Monday, September 21, 2009

Bump of the Day: Me!

More projects are on their way, but until then:

My cute friend and neighbour, Stepper, is devoting her blog this week to baby bumps and the women who have them, and I have the great honor of being the first interviewee of the week!

Read all about it here.

Please consider yourself warned that Stepper writes a great blog and has an absolutely adorable son (OK, and husband), and you are likely to become just as smitten with her as we are.

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Project Baby: In which grandchildren are spoiled rotten months before birth. And a promising career in the recording industry?

We recently got back from visiting my family in Norway. We had a great time and it was so good to see my parents after all of the worry and stress they've been going through lately, and still have ahead of them. And of course it wouldn't be my family if there wasn't some crazy drama going on while we were there. But I'll leave all of that for another post.
We hadn't really intended on focusing too much on our ever-growing baby while we were there - after all at four months I was only just into maternity clothes and looking a bit chubby around the middle, and we didn't know (and still don't know) if we are having a boy or a girl, so we thought we'd just pick up a few gender neutral things here and there.

Little did we know.

We had, of course, forgotten to take my mother being a first time grandma into consideration. Within minutes of getting into the house, we were sitting under heaps of wrapping paper with mounds of tiny little garments everywhere. And it didn't stop there. Everywhere we went, we somehow ended up in the baby section and tiny little items somehow made it into our hands, courtesy of my mama. And then her generous friends started gifting us too. Wow.

So, we went from having nothing for our baby when we left, to coming home with this.



Why, yes, that is indeed a hand-knit Norwegian baby sweater in the center. Why, yes, my mother did make it. In the background you can see a down baby duvet from some of my parents friends that we've never even met, and some cute decal things from auntie Annika. Our only two purchases are the adorable jammies in the front. The crazy thought, of course, is that we have only just begun acquiring everything a baby needs. Yikes!

And now a short message from the star of the show him-/herself. Doesn't that just make your heart sing?

Monday, September 14, 2009

Project Black Thumb: Summer's lease hath all too short a date

OK, not really. At least not in Utah, it doesn't. I'm on of the people who fail to see the point in summers so hot that you can't go outside in them and who looks forward to September and cooler weather with a song in my heart. Jeans! Knitwear! The outside of my house!
So to remind myself of some of the glories that summer brought to our particular house, I give you the fruits and flowers of our labour:



First up, our raspberries! The previous owners of our house left us some raspberry canes, and they have been valiantly battling for world domination ever since. Seeing as we haven't put much work into our little garden yet, we have mostly let them grow where they wanted to, and this summer they rewarded us with a bumper crop of berries. We ate them by the fistful, on cereal, with ice cream and with chocolate pudding. We also made jam, which was so tasty that we gobbled most of it up before we had a chance to take a photo of it.

Then we decided to prettify the other garden bed, previously a sand box for the three little boys who lived here before us. We planted a pink cosmo, lots of salvias and (I think) a begonia? It was such an improvement on the weed filled sand box that it made me happy just to look out of the window and see all the colours.



And finally, our front door needing a little tarting up, so we filled a glazed blue ceramic pot with pink petunias, and they kept flowering all summer long. Especially nice, considering my propensity to kill every plant within a 30 ft radius.



Sadly, our flowers didn't look quite as lovely and healthy after three weeks of neglect while we were in Norway. So I'll let this little post serve as a memorial to them, and a reminder to me of what plants are supposed to look like, as opposed to the sad little brown things we have right now.