If you’ve ever read my blog before, you might have noticed I sort of like planning and organizing small intimate casual parties for my kid or my friends.

So I decided to follow in the footsteps of my friend Audrey and throw a Baby Celebration Party for Baby Girl. Not a shower, because throwing yourself a party where you basically say “OH HAI, BRING ME PRESENTS” is unnecessary and kind of rude for a second baby (in my opinion), but I still wanted my daughter to know her pending arrival was just as exciting and celebration-worthy as her brother’s.

Of course, being 35 weeks pregnant AND the mother of a toddler is fairly exhausting. And the morning of the shower I woke up feeling like death warmed over. Really, seriously, painfully awful (in pregnancy related ways, not in contagious diseases sort of ways) and after rolling sugar cookie dough for only a few minutes I was almost in tears thinking about how much I still had to do before my guests showed up.

THANK GOD my in-laws and two of my very best friends Erin (from the wedding) and Erin (who wrote a guest post for me here and let me post pictures of her kid here) were staying with us for the party, because they – along with my amazing husband – did ALL the work for me. Even the night before the shower when I was still planning to do it myself they helped out stringing pennants and gluing craft paper. And of course Wedding Erin spent a ZILLION HOURS on an amazing – and incredibly delicious – custom themed cake. I, on the other hand, mostly sat in a chair and pointed at things.

(As a side note, I now know E is not only capable of following recipe instructions without my standing over his shoulder, but he can BAKE LIKE A MOFO. The thumb print cookies he made were ridiculously tasty – not a single one left over. He may live to regret letting that slip.)

It was especially nice of my in-laws and The Erins to help after I didn’t have blankets, pillows, food for breakfast or time to clean my rather disgusting bathroom before they got here. I’m not sure there was ever a time I was LESS prepared to have house(or any kind of)guests in my life. I used to be the hostess who not only had guest towels that coordinated with each room’s decor, but little baskets of toiletries, soaps, toothbrushes and tea waiting for them just in case they forgot or needed them. This time I barely got up off the couch to say “Hey thanks for coming!” I didn’t even manage to sort of clean up the new master bedroom before my party guests came over even though I KNEW I would end up giving a tour. So all my friends saw my literal dirty laundry.

As as far as having the new nursery done before the shower? AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

So in the end everything was awesomely awesome and I am really glad I decided to shower myself, even if it was a little overwhelming.

Of course, 50% of the reason I even HAD the party was so I could show pictures of my cute theme and decorations here on the blog. I promise to have those up soon. It will be TOTALLY WORTH coming back to check them out. That is, if you like that sort of thing. I apologize in advance for about a gazillion pictures if you don’t.

Monday:

Tuesday:

Wednesday:

Thursday:

Friday:

Saturday:

And now we are all exhausted and paint-covered and going to eat an obscene amount of pizza to celebrate getting 80% of the work DONE (with 15% to do after dinner and 5% left for E and I to finish before the carpet guy comes Thursday.)

Hope you had a great week! You still have time to enter all the giveaways, but Day 1 closes Monday, Day 2 closes Tuesday, etc. so check it out SOON!

Ok, so maybe not quite half way, but the old carpet is up, the new carpet is ordered and we’ve got all day Friday to paint. every. single. surface. of this stupid room. But to truly show you how much progress we’ve made since we bought the house three years ago, I had to track down my ancient LiveJournal account and steal these pictures.

This is the wallpaper I found under the OTHER wallpaper. Sadly, it was just on this one wall or I might have kept it. Jungle animals are so hot right now.

I *intentionally* painted that futon orange. You know, to match the room. Yikes.

And then in the past three years, we’ve thrown out most of the furniture, dragged a guest bed up there and turned it into a giant junk hole.

I also painted the walls a color that should have been called "dirty band-aid" and hung up dark polyester curtains. Because who wants to really SEE a room that ugly?

Since Wednesday afternoon, THAT has turned into this:

Ugly room, now with less stuff!

Which now looks like this:

That's my dad, who ripped up all that carpet entirely by himself. Before I had finished breakfast. No, he is not for sale or rent.

Next up, paint ceiling, paint trim, paint moldings, replace electric baseboard heaters, repeat all of that in the stairwell, buy new closet doors and THEN we can paint the walls.

The carpet guy comes Thursday.

And then we get to move all our bedroom furniture UP.

I need to go lie down.

The whole POINT of going to the Eastern States Exposition (known as The Big E) was so I could get a picture of E standing next a sign that said “The Big E”. And although I took 114 pictures of various others things and people somehow I did not take that picture, despite spending 6 hours and a good portion of my sanity wandering around looking at cows and fried things and Fair People.

Fair People makes me think of Bill Engvall’s stand up bit about the fair. Which is why I took this picture:

Sorry, that’s probably only funny to E and me. We’re dorks. And maybe rednecks.

Even though I didn’t get a picture of E next to the sign, I did get a ton of other pictures. There was food…

That's the face of a child getting a major brain freeze from my strawberry-lemonade slurpie.

And animals…

That's one of the Budweiser Clydesdales getting a foot rub.

All that WOOL! I could knit so much stuff! And Baby Evan liked petting them too.

And plenty of things to buy and touch and look at…

That unicorn in the upper left is part of the Massachusetts building. Apparently they have unicorns there. Or maybe they USED to have unicorns, until the pilgrims ate them all at the first Thanksgiving and everyone got gay married. I was never very good at history.

That was some sort of crazy skateboarding themed fun house on the midway. I just like the picture because Baby Evan's wearing his rock'n'roll shirt.

Not pictured: Framed poster of the Jersey Shore cast dude in a tank top was carrying around. I guess that’s what counts as a “prize” from the ring toss game these days. Hand on my heart, that’s 10000% true.

It was a very fun, very busy, very long day. We planned to stay until about 1:30 and ended up hanging around until 4 to meet some friends. My feet were SCREAMING and my horrible pelvic pain threw my left hip out of joint. I ended up half limping, half waddling, clinging to the stroller and breathing like I just finished a marathon. It was dead sexy. And despite my huge pregnant belly, the people who had claimed the very few benches showed absolutely no interest in letting me sit down for even a minute.

So I took a little rest in the grass. At least SOMEONE got a seat.

And just so you know, I TOTALLY resisted having this done:

But it was really really hard.

Maybe I’m a little more redneck than I thought.

Another family photo album in lieu of a real blog post. Not that my real posts are ever brilliant to begin with, so no big loss.

We very ambitiously decided to head into Washington on Labor Day despite not getting home until 1 am, one hangover, one separated pelvis, and one child we knew was probably going to miss nap time. My folks only live 20 minutes from DC (when there’s no traffic) so we were prepared for a short visit if we couldn’t handle it. A quick escape proved unnecessary and we made it about half way down the Mall before the pregnant one started complaining too much as we had to give up on seeing the World War II memorial. That’s what happens when you park illegally by the Capitol building all the way at one end of the Mall and think “yeah, we can TOTALLY walk 4 miles in three hours with a stroller and still see several large museums and monuments.” You miss stuff.

Air & Space Museum. Did you know it's the most visiting museum of any kind anywhere in the world? That's the kind of cool stuff you can learn when you eavesdrop on the tourguides. All the good stuff is on the ceiling so Baby Evan spent a lot of time like this.

For the most-visited museum it was pretty not crowded on a holiday. Look closely, do you see the hobo baby in this picture?

Family Picture!! Tired Baby Looks Tired, but he did really well despite the sun and the crowds.

There was no way to accurately capture with a picture how cool this sculpture is. When you walk past, it appears to be turning but really it's just the perspective. Yeah, sorry, that didn't help. Maybe there's a video on YouTube or something.

Natural History Museum, home of my favorite thing to visit in DC - The Hope Diamond

See Baby Evan's blurry little hand? He's signing "fish! fish! fish!!!!" He likes them almost as much as dogs.

More fish. Ancient, scary, giant-toothed fish, but still fish. Strangely enough, he didn't react AT ALL to the dinosaurs. Maybe because he doesn't know the sign.

I mean, even *I* like the T-Rex. You'd think a kid would too. Nope.

Part of an elephant. Maybe. Baby Evan liked poking it.

24 Weeks - it's a Good Amount of pregnant. We've reached a turning point on viability (not that I WANT to have a super-premie but knowing the baby would have a shot if something unexpected happened is nice), I'm not horribly uncomfortable, I still have plenty of things to wear, and I haven't reached the "swollen bloated manatee" stage yet. Can I just stay here?

The whole trip I couldn’t stop commenting on how much I LOVE Washington. It’s such a great tourist destination. You can break up lots of outside walking with museums that are sciencey or arty or historical or fun and they’re all free. The Metro is super easy to navigate, there are tons of places to eat, and most of the time the crowds are manageable. E and I talked about our chances of ever getting transferred to the DC area and decided if it becomes and option we will definitely take it. Of course, it could be 10 years before that happens and my folks don’t plan to live there to offer free babysitting forever, but if they haven’t moved it would be the perfect icing on a lovely just-southern-enough cake. Of course, then I remembered the high crime rate and the insane cost of living and the constant, never-ending politics and the TRAFFIC and how much I complained about the total lack of fun stuff to do when I was growing up there. But hey, no where is perfect.

If you’re feeling clicky today, I’d appreciate it! I think I’m on page three. Maybe four. Shamefully uncool, is what I’m saying, and my ego could use the extra bump. XOXO!