Baby Shower

I had a great time showering my sis-in-law yesterday in preparation of our new nephew's arrival.

The theme and cake were really cute -- giraffes -- and they had to get creative with the cake since the name isn't finalized, "lil Tuck", may have to keep using that nickname.

I helped with the shower by putting together the games.  I like to 'keep it simple' and do fairly easy games, and this way the games are always optional, if everyone is visiting/eating you can just skip one or more of the games and it won't be missed.  Here are the games we played, the first two were ones I'd played before, the third was a new to me one that we found online and thought would be easy and fun (and it was):

1) baby word scramble - give everyone the forms and they all start at the same time, set a time limit and first person to finish or person to get the most at the time limit wins.

2) who take after?  -  list of traits and you select whether mommy-to-be wants baby to take after mommy or daddy (prep work:  have mommy-to-be fill out ahead of time).  I just put this together in Excel.

3) baby price is right -- saw several variations, for ours a bunch of baby items were bought and put in a basket everyone could see.   Everyone makes a guess of how much the total bill is for the items, after everyone guesses then you look at guesses and choose winner based on closest without going over (and guest of honor gets the basket full of baby items).  This is a nice one to play as people come in, everyone can play at different time, just write their guess and put into basket.   Our 6-year old niece ALMOST won this one!    

Splitting the duties is the best way to do a shower, I just did games, others did decorations and food.  I know that mommy-to-be enjoyed it, and it was first time i saw her since she has had her bump, she truly is glowing!   Cannot believe the little guy will be here within a month!

They are totally set with baby stuff now --- stroller system, boppy, tons of cute clothes.

First week DONE!

We made it through the first week of classes!   Kevin had to take his first sick day from teaching, he was so sad he had to cancel his classes, but sometimes your body just says NO and he had to take a day of rest.

He had is annual Saint Arnold's outing with a colleague (now also a full-time faculty member at another campus)! and we ended the week eating outside at uberrito and watching kids (including my coworker's cute daughter) on the play equipment -- did i mention they have $1.99 margaritas til 6 pm?  yes, that was the winning info for that place :)

Reading today about some new words in the dictionary, I found my favorite: wine o'clock.

Check out the rest here.

National Dog Day

Social media told me its National Dog Day.....the way Smokey lives, I think every day is 'dog day' but I'll play along.   He can be a stinker, but he makes our days better...every day when I get home from work he is waiting for me, standing at the top of the stairs (note to self...photograph this sometime soon) and he is quite the snuggle bug when we watch tv....

I also realized that one year ago this week is when we moved out of and sold our previous home.  That was still the most stressful thing I've ever been through -- just now I found the emails we had to respond to ON closing day...our buyers (and their agent) were difficult to say the least.

First week of school is in full swing, and Kevin has seen his office!   yay!

easy leveling

My new home hack --- using yarn to make sure that staggered art work ended up even with each other.....way easier than learning to use a laser sight, and one less thing to keep around the house.

Taking this photo also helped me to have a 'during' and an 'after' photo.    For the before, just imagine a very empty wall....

I did not take photos of all the calculations I did to make sure that I had them mostly evenly spaced along the wall.....woohoo math!  Anyone who says they don't need fractions isn't thinking of how often they are used in everyday life.