a barnyard baby shower

Today we celebrated a little life-on-the-way. It was a super fun celebration for a mama-to-be and her baby who we are so excited to meet. I have to say, for the record, that I adore baby showers. I love having a room full of girls of all ages celebrating motherhood. There is something so powerful that happens at a baby shower. The preggers mama is affirmed and encouraged, older moms talk about when their kids were babies, younger moms bond over their shared sleep deprivation and all of the women swoon over tiny baby clothes, laugh about breast pumps and everyone eats lots of good food. I just plain love a baby shower.

Emily's shower was a barnyard theme based on their baby's nursery. I was put in charge of decorations and loved having the chance to get my creative juices flowing again. It had been a while.

I am posting a lot of pictures tonight so that Emily's family can see some shots from the event. They were snowed in today in Albert Lea (holy cats Minnesota! this winter is unbelievable!) and so they couldn't come to the shower. We missed them, but obviously the roads were and still are horrible. Hopefully these pictures will help set the scene:

Trudy gave a great devotional and then her girls sang a song about prayer. The whole shower centered on prayer and trust and faith. Have I mentioned yet how much I LOVE baby showers?!!

And here's the planning team with the mama-to-be. We're so excited to meet Baby Boy P!

baby photos gone wrong

Ivar and Stella's photo shoot.

couponing

My friend Melanie is a couponer. Have you ever met a real couponer? They've got skills. Melanie has been emailing me about diaper deals ever since Ivar was born, but to be honest, I was nervous to coupon. I think I was scared that I would get to the register and something would go wrong and I'd have to sheepishly take my cart full of bulk goods and put it back on the shelves.

So today when my friend Lindsey came over I took her along to Walgreens. Their diapers are buy one get one free, plus there is a $2 off coupon in the Infant Care brochure that is distributed right in the store (I found the Infant Care booklet on the cosmetic counter). I bought two things of diapers on Wednesday just to be sure that I liked Walgreens diapers. None of this would be worth it if they were cheap, leaky diapers. But after a 48 hour trial run, I was impressed.

So Lindsey and I filled a cart and came home with some serious loot:
Now check out the total price!!!Today I became a couponer. Honest to goodness, this is insane. I came home with two boxes of baby wipes (they are Buy One Get One free) and 10 bags of diapers.

In those 10 bags, there are 392 diapers. And for this price, these diapers are 4.5 cents a piece. Which I am actually confused about. I think I was supposed to pay more...did they take $20 off two times? Because I think I should have paid $37. Which would make the diapers 9 cents a piece, which is still incredible. Hmmm...did I not pay enough?

the three little girls

That's what we were called in our family of older cousins. We got together last night to celebrate Kathy's birthday. She's 28 today! When I was setting the table I was thinking, "well, she must be 24 or 25 this year. But if I'm going to be 30 and she's two years younger than me and Sarah then she must be 28. That can't be right." And I had this weird I'm-getting-older moment that made me think about how it doesn't feel that long ago that the three of us were posing like this:
And now those sweet little girls have babies in their arms and Kathy is a doctor. Crazy. Sometimes life just catches me off guard. Ida was so excited that it was finally time for the cupcakes. She had to look at them for three hours before she got to eat a pink one. She was also very helpful in assisting her Aunt Kathy in unwrapping her presents and blowing out her candles.

The night concluded, as every good party should, by making snow angels in the living room. That was a good idea Ida.

mr. fix it

Today was at rough day. Ivar woke up cranky and it turns out it was contagious. We both needed a nap this afternoon and one of us was fighting this fact as hard as he could. We were walking in circles. Ivar didn’t know what he wanted. I didn’t know what he wanted. So we cried together.

Then the doorbell rang and my Uncle Carl showed up to fix our garage door. Uncle Carl was kind not to mention my blotchy face, and of course upon seeing another human to charm, Ivar turned to smiles. We followed Uncle Carl out to the garage. I don’t know if Uncle Carl had anticipated an audience to watch him install the garage door opener, but he had one. Ivar was entertained and I was relieved. I had him in the baby bjorn and after 20 minutes of watching parts sorted on the floor we had both calmed down.

Uncle Carl came to fix our garage door and for no extra charge, he fixed our whole day.