Fly Like a Baby Hawk

We got to meet our new nephew yesterday when we drove up to Great Wolf Lodge to spend time with my sister's family for my niece Alice's 4th birthday.

Alice was born a couple weeks before Josh and I got married. Here we are singing Beatles songs to her when she was a newborn:

Here she is on her birthday:

I guess there is a book about a little girl that eats so many pink cupcakes she turns pink, so Alice was rubbing the pink cupcakes on herself. It was pretty funny.

I made these:

I was trying to experiment with sanding sugar. The original idea (to have tiaras made from silver sanding sugar) didn't work, and I didn't have tons of time, but of course Alice didn't care. She just wanted pink and purple cupcakes, so everything else was a bonus.

Now for pictures of Hawk:

He is such a good baby. He fussed a little when he was hungry/tired and he drooled A LOT, but he has the cutest smile and is super aware of what is going on around him. 

He is a lot skinnier than I thought he would be and has long arms and legs. I think he's going to be tall. He's just the cutest baby in the whole wide world and has these huge eyes that would make you melt. We love him so much already!

A Very Super (Bowl) Weekend

Last weekend, we celebrated the Super Bowl by spending the weekend in Eugene at my parents' house. We did all sorts of fun stuff, like:

 Go to the "Tie-Dye and Tofu" exhibit at the Pioneer Museum and listen to my parents talk about their commune days and what it was like to live in Eugene during the '70s. 

My sister and her friend Emily (which, believe me, I am always confused hanging out with other Emilys) also came along, but unfortunately Josh had to work. (Helen's the one on the left wearing the awesome shirt of a polar bear fishing with a narwhal and the owl skirt).

 Go to TWO basketball games where I finagled second-row tickets (because they were already my family's but I laid claim to them).

We made my parents sit in the stands with the rest of the lowly fans, but they were nice enough to wave to us.

We were on screen during the televised broadcast of the game for all of two seconds. Josh got a bunch of text messages as we were leaving Matt Court from friends saying they had seen us.

In addition to cooking all morning, we also watched the game. My mom even bought cheeseheads for us! We were so excited the entire time-- it was such a good game!

 My niece Alice wore her Packers cheerleader outfit. She made sure Josh displayed double the cheesehead pride.

 This is my sister with her daughter. My bro-in-law was in Utah with my nephews, so they didn't get to watch it with us.

Me, eating all the food Josh made.

That pretty much summarizes our fun, awesome weekend. Totally do.

Super Bowl Sunday Snacks

For the past year or so, Josh has been gifting cake and cupcake decorating books to me because, even though I'm not artistic, I strongly suspect that I would have been a great cake decorator had I not chosen to be a psychologist. But I never get a chance to decorate anything! So for the Super Bowl, my mom and I decided we would make special football player cupcakes in honor of the Packers. 

We started with yellow cake batter, frosted green and then dipped in green decorator sugar:

For the football player heads, we used vanilla wafer cookies, back-to-back and stuck together with frosting. Then I dipped them in green frosting and sprinkled them with green decorator sugar. My mom had the genius idea of propping them up in a wire cooling rack so that they could harden without smearing:

Then we used white chocolate-covered pretzels for the facemasks. It kind of ended up looking like all the players had beards, but I thought it was a cute idea.

Then I piped on some yellow stripes and numbers. I made Josh find out the numbers of the starters so we could have an accurate player representation. (Please ignore my scruffiness, I hadn't yet gotten ready for church).

 The finished product:

Eating while wearing my cheese head during the game: (I don't have a Packers sweatshirt so I wore my UWisconsin sweatshirt instead).

Josh also contributed by making tons of food (enchiladas, green chili, Spanish rice, and beans). He also cooks while wearing his jammies:

Halloween House Party

We had a Halloween party at our house back in October. As per usual, Heather Noakes planned the whole thing and we just made sure our house was presentable (free of cat hair) and unlocked. Heather did all of the decorations, though Mark can be credited with putting most of them up (and apparently making the pomegranate juice).

Because neither Josh nor I thought to get the camera out, all of these shots can be credited to Mark Noakes (except the one in which he appears, I suppose). So this was our party:

Heather had these really cute tea light holders in the shapes of jack-o-lanterns, but it rained so much they flooded! Fun fact: when I cleaned up these gravestones, they were covered in slugs. Apparently slugs love wet Styrofoam.

Our spooky front door. I've been cultivating the spiderwebs for the purposes of this party, I swear!

Thankfully our bookcases were messy enough to already look like they belong in a haunted house 

No Halloween party is complete without a picture of the real Haunted Mansion

All of the food was Halloween-themed, like:

Eyeballs!

Worms!

And food from the devil himself!

 

Heather set up a specimen lab in the dining room

Heather has such an eye for detail, she even thought to put mice running along the baseboards!

My phrenology bust made a surprise appearance

Unfortunately, I don't have pictures of all the costumes, but here are some of them:

 Sean and Kim Janeway as Jack and Jill

 Dave and Michelle Christianson as Darth Vader and Queen Amidala

 Me and Josh as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. Remember these costumes? There were a couple people who couldn't figure out who we were supposed to be (though I thought the guess of Josh as Sayid from LOST was a good one).

Matt and Tonya Gold as '70s Disco Dominators

Christine and Kevin Morton as a witch and Spiderman (he had a mask too!)

And Mark and Heather Noakes as a wizard and a witch

This is my favorite picture of the night because 1. Josh looks so happy, and 2. Even though we were having a Halloween party, we couldn't bear to take down our Ducks' season poster:

Mostly we spent our time eating and talking, though we did try to do some spooky things like watch The Twilight Zone. I don't know what Josh and I are going to do when Heather and Mark move this summer, but I can guarantee we're going to be a lot less popular! 

My Bestie is Having a Baby!

I had the pleasure of attending a Blessingway yesterday for my best friend Amanda. A Blessingway is originally a  Navajo traditional ceremony to celebrate a woman as she transitions to the role of Mother. I was a little skeptical about this (but as the daughter of former commune-living hippies, I really shouldn't have been), but I had a great time. Rather than have a party for a baby whom none of us have met yet, the focus is on the mother-to-be, and giving her our well-wishes and blessings before the birth. It was so nice to have a forum to celebrate Amanda, who is such a beautiful pregnant lady!

This is us:

I have known Amanda since Kindergarten, have been friends with her since 3rd grade, and have been BEST friends with her since freshman year of high school. She has been with me during some of the best moments in life, and some of the worst, and I can't wait to meet her baby girl Eibhlin (pronounced "Ave-uh-lynn"-- it's Irish) in a month or so.

Some of the activities of the Blessingway included:

Smudging

Lighting a candle

(we all got tea lights to light when Amanda goes into labor)

A relaxing foot massage by Amanda's older sister

(her younger sister is in the background)

A presentation of beads/charms so that when she's in the delivery room she can look at them and think of the love we're giving to her, and (hopefully) that will give her strength for the labor

Holding a naked baby
(Amanda's sister has already potty trained her 5 mo daughter[!] who hung out naked most of the time)

Belly casting

And opening presents!

We also brought and read poems that made us think of Amanda or childbirth. My poem was this one by Marianne Moore:

I May, I Might, I Must

If you will tell me why the fen

appears impassable, I then

will tell you why I think that I

can get across it if I try.

I picked it because it succinctly sums up my views on life and my idea of what childbirth/parenting must be like. Plus it's short and easy to remember. :)

I'm not going to lie, I cried a lot. I went on forever about all these memories I have of her, and the more I shared, the more I remembered more things to share. I may have been slightly obnoxious since no one else knew what we were talking about, but it was a lot of fun to reminisce and to hear other people's stories about her too.

Here are a couple anecdotes:

* When we were in the 4th grade, we were on the same softball team. One time, during practice when Amanda was playing first base and I was batting, I got out at first. Amanda either laughed at me or I thought she was making fun of me, or whatever. So I threw my helmet at her. Our coach made us run to the edge of the field and back. Together. It was awkward.

* Junior year of high school, we had a series of classes together. We sat in the back of the classrooms and pretty much just talked nonstop. Our teachers must have hated us, but didn't split us up or anything. We had maybe a ten minute break between classes, and we would often go to Dairy Mart during the break and get these huge sodas that we would drink during our second class. Whenever I drink those huge fountain drinks (which isn't a lot, thankfully), I think of her.

* Senior year (I think), we went to some play at the performance theater in Eugene (the Hult Center), and because we didn't arrive super early, we had to park on the top of the parking structure. As you can imagine, after the show everyone tried to leave the parking garage, so there was a huge backup of cars and we were at the end. So we spent the waiting time sitting in my car singing songs from Alanis Morisette's "Jagged Little Pill" at the TOP of our lungs. 

I cannot express how much I love Amanda and how excited I am for her to have her first baby. Hooray! 

(it will also give me an excuse to knit some baby leg warmers)

Ladies' Night In

Josh went up to Hoodoo this weekend to camp and ski with the scouts, so my friend Heather planned a fun get-together at my house last night for some of the other women in our ward. This is the second major party Heather has organized to be held at our house, but I wish we did it more often! My least favorite part about parties is the organizing, and my favorite part is the having people come over, so in my opinion it was perfect.

Heather had the yummy idea to put together different types of fondue. Unfortunately, my day really got the better of me, so Heather wasn't able to come over ahead of time like she had planned to get everything ready. But I think it worked out well because then everyone was able to pitch in and help out cutting, mixing, and stirring.

Here is (mostly) everyone, before we dug in:

 

It was so good! And it was nice to put our fondue pot to work for the third time since we got it for our wedding. We also watched "The Time Traveler's Wife," which was better than I thought it would be. I was glad I read the book long enough ago so that I couldn't remember all of the details, so I wasn't too disappointed with the things that were left out.

It was definitely a great way to spend some of my Joshless time! Thanks, Heather, for all of your preparation and for the great idea of a Ladies' Night!

LOST with the ShepAlders

In honor of the final season premiere of the coolest show on tv, Josh and I threw a LOST party last Tuesday and had a few friends from the ward come over. We have been looking forward to this forever, and were super excited.

Josh got into the spirit by putting together this Dharma Initiative-inspired spread:

Isn't he amazing and detail-oriented? I thought these were so cool looking!

Here's a closer look:

When first reading this label I thought it said "barely-flavored" rather than "BARLEY-flavored," and I had a good laugh. And don't worry-- no talks with BishBrenn needed since our beer is strictly of the root variety.

I thought the first episode definitely delivered (flashing sideways?! My mind has been blown again!) I'm sad for the end of LOST, but excited to have all my questions answered.