Saturday smells like... A DAR Meeting

At our DAR Chapter meetings we usually have snacks or a light lunch to enjoy while socializing after the meeting.  We are broken into groups to provide the snacks and each group decides how to best break down the workload.  I'm in charge of February and decided (a few years ago actually) that my group's workload would be best broken down by putting J in charge and letting the ladies put out trays of his yummy food while taking all the credit.  Or something like that.  Anyhow, it works, and the ladies of my chapter seem to be big fans of this plan.  Today is our chapter meeting, and J started prepping food last night!

We're having our usual standby's: roasted pork loin crostinis, salmon-dill crostinis, bacon-tomato cups, brie kisses, veggies and something sweet.  While he prepped the pork loin and the filling for the bacon-tomato cups last night, I only managed to grab a picture of the pork loin.  Feast your eyes:

Seriously, I wish you could actually smell the yumminess here!  Also, since J gave up meat for lent, I *had* to sample everything to be sure it wasn't poison.  It wasn't. I may have tried a few pieces to be sure.  I'll try to take pictures of the spread today to come back and share!

Full Term!

Every week for the past 33 or so I've taken a picture to map the little one's progress.  While I've not been sharing them online, I thought today's might be a good one.  Why?  Because today is the important 37 week milestone!  Now, I could totally get into a lengthy conversation about how that isn't technically right, but it doesn't matter. As far as the doctor's office is concerned, the parasite is 37 weeks 'old' today and has reached Full Term!  That means that, while we'd prefer she 'bake' at least another two weeks if not three or four, she could arrive at any moment and not be considered a preemie. 

For those of you who celebrate these things, today is also Ash Wednesday.  You might remember that last year, I gave up sweets and added steps every day to my walking regemin.  This year, neither of those seem practical (well, giving up sweets might be practical, but no one is going to hold a pregnant lady to that).  Instead, I've decided to strongly limit my facebook time and to be more intentional with the time saved through that.  Will that mean more blogging here?  I expect so.  I expect (and hope) that it also means more time reading books, more time devoted to keeping up my commitments, and in a few weeks, more time devoted to staring at a sweet little face.  I'll try to share that with y'all, too!

P.S.  J is giving up meat and cokes.  Pray for us both! :)

Camp-out Cake

It's been a while since I made a cake, but this weekend offered a perfect opportunity!  That's right, the Superkid had another birthday, which meant Mrs. Jeanonathon (What? You didn't know J and I have a celebrity name?  Well, to this kid, we must be a super-couple!  Or just have really long, confusing names...) had a cake to decorate!  (See previous cakes for his sixth birthday here and fifth birthday here)

The Kid loves to camp, and a February birthday doesn't really lend itself to a backyard camp-out that he might have preferred.  Luckily, his momma put together an amazing indoor camp-out complete with s'mores in the fireplace and a tent set up in the family room for a sleepover!  Last week, he showed me a drawing of what he had in mind for his cake, which included a red tent, trees, and the family car (which is typically parked next to the tent when they go camping), so I took that as my order!

As you can see, I only managed part of the order.  See, if you clicked back to the sixth birthday cake, you know that I sometimes bake too much cake to meet the vision.  I'd promised Becky I would reign it in this time and not send all of the guests home with their own month supply of birthday cake.  I found a great formula online for the size of cake you should bake (area of the cake divided by area of the slice equals the number of people served), and it turns out, you don't really need nearly as much cake as you'd think! Unfortunately, a smaller cake meant less room for trees and cars, so I focused on the tent and a smaller forest.

I feel sort of iffy about the tent; I rolled the fondant too thin, and could have put more thought into the rolls at the end.  The trees, on the other hand, turned out better than I'd expected.  Both the trunks and the treetops are a mix of fondant and gumpaste, held together on bamboo skewers.  These aren't typically a great combo for kids, except for the kids at this party.  I glanced over at one point to see them eating the trees like lollipops.  Apparently they tasted a little like bubblegum?

The best part?  All of the guests at the party got a slice after presents were opened, and there was just enough for the Kid, his family, and his sleepover pal to have a piece for breakfast.  Once the party was officially over, so was the cake.  I'll be using that formula again!

An amazingly productive weekend...

After a few weeks of busy weekends and long work days for J, we actually managed to put together a pretty productive weekend at the MP!  Don't get me wrong, J actually worked all weekend, too, but he worked from home and I managed to squeeze in a few projects for him.

So in bullets to keep this short(er):
Friday:

• We bought lots of paint and painting supplies
• I bought the supplies to build a new mailbox post (Why? See the pic below to see what it currently looks like thanks to some random stranger.  Re-doing the mailbox was on my list for 2013, so I guess they did us a favor.  I'm waiting on a wood corbel I ordered online to arrive before getting to work on this project.  The local post office is kindly holding our mail for pickup there while we sort this one out...)

Saturday:

• Prepped the nursery for painting
• Welcomed two good friends over for an afternoon of painting and painted the walls of the nursery (and much of the ceiling)  (I'll post a pic later today when I have a chance to get one in good daylight, but you can see a hint of it below!)

Standing at the window looking towards the door, this is the left side of the room. 

And then this is the right side of the room.  The walls and ceiling are the same color.
Obviously still need to paint the trim...

Sunday

• We put the crib together and discovered that much of the furniture actually matches!  (Yes, I know we could have gone out and bought a set of nursery furniture that all matched from the get-go, but I prefer to collect things so matching is kind of a nice surprise!)

• I finished painting the nursery ceiling
• J got the second (final?) coat of poly on one of our library bookshelves

There is MUCH left to be done around the MP to get ready for the baby girl's arrival in a month or so, but we're thrilled to have a productive weekend under our belts!