Work surprises

We've been really fortunate to have so many generous people in our lives and on this journey with us. In addition to the Ohio shower and Florida shower, friends and coworkers have been giving us gifts for weeks as Elle's arrival gets closer.

This week in particular brought us a lot of surprises at work. On Thursday, my coworkers presented me with an absolutely adorable and delicious cupcake cake, a sweet card, generous gift card and gorgeous personalized frame with Elle's name engraved on it.

Mmmm, cupcake cake ...

On Friday, Tim arrived at work to find his cubicle covered in wrapping paper (thanks, Kelly!). A bunch of his coworkers chipped in to purchase two awesome gifts from our registry.


Elle the Breaking News Magnet will be sure to make appearances at the offices to thank everyone personally!

A Florida Baby Shower

A few months ago, one of my crafty friends, Lisa, told me she needed to ask me a question. I'm not one who has ever been short on answers, so I told her to fire away.

But when she told me that several of the craft girls wanted to throw me a baby shower and asked for a few dates that would work for me, I was bowled over. We picked a date in early June, and they went to town planning.

The day of the shower was extremely hot and humid (waytogo, Florida). The food was amazing (like there was ever any doubt!) and the atmosphere of the entire shower was perfect - relaxed, fun and comfortable.

Chowing down, baby-shower style :)

The girls all decorated onesies for Elle - there were fabric markers and puffy paint everywhere! - and it was a really cute idea.

A sampling of the onesies. A former Stater coworker/KSU grad who works at the Times made the "Daily Baby Stater" one, and Julia, my fellow Bret Michaels' lover, made the one on the far right.

Apparently the theme of showers this year was surprise guests. At my Ohio shower, my mom surprised me with three of my former high school teachers. At the Florida shower, I was tricked in to thinking that our friend Julia, who moved to North Carolina to attend law school last fall and is working there this summer, wasn't able to attend. Julia can only make it back to Florida every so often, so I wasn't surprised or offended when she RSVP'd with a "no." But when I saw her walking up the sidewalk to the shower, I was floored. Apparently she'd kept her weekend visit hush-hush so that I wouldn't find out that she WOULD be at the shower. It was an awesome surprise, and I totally didn't see it coming.

Yay, Julia!

Elle got a ton of awesome gifts, including a bath tub (so she's not Smellie Ellie!), a first-aid kit, a Boppy, a ton of adorable clothes, some hand-made washcloths, the coolest turtle nightlight EVER (that may or not be already in use by her mother), some adorable toys, her first CDs and a large contribution to her library, among other things.

Kelly got the perfect book for our future craftster!

She got some amazing books, and Tim practiced reading them the night of the shower (he read one Sesame Street book in complete awe of the complicated plot twists).

Thanks for the fantastic shower, ladies! It is great to know that Elle is being born in to such a caring and generous Florida family :)

The hostesses with the mostess - Lisa, Candice and Jumbles, world's coolest dog.

April shower

I have been working on this post for the last few days, and I was hoping to have it finished by Mother's Day, but that didn't end up happening... ANYWAY, my mommy threw me a super sweet baby shower while I was home in Ohio a few weeks ago. I can't thank her enough - party planning has always been more of my thing, and my mom wasn't exactly in her comfort zone. But she did an awesome job and threw in some major surprises - and usually I'm the one surprising her, so I was totally caught off guard!

My mom had been referring to "her committee" of helpers for the shower for quite some time. I assumed she was talking about her best friend and my sister, who did both help, and maybe my grandma, who had been weighing in on the guest list ... but apparently my mom had another arsenal of helpers in the form of three of my high school teachers. Teachers I hadn't really seen in eight or so years.

I was a little nervous about the shower to begin with because I hadn't been home in six months and hadn't seen many of the guests in at least that long, so I knew there would be a lot of people to catch up with and not a lot of time to do one-on-one visiting.

At the beginning, there were only two or three guests - and I was starting to feel the pull of trying to "work the crowd" - when I saw someone out of the corner of my eye. It was my high school band director - who actually has known me since I was in fifth grade. My mom saw my look of shock/confusion (at that point I think I still thought Mrs. Long had just stopped by the church for some random reason during my shower) and came over and reminded me of her "committee." Apparently she had been sneaky and invited a few people from my past ...

Looking at the scrapbook with Mrs. Long.

Mrs. Long brought the band scrapbook from my senior year, which was hilarious to see again. It was amazing to see who had changed and who hadn't, and we chatted a bit about who was doing what, living where, had gotten engaged, married, etc. (Facebook is quite the tool for keeping up with old high school bandmates!)

Catching up with Frau Baker.

And then I saw another person enter the room: Frau Baker, my German teacher for four years of high school. The funniest part about seeing Frau Baker again was that when she hugged me she said, "Brigitte! So good to see you again!" Brigitte was the German name I adopted for class for at least three years. (One year I tried to change it to Amrei because I thought Amrei was edgy and different). But Brigitte was the name that stuck. Sometimes Frau would "slip up" and call me Kerstin, which would be the more direct German translation of my real name, but it amazed me that after almost 11 years, she still called me Brigitte. She also wrote my card in German, and I had to translate it. Whew. Talk about being on the spot.

While I was trying to recover from my shock, and my sister was catching up with Mrs. Long and Frau Baker (Marti also has extensive histories with both teachers), I saw another person standing near the door. She looked familiar, but I didn't place her at first. Then my mom said, "Do you remember Paranoid Spice?"

Ahhh, yes. During my senior year of high school, the newspaper staff had given ourselves names of Spice Girls. We had Sporty Spice (the lone jock on staff), Baby Spice (a dead ringer for the real Baby Spice), Spelling Spice (a dear friend who struggled with spelling in his articles), Scary Spice (my menancing co-editor in chief), and we called our advisor Old Spice :) Until she started fighting us on semi-controversial issues and we had to convince her that she wouldn't be suspended/we wouldn't be sued/the newspaper wouldn't be banned if we printed this article or did that interview. That's when Old Spice became Paranoid Spice.

Mrs. Mast (aka Paranoid Spice) was one of the greatest influences of my entire academic career. She never lost faith in me and pushed me to become a better writer, designer, editor and leader. I was on staff for four years, and I was an editor or the editor for at least two of those years, so I spent a lot of time in the newspaper office and with Mrs. Mast. We had a small staff, so there was a lot of one-on-one time. I went to journalism camp partly because of Mrs. Mast. Opportunities were opened for me at Kent State because of Mrs. Mast and what she pushed me to do. To say she shaped my journalistic career would be an understatement, and I will be forever grateful for all that she helped me with ... and while not every day on the newspaper staff (or any newspaper staff, really) is sunshine and rainbows, I have a lot of fond memories from those years. And sadly, I don't know if anyone got a photo of me with Mrs. Mast at the shower.

The amazing part is the work my mom had to do to track these people down. I'd lost touch with Mrs. Mast (I blame it on the fact that she lives in Amish country and like to joke that I send e-mails, not carrier pigeons, plus I never make it back to the high school anymore). My mom ended up tracking her down through a fellow church member who teaches at the high school (he was actually the yearbook advisor when I was in high school, and the newspaper staff shared an office with the yearbook staff). I hadn't seen Frau Baker in at least five years, when I ran in to her at a graduation party. My mom had originally tried to contact her by calling her brother. And Mrs. Long is one of my little brother's teachers, so she was easy to track down.

My mom corresponded with them through invitations dropped off at the high school and e-mails. I don't think I ever would have suspected that there would be surprise guests at the shower.

Thanks for everything, Mom! :)

And now, the not-so-surprising parts of the shower, illustrated with lots of photos:

My grandma, sister, hostess mom, me and Elle.

The shower was held at my mom's church, and we invited family (both mine and Tim's) and some of my closest friends. The shower was quite a drive away from most of Tim's family, but his mom made the trek across the state and survived getting lost to join us :)

Tim's mom and I.

I hadn't seen my cousins Linda, Melissa (who drove in from PA) and Sharon (shown here with my grandma)
in quite some time. It was great to see them again!

My sister assisted in the opening and record-keeping of gifts.
Here, I open a gift from my friend Sara. I was laughing because
the card contained the three bobby pins I'd lent her the night before :)

I got to help pick out the cake :) It was delish!

I spent a good chunk of my weekend with my closest high school friends :)

Lindsey, me (holding the doll that was part of the shower game), Sara, Jen and Megan.

I also got to see some of my favorite college friends (Aimee just wanted to make sure she didn't go two years in a row without seeing me ...)

Aimee, me and Claudia.

And Elle received a ton of awesome gifts. This girl now has quite a wardrobe, including sunglasses, sleepers, bibs and the cutest dresses you've ever seen. She also got outfits for every holiday courtesy of Aunt Marti, some adorable toys, towels and books and a bouncy seat that I think she'll love. Because I had to travel back to Florida via plane, I was a bit concerned about how to get everything back ... but luckily, a lot of people also gave gift cards, which travel extremely well :) And the clothes and toys didn't take up much space, so I was able to get everything back to Florida in my oversized suitcase plus one large box that we shipped while I was still in Ohio. It arrived in Florida two days after I did :) Now I just have to put together the dresser so I can put away some of her awesome clothes!

It was a great shower, and we truly feel blessed by all of the people already in Elle's life and their generosity. It seems our little girl's arrival is highly anticipated by a lot of people!

Buggin' out at a baby shower

Earlier this month, I was quite busy preparing for an important event: a baby shower for my friend, Kate, and her husband, Mike. Kate and Mike (shown above, with the gift of hot pink baby crocs) work with me, but I met Kate through our craft group a few months ago. Kate and Mike are expecting twin girls in August, so fellow craft grouper Lisa and I co-hosted a shower for them. And you know showers involve food, so I was eager to bake for the joyous occasion.

Early in the planning, Lisa and I (that's us below, as the shower was wrapping up) tried to decide on a shower theme. We thought about the extremely girlish possibilities. We considered the twin theme ideas. But then we started tossing around a theme of "cute bugs." In the end, the cute bug theme wasn't a huge part of the shower, but it gave us a starting point, and Kate loved it. (It must be noted that Kate - you know, the one expecting two little GIRLS - is not a huge fan of pink. So we've been quite careful to not over-pink her, but it's kinda hard when there are baby princesses on the way!) Cute bugs such as butterflies, ladybugs and dragonflies were mentioned. We decided to echo the nursery colors (light, light pink and sage green) with the shower decorations. (We later minimized the decorations as the shower was in a pavilion right off the water and it. was. windy.)

After the theme was decided, we discussed shower cakes. Knowing my background and love of cake decorating, I was appointed Cake Master. Lisa was my supreme guidance giver, as I sent her ideas I found on the internet. (Let me tell you: "Cute" bugs can be downright SCARY looking.) Then I narrowed it down to two ladybug cake options. Then I decided to extend the pink/green color scheme to the cakes, so instead of traditional red and black ladybugs, we had pink and green ones.

Cute bugs? Check. Shower colors for the cute bugs? Check. And as our guest list grew, we decided it was best to have TWO cakes - twin bugs! - for the shower.

So the week before the shower, I mapped out my game plan. I baked the yellow cake one night after work. I started icing it the next morning as I baked the chocolate cake and made some cookies. The next morning, I worked on decorating the chocolate cake. That night (Friday night), I came home and made another batch of cookies and finished up the cakes.

Whew!

For a while, the cakes looked like fuzzy watermelons. But in the end, I think they came out well, and I was glad to have a hand-made part in Kate and Mike's shower. The cakes were cute, but no where near as cute as Kate with her "Mom to be" button on. Or as cute as Mike holding up booties that were the size of his ears. Or as cute as all of the PINK clothes and blankets those little girls got.

The girls are scheduled to arrive on August 11, and I CANNOT wait to meet them. Kate and Mike are going to be awesome parents, and those girls are going to be spoiled to pieces.