Despite CLAIMING to be not-so-domesticated on the internets, Hannah of Peggy Ann Design sure knows her way around a sewing machine. Her aprons are so gorgeous they make me want to bake stuff just so I have an excuse to wear one and her picture frames are definitely too pretty for any of the photos I’ve taken recently. But her real genius lies in her pom-poms.

Mama size pom-pom and a NEW mini pom-pom for little fans (or for your ponytail)

Now, Hannah is a fan of something called War Eagle and is always yelling about them on Twitter. I Googled it, and discovered War Eagle isn’t actually a vicious bird but the mascot for Auburn’s football team. Which makes a lot more sense. But since she was tired of ugly ball caps and jerseys as her only options to show her Auburn love in public, she created these pom-pom pins in her team’s colors!

Since my college didn’t even have a football team (I think we were famous for…basketball? And at some point might have had the #2 tennis player in the country? or something?) I had to go with *real* sports when she asked what colors I wanted. And since I live in New England the answer is obviously red & blue – Go Sox AND Go Pats!!

OMG don't we look insanely alike in this picture?

This is Little Evan and I in our adorable pom-poms*, watching the Patriots almost lose even though they had a TWENTY POINT LEAD. Please note Evan’s vintage football sweater that simply supports an imaginary “team team”.

WTF PATS?!?!?!?!

Luckily, that last touchdown didn’t count and we won. I give all the credit to our new pom-poms.

*For the record, the pom-pom hair clippie is actually for Baby Girl, but it’s a little hard to get her to model things right now. Also, Hannah made using Evan as the model a requirement for the giveaway. True story. Oh, and the small pom-pom can also be put on a pin if you’d prefer that to a clip.

If you want to support your team with your very own pompoms, Hannah is going to give one of my readers their very own set of matching mama & baby poms in YOUR CHOICE of colors!

All you have to do to enter is leave a comment on this post telling me what colors you want! You can see what Hannah has in stock here but your choice can be ANY team colors. Just don’t say blue and white pinstripe, because we don’t allow your kind around here. I’m not even joking.

You can also follow Hannah’s blog (which I recommend, she’s been doing some awesome giveaways) or follow her on Twitter (which I also recommend, because she’s hilarious) but those aren’t extra entries.

Giveaway will be open until November 4nd, winner will be chosen using Random.org and notified via email, so make sure you use a real email address when you comment.

Giveaway is now closed!

Disclaimer bit: Hannah sent me these pom-poms free of charge to photograph and review, but I think she really just wanted to see Little Evan in a hair clippie. No other compensation was received and the opinions expressed are entirely my own. I wasn’t even extra nice because she’s a fellow Navy wife.

Day 1 is open until November 1st! Allora Handmade
Day 2 is open until November 2nd! Uff Da Designs
Day 3 is open until November 3rd! Taradara

Nothing can snap  all three of us out of a bad mood funk faster than a weekend full of of fun and food and friends. Gorgeous weather and a kid who was charming and happy despite skipping nap time two days in a row didn’t hurt either.

Saturday morning we all went to E’s hockey game, where Little Evan showed off his team spirit.

Babies Gone Wild! I think he was just enjoying the sunshine.

Then we headed over to the Mystic Seaport for Chowderfest.

CHOWDAH!

We had seafood chowder and lobster chowder and beef brisket sandwich and apple fritters and pumpkin spice gelato. E also enjoyed a very very delicious Pumpkin Head Beer while I cursed myself for ALWAYS being pregnant.

That Seaport membership is the best thing we've bought in years.

On Sunday we drove up to Boston to meet my friend Erin (of the much-mentioned wedding) and her new husband. I always forget Boston’s only 90 minutes away and is a fantastic day trip, even with a baby.

Could this city be any more beautiful? I heart it.

We went up early to visit the Children’s Museum in the morning. I’ve been wanting to go since we moved back to New England 5 years ago, but visiting a children’s museum when you don’t have any children is sort of…creepy.

I've never met a kid who loves making faces so much.

I have amazing memories of Boston from when I was a kid – we lived about an hour outside the city from when I was 10 until I was 15 – and I was glad to see Little Evan enjoyed it as much as I did. He’s still too young for most of the museum but the toddler section was fantastic.

Trains! Tunnels! Hats! Loud noises!!!!!

After a couple of hours of inside fun we met our friends and walked over to the Commons to meet up with another friend (and blog reader!) Kim and her adorable daughter.

The brick building in the top left picture is my dad's old office. Right next door is James Hook Lobsters. Dad would sometimes bring home live lobsters and we'd play with them and name them and pick out which one was "ours"...and then toss them in a pot and eat them for dinner. You can see why I'd make a terrible vegetarian.

This Elliot, Erin's husband, being a good sport while we played a game of "freak out the newlywed by throwing babies at him." He actually did a really great job. It took a lot of effort to not start asking "SO, WHEN ARE YOU GUYS GOING TO HAVE KIDS?"

Of course, I can’t go to Boston without visiting the Gardens and the beloved duck statue:

Make Way for Ducklings! That's the island where Mr. and Mrs. Duck live in the book. The ducks really do live there.

It took at least 30 minutes of waiting for bigger kids (and adults) to get off Mrs. Duck for this picture. I guess I should be glad so many people love classic children's literature, right?

We topped off the afternoon with Little Evan’s first carousel ride.

That top left picture is Evan crying and screaming, not because he's scared of the ride but because the ride is over and he's SAAAAAAD to leave his horsie.

We left Boston around 5:30 and even with traffic made it home about 2 hours later. As we pulled into the driveway, my friend Amy showed up to drop off her delicious homemade pumpkin ice cream. I have really awesome friends.

But the BEST part of the weekend is that even after 2 super busy fun days of running around and going places and seeing friends, E has today off. We’re both in our pajamas and have absolutely no plans to leave the couch for longer than it takes to heat up some mac & cheese and refill Little Evan’s sippy cup. SO AWESOME. Plus I have half a bowl of pumpkin ice cream left.

What did you do this weekend? I hope it was as much fun as ours!

I know it’s ridiculous to complain about the sunshine! and the gorgeous weather! and the warm! and the chance to go to the beach! again!!! but I am SO DONE with summer. It was an especially long and hot one here, made longer and hotter by the oven attached to my midsection. Plus, I FINALLY found a pair of brown flat boot to fit over my giant calves and I want to wear them before the pregnancy swelling gets too bad.

The in-between seasons – Spring and Fall – are the best times of the year here in New England. (Although I don’t know why I think of them as in-between. They’re just as long as the Winter and Summer.) And as much as I love the budding trees and melting snow and daffodils and balmy days in March April May, Fall is sort of New England’s “thing”. If you don’t slow down just a little to enjoy the beautiful hills flaming with reds and yellows and oranges or get the sudden urge for a steaming mug of mulled cider on a cool evening or sigh with happiness when the smell of wood stove starts drifting through the neighborhood then you’re dead inside. DEAD INSIDE.

But yesterday it was 84 degrees. And today it’s supposed to be almost 9o. And humid. I would be turning the air conditioning back on…if we had any air conditioning.

I’ve decided the best course of action is to just WILL Fall into being. I got out the pumpkin decorations. I changed the wreath on the door from a jaunty bucket of yellow (fake) flowers to (fake) twigs and leaves and berries. And then, in a blatant act of defiance against Mother Nature, I took Baby Evan apple picking. I wore flip-flops. He wore socks but no shoes (also known as the hobo baby compromise).

Holmberg Orchards

Baby Evan was REALLY convinced he wanted to eat one of the decorative gourds. He tried to sample one in every color.

He did a lot better in the orchard, although that face in the middle is from eating an apple he found on the ground. P.S. The adorable little girl is his friend Amelia. She's FRICKIN ADORABLE.

We’ll have to go back when it’s Fall for reals and do the hay ride and get our pumpkins and buy some mums and cider and do the rest of the traditional New England Autumnal Family Weekend. Hopefully when it’s cold enough to wear boots. Or at least shoes.

Pinky swear. I just can’t shut up until I share a few more stories, pictures and do a little name dropping *coughReecoughcoughLoraleecough*.

My flight out was…crowded. Apparently Hell now operates an airline from Hartford to Minneapolis. There’s no other way to explain sitting in a teeny tiny middle seat between snoring shoeless guy and plus-size over perfumed grandma for 2+ hours with so little room I could neither cross my legs or work on my knitting. But the flight was blessedly on time and once I found my chauffeured car (!!!!!!) at baggage claim I was mere minutes away from that delicious red velvet cake and a great Q&A with The Pioneer Woman herself.

The funny thing about a crafting conference instead of a blogging conference is that the attendees were split about 50/50 on whether or not they had ever even HEARD of Ree Drummond. The mind, it boggles. Although I bet someone somewhere is writing the exact same thing about idiots like me who hadn’t heard of Amy Butler before. (I have now and I love her the appropriate amount.)

High point: When Ree signed my book.

Low point: When I hit myself in the head with said book after telling her my palms were super sweaty and she was cute.

Yes, Ree is wearing 2 different shirts because that was 2 different days. Like I said, since so many people were unfamiliar with her blog she was without fawning masses 90% of the time.

After lunch I made it to a panel on Social Media and managed to accidentally find a seat next to an outlet (DEAD IPHONE ALERT CODE RED WEE OOOO WEE OOOO) and next to Nicole from Lark Crafts, my contact at the event. Afterward I hung around awkwardly hoping for a chance to talk to Loralee and thank her for the link that lead me to the conference in the first place. She ended up asking a group of us stragglers for business cards and when I passed her mine she looked at it…and looked again…and said “Waaaait a minute…” and then JUMPED UP and ran around the table and hugged me and hugged me and hugged me again. The other women who had been standing around all stared and one of the asked “Ok who is this famous person?” IT WAS AWESOME. Loralee is totally the same in real life as on her blog – funny and real and gorgeous and so so so nice.

I managed to check in, find my room and get changed for dinner with a few minutes to spare so I turned on the TV and was surprised to see Jeopardy! was on. Central time is weird. Anyways, this was the Final Jeopardy! question. None of the contestants knew the answer.

I totally got it though. Because I am a genius. Clearly. Do YOU know the answer?

Then it was time for the Keynote dinner.

Me & Loralee (with PW in the background showing someone her pretty earrings), Amy Butler speaking, Kerrie (one of the other winners) & Nicole from Lark Crafts & me, Mary Jane Butters speaking

And then I limped up to my room, ripped off my high heels (poor choices, Suzanne, poor choices) and passed out. For exactly two hours. Then I woke up and composed eight zillion blog posts in my head and worried about finding my way around the next day and worried Baby Evan missed me and worried everyone secretly hated me and worried some more. I didn’t sleep very much. The possessed alarm clock didn’t help.

On Friday I attended a panel about blogging that included Lisa Leonard, Heather Bullard, Brett Bara and Loralee Choate. FINALLY, something I know a little bit about. I almost broke my neck nodding along to all the advice (write often! good quality pictures are important! comment comment comment!) and loved hearing people’s different opinions on personal vs. professional blogging.

Then there was the box lunch with the Women Entrepreneurs panel. It was the only place I felt totally intimidated and out of my league – not a single person mentioned The Twitter or The Facebook for 2 1/2 hours. To be honest, the whole middle part of Friday is just a big blur. The schedule was so full I hardly had any time at all to catch my breath.

Which is something I definitely needed to do, since right after lunch I ducked back into the Handmade Market for this…

OH HAI THERE.

O My, isn’t Allison ADORABLE?

I’m not even gonna lie – it was totally weird meeting a bloggy friend in person for the first time. You already know so much about them that the basic hi-where-you-from-how-many-kids-do-you-have-what-do-you-do? small talk is pointless, but you can’t really just jump in with the super personal details. You end up standing around grinning like a crazy person but have nothing to say.

Of course, the initial awkwardness didn’t stop me for a SECOND and since she was foolish enough to give me her cell phone number I managed to invite myself along to dinner with Allison, her friend Cindy and Cindy’s blog friends Kim and Jenny and (another) Allison (who writes for Apartment Therapy). We started at Ikea, which makes sense when you’re hanging out with house bloggers, where I enjoyed crepes and lingonberry soda and bought an inspirational yard of fabric I’m going to plan the new nursery/play room around. Then we went over to the Mall of America (Which turned out just to be a big mall. I don’t know what I was expecting.) for some super cheap happy hour food and wine Diet Coke* lemonade.

This is the part where things could be really awkward if I say “Meeting Allison in person was like getting together with my best friend from high school who I haven’t seen in years but I already know I love” and she’s all “Uh, yeah, it was…nice. Please stop emailing me.” It was like a first date where one person thought they were totally Soul Mates and the other couldn’t wait for the night to be over. My social awkwardness, let me show you it. I think it’s a blogger thing. But IN MY HEAD, it was a super awesome night.

On Saturday I played with yarn with Kristen Nicholas…

Embroidering knitting with yarn was SO cool and surprisingly easy.

Attended one more panel – The Future of Retail: The Digital Marketplace…

Me & Lisa Leonard (I totally dorked out and begged for a pic), Amy Turn Sharp speaking on the panel

Amy writes a blog, has an incredibly successful wooden toy business (that once got Dooce-ified), and had her teeny weeny 3 week old baby boy Scout with her at the conference. She was all kinds of cool and nice. I talked to her about my horrible pregnancy pelvic pain and instead of giving me the side-eye and running away she was all “YES!! THE PAIN!! IN THE CROTCH!!” and made emphatic stabbing motions. I liked her.

And then…the weekend was over.

Nancy Soriano (one of the creators), Kerrie, Erin (winner of a local contest to attend), me, Jo Packham (creator and founder of Where Women Create Magazine) and Jennie (the third Lark Crafts scholarship winner)

It was fantastic. Amazing. Everything I had hoped for and more. It still feels more like a dream than something that actually happened to me and being back in my real life (oh boy am I back in my real life) makes it even more unbelievable.

Thank you again to Lark Crafts & Nicole & Jo & Debbie & Meaghan & everyone else who handled all the details to get me there and registered and made sure I always felt welcome and special. I promise to use everything I learned to do something beautiful.

P.S. I wanted to share this cookbook with you too:

How adorabe is this?!?

The author, Zac, was working as the event’s videographer and tried to give a copy to Nicole, since she’s all fancy and important and has tons of publishing connections, but I fawned all over it so much that she passed it to me. I feel sort of bad for stealing it from her (and I think he was pretty disappointed too) but I looooove it. I think I’ll throw a Halloween party just to make those cupcakes.

P.P.S. If you were at the event or want to write about the event, please feel free to use my pictures from this post or the other ones. All I ask for is an attribution and a link back. If you want unedited or larger copies just email me bebehblog at gmail dot com.

*There is NO DIET COKE in Minnesota. It was all Pepsi, all the time, and it SUCKED. I ended up drinking more coffee than I’ve had in years.

THE END

THE DRESS FIT.

The End.

I know that was really all anyone wanted to hear about – especially my real life friends, since I don’t think I’ve talked about anything else for weeks. Of course, my fear of the dress not fitting didn’t stop me from stuffing my face enjoying the delicious rehearsal dinner or catered lunch at the salon. Pregnancy is equal to about four glasses of wine when it comes to helping you make good choices. Maybe that’s the REAL reason you aren’t supposed to drink while pregnant – you’re already just a few seconds away from doing something really stupid, no need to add alcohol.

I look like the Hulk next to those teeny tiny maids. HULK SMASH J CREW!!

It was a super awesome fun time. Half the guests were from England (as is the Groom), so cute accents and extremely high alcohol tolerances were plentiful. It’s probably good I was knocked up and unable to enjoy more than a sip of champagne, since “open bar” is a dangerous thing to offer someone having her very first date night in 17 months and who hasn’t even finished a glass of wine in more than 2 years.

Since it’s not my wedding and most of you don’t know who any of these people are, I’ll try to keep the pictures to a minimum. I’m also EXTREMELY disappointed I didn’t pass my camera off to anyone  – I don’t have a single head-on shot with my dress and hair and makeup done, and NO pictures of me and E together or me in the borrowed comfy-yet-still-super-classy black dress I changed into for the dancing and eating part of the reception. Unfortunately, I don’t think any of the people at my table (the official Friends From High School table) had cameras, so the chances of a good picture popping up on Facebook is pretty small. I also loved the bulk lace table runners they had to decorate while we had dinner together.

Here’s your free tip of the day: IF YOU LOOK NICE FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE GIVING BIRTH, GET LOTS OF PICTURES OF YOURSELF.

Every picture of myself I have – the two on the ends are cropped like 400% because they’re really of lots of people. But you don’t know them.

(As a sidenote, although I have hated almost every picture of myself for the past 6 years, I don’t mind these. Being pregnant is a pretty good excuse for a double chin and my arms look not as huge as they used to be.)

I did steal these from someone’s Facebook – just not someone I know. Despite all my complaining about the dress being TERRIBLE for pregnant people, they looked spectacular in the pictures.

I have a whole series of pictures from the “putting on the dress” portion of the afternoon. They’re hilarious.

Isn’t she gorgeous? Everything about the day was gorgeous. For anyone who’s also thinking of marrying someone in the nearest future, check out these titanium wedding bands for sale because they are just plain beautiful. Enough said. 

That is the official E Dancing Face. He was SO THRILLED to be dancing. I wish I could explain the dancing better, but you’ll just have to trust me when I say dancing is His Thing.

I also got to meet a reader (I will NOT say “fan”) who I didn’t know before – the bride was kind enough to send her a link when she was pregnant last year and for some crazy reason she’s kept reading. It was AWESOME, if only because I’d been doing my best not to talk about my kid for the past two days and suddenly here was someone who WANTED to talk about babies. Within seconds we were already discussing our struggles with breastfeeding and cloth diapers and labor preparations. I’ve never met someone I knew through blogging before (I know people who also blog but I don’t know them FROM their blogs, if that makes sense) but it really is like having an instant friend. So great to meet you Kim!

So, who wants to get married next? E and I definitely need another weekend like this one.