of the baby stages that seemed like perfection and embracing the new stages that come along that are a little bit scary and unfamiliar. This is parenthood with your first child, and maybe with the second/third child you come a little bit more prepared!!

Understatements

Ok, so to say that I'm excited about the holiday season is an absolute understatement. Whoever knows me knows that I ADORE everything holidays. Christmas especially, but the whole holiday season (November 1-Jan 1) I absolutely bubble over with enthusiasm!
This Christmas is going to be extra awesome because it's my baby's first Christmas! I've already started my Christmas Countdown planning (found here) which I've done for the past four years. This plan is the organizational freak's DREAM! It breaks down Christmas planning over five weeks and you can pretty much tweak the plan to fit your own traditions and customs. I could not coordinate Christmas without this!
I also just got Ethan's first Thanksgiving and Christmas outfits! Cute! I'm sure when he's a teenager and I'm showing his new girlfriend pictures of his first Thanksgiving complete with turkey comb beanie cap he's going to loooove his mama! It's the price he pays for having a dork as a mom. :-)

Speaking of first holidays we had an awesome first Halloween with him! His shirt says "I Love My Mummy"! Too stinkin' cute. Adam carved the vampire pumpkin (inspired by my four week long reading session of all the Twilight books...I put it off as long as I could!) and the spider is by moi! We had a fun day and did trick-or-treating for twenty minutes before it got too cold for Ethan to be out and about. I can't believe that next year he'll be walking and able to say something along the the lines of "trick or treat!" Time is going by unbelievably fast!

Back to Me Now

Recently at work I was part of starting a new book club that I named "Dazzlin' Divas Book Club." There's about twelve of us that all share a love of reading and always pass along favorite books to read so we figured we may as well start a club.
The first book we read was the Time Traveler's Wife which if you've read you know how hard it is to get into. It took me about half the book to understand what was going on, but then it got reeeally good. Well, only two of us could get through it in time for our first meeting so needless to say that was kind of a bust.
       So I started thinking what kind of book will all of us most likely be able to read fairly quickly and be able to discuss with some kind of enthusiasm at our meeting? And of course me being the foodie I am, I thought cookbook! The perfect combination of cookbook and novel came in the form of "Confections of a Closet Master Baker" (do NOT say this three times fast) by Gesine Bullock-Prado. This book will make you want to hop the first plane to Montpelier, Vermont and march into her bakery and order everything at the counter.
The author has a wonderful blog here that has demos and a neat commercial for the book. Her memoirs are poignant, heart warming, and will literally make your mouth water. I'm going to *attempt* to recreate her Golden Eggs recipe (it's a glorious yellow cake recipe in which the finished product you dip in melted butter and cinnamon sugar...yum.oh.) for the book club meeting coming up. I literally want to start my own 3:00 pm "coffee and cake" time after reading this book, but I'm pretty sure my co-workers will look at me a little weird.
       Reading has always been one of my favorite things to do, and I'm just now getting back to the place where I carve out time to do just that. My nickname is affectionately the "book club nerd" because I read whatever book is handed to me within two days, but that's just how enveloped I get when reading somebody else's world. It's a wonderful escape from the harsh realities that I face every day working for law enforcement.
       There are many things that I would like to get back into bit by bit. Marriage and babies can be all-consuming if you let them, so occasionally I know I'm going to need "back to me now" moments. Whether it's to read, scrapbook, play piano, or dance a jig (though this will probably be done in my closet in the dark so I can't even see myself) I'm going to take the time to do it.