Coming soon!

My sister is having a baby any day now! We are so excited to meet the new baby boy! I can't wait for Eliza to meet him and have a new cousin to play with. In February we threw my sister a shower to help her get ready for this new, exciting, and expensive time in their lives! We had a great group of people join us and I had a good time creating things for the shower. I left all the yummy, creative food prep and coordination to my mom, grandmother, and aunt and they did an amazing job! I wanted to share a few pictures on here from the shindig, but of course I completely forgot to take even one picture. :( I think that makes me a very bad at this blogging thing. Fortuitously my brother-in-law took some pictures. We went with a "Cute as a Button" theme for the shower.

The yummy food spread

Another of the food and  the flower arrangement created by my grandmother

My gorgeous sister



The loot! Also, a beautiful afghan by my mother for baby b.


Trike diaper cake. My mom and I had fun putting this guy together!

Button cake, cake pops and pretzels. Cake was red velvet with cream cheese icing and fondant buttons!



Close up of fondant buttons created by my mom

Shadow box of invitation and button flowers

'Cute as a button' cookie favors that my mom outdid herself on. These were super cute. Sorry no close up picture of these!

Button flower arrangement. These were a lot of fun to make and hunt buttons for.

My nephew's nursery. My sister did a great job of putting together this room. It is so sweet and full of love. My mom, sister and I spent a few days over the holidays making these yarn eggs and I think they look great hanging in the corner. 

 

I made this fabric garland for the room. It's the same pattern of the one I made for Eliza's first birthday but with colors to match baby b's nursery.

Everything is ready (well, as ready as can be) for baby b so now we are just waiting to meet him. I know he will be cute as a button (or much cuter!) :) 

March Update

So what's new with us? A veritable assortment of novelties!

We've decided to start a vegetable garden in our back yard using the square foot gardening method. Since neither of us have much gardening experience, we're starting small, with one 2 x 8 foot box and one 2 x 4 foot box - 24 square feet total, each with a different vegetable planted in it. The cool thing about square foot gardening is that you can fit a lot of veggies in a small space. We have cauliflower, broccoli, 2 kinds of cabbage, 2 kinds of carrots, radishes, 3 types of onions, spinach, several types of lettuce, sugar snap peas, and mustard greens in our 2 boxes. Hopefully we got the soil mix right and we manage to keep up with the watering so that we'll start having some yummy home-grown vegetables in a couple of months!

In the front yard, the flower beds that we put in last fall with the help of my parents are blooming nicely and looking great now that they've had a good weeding.

But enough about the yard - I'm sure what you're really wondering is "What about Eliza?" ☺ All in all she's doing great this month! She turned 18 months old a few days ago, which is a huge milestone in itself, but that's just the start. Thanks in large part to a sudden increase in her interest in moving around, and in part as well to some extra focused PT time and effort from our end, she's continued to make a ton of progress in her gross motor skills too. A month ago, she was rolling around on her own. Now she's getting really good at transitions - getting from prone to sitting and vice versa is still a little tricky for her but she's almost doing it entirely on her own with only a little prompting. When she's prone, she's figured out how to use her arms to turn herself left and right until she's oriented toward something of interest. And biggest of all, today she started to "army crawl" for the first time! She used her elbows and feet to push herself forward a couple of feet across the carpet to get to a toy. (It was actually one of Pasha's toys - funny how someone else's stuff is always more interesting...) Exciting times and no doubt a lot of babyproofing of the house are in store!