A few of my favorite things

Yesterday was a good day. Max went to nursery for all of church! Technically, he's not actually 18 months, but the fact that he makes a bee-line for the nursery room in any church building is a sign to us that he's more than ready. Of course since I dropped him off, there were no tears (he only has attachment issues with Joey). I got nervous when the nursery leader poked her head into Sunday School looking knowingly at me, but it was only a really stinky diaper. That might not sound like a big deal, but Max is a bit of a shy pooper (yeah, yeah TMI) so he must have felt pretty darn comfortable in there! Sending Max to nursery for the majority of church is one of my new favorite things!

Another favorite of mine is our growing cupcake business. I made these cute spring chicks for some friends who had birthdays.

These are some monster cupcakes I made today for a preschooler's birthday. I think Jim Henson would be proud. They were super easy too.Lastly, my favorite thing to hope for is our backyard. Joey worked all weekend getting ready to pour our cement patio. I cannot wait for grass and a garden! Max loves going out to play in the dirt, but I would rather be playing on some grass. Hopefully we'll have the majority of the yard done by the end of the summer.

For Sale!

Do you find yourself unable to reach the dark recesses of your cabinets? Are you too frightened to uncover the dust bunnies waiting for you in the nooks and crannies of your cupboards? Are you frustrated when you are missing the lid to your favorite Tupperware container? Have we got the tool for you. He's lightweight, flexible and comes in many shades and smells. We can't guarantee the tool will do what you want, in fact it IS guaranteed he'll do the exact opposite of what you want. But rest assured that if you want to know what lurks in hidden places, this guy will find it. He's also great at climbing to those hard to reach shelves on your bookcases and crawling under your bed. Order now, he's going fast!
*Caution: he will most likely eat whatever he finds and emits foul odors at least twice a day.

Look What I Can Do!

I guess Max thought it was too bright in the living room, so he took it upon himself to fix the blinds. I'm still not sure what to do about him climbing on the couch. I wasn't able to grab the camera in time to capture his backward summersault-faceplant when he slipped off the top of the couch. I wonder what the neighbors think of the boy standing on the couch, yelling and banging on the window.

After!

So here is our new furniture. I'm still not done with the whole room. I don't care much for the pillows that came with our couches, they seems too southwestern for me. I'm keeping my eyes open for fabric to cover them and match to curtains. I always get nervous when I pick things out at a store and am not positive how they will look in my house. Joey and I were both relieved that they work so well. Our table doesn't have the leaf in it right now because it would take up the whole dining room. I'm also not sure about the lazy susan that came with it, but it sure is fun spinning food toward Joey! The only downer was that the delivery men (they blamed it on someone else) dropped the table top and crunched a corner. We'll get our new, new table in a week or so. Now onto finishing the backyard and tiling the floors!

Before...

When Joey and I got engaged, we looked at furniture for our first apartment and realized we were dirt poor. Luckily, we came into lots of donated furniture. In fact, in our first apartment we didn't have a single new piece of furniture. Joey found our huge, green, feather-shedding monstrosity at work... which was a disaster cleanup company. They mostly dealt with sewage leaks and mold, but lucky for us this was just a fire damage job. Some rich person with horrible taste out there had this couch custom made complete with pea green flower print and fabulous dust ruffle. We never smelled any smoke on it and the people who owned it got a nice chunk of insurance money. Since then, it has served us well... aside from the feathers scratching us and going up our noses and the cushions sliding off daily. I can still picture Joey standing on his dad's truck lifting it up to our window (it wouldn't fit through the door) to Matt and me. Then having to drop it back out the window when we moved to Dayton.

I'm not just posting this to show my love for my couch, but to rejoice in the fact that by tomorrow it will be gone and so will our dining table! In their places, we will have STORE BOUGHT furniture that matches! Hooray! So here is the before picture of our living room. Stay tuned for the after picture.

What the cup, Cake?!

As some of you know Sarah and I are starting a cupcake business. Halloween was pretty much our first attempt... and there was a lot of error going on with our trial. I had my doubts if we could make it in the cut-throat world of confections, but Valentines Day was booming for business! Here are a few samples of our work. Sarah said in all we made 152 cupcakes...but I was spent long before that. We have a website for our company http://www.whatthecupcake.com/. You can also email orders and questions to whatthecupcake@yahoo.com.

Tracking Bigfoot

By 8 o'clock I usually crash on the couch watching some stupid reality show after eating some rocky road ice cream. I keep asking myself, "Why am I so tired??" I know I'm pregnant and it's supposedly like running a marathon...blah, blah, blah. I know what the real reason is- M.A.X.



I try to explain to people just how mischevious he is, but I can never express it fully. Either that, or I'm just a big whiner and people don't want to listen to me anymore. Either way, I try desperately to document his behavior on film, but it's all in vain. It's like trying to capture Bigfoot on film, no one believes it's real. Of course Max just loves the camera, so whenever he hears the whir of the lens popping out, he drops whatever he's breaking and runs over to breathe heavily into the lens. For instance, here's a video of him. What I was trying to get was him pulling the suitcase out of the closet over to the bed to create a step stool. He wanted to grab whatever random item I had placed on the middle of the bed out of his reach. Now, I realize this is pretty ingenious of him to figure out his own solution, but his inventions always come with some bodily injury risk.



Exhibit B: I had to get ready this morning to go deliver cupcakes, so I set up the gate in the doorway of the bathroom and headed for the shower. In the 10 minutes I was in there (I sped up as I heard various crashes and squeels) he had knocked over a lamp, unfolded all the towels I had just folded, taken the heater vent out of the hole (I don't know what he threw down there), pulled out the drawers of Joey's closet organizer, and somehow changed the time on my alarm. Not to mention earlier this morning he pulled the table runner off the table knocking over the roses Joey gave me, getting water all over the place. I find myself saying to him, "This is why we don't have nice things!"