Washington Baby Shower

My mom and Lisa Sharp threw the most beautiful baby shower for me. It was a carnival theme because they know how much I love animals. 

The pictures are in no particular order!

You can see the sign in the back that says "Big Top". It was perfect.

Kerstin, Claire, Jeanne

Janalee, Julie, and Debbie

Mom talking about me and introducing everybody at the shower

The beautiful planner - Lisa

Cieara

Tanya and MacKenzie

Dinner was served as a baked potato bar! DELICIOUS. There were baked potatoes or sweet potatoes. It was all so delicious

Gifts!

Beautiful table settings

When I was little, my mom made me this wonderful circus cake. She recreated it here in a different manner to make the actual circus top. 

Marcia

Mom helping me open gifts 

Theresa! This is my belly buddy. I started talking to her on my BabyBump forum and we became belly buddies. We send each other gifts at certain milestones, and we talk all the time. We have the exact same due date of September 4th. She lives in Lynnwood so I got to meet her! HOW COOL! This is the first time I've met her. :)

More gifts...

and more gifts...

and MORE gifts! Gotta love it!

MacKenzie

Lisa's husband and son filled up all of these balloons to help create the carnival/circus atmosphere

Lynda

All the drinks

Mom

Jenny

Alexa and Elyse

Kessia and Nariah

Nina and Bexter

A popcorn machine!

The girls in my family lip synced "Thank heaven for little girls" and danced. It was cute.

Up close of the yummy cupcakes!

Popcorn!

The entire party

After we let the balloons go!

And the end.

The party was excellent. I loved every minute of it. Thanks again mom and Lisa for doing a spectacular job!

WASHINGTON!

My mom said she would throw me a baby shower in WA, so she flew Eric and I up and we had a grand ole time! Eric had to come on Friday - I left Wednesday night - as he needed to finish working. I just worked from home Thursday and Friday. Love that about my job.

The night I got up there, my whole family headed off to Las Margaritas. SO GOOD. It is by far my favorite mexican restaurant. Alexa had flown in earlier that day and it was so fun to see her too!

Andrew was sitting next to me and would take a napkin, and put a pile of chips on it. Then he would sprinkle salt and then pepper over them. Then, that wasn't good enough, so he opened up the sugar packets and placed sugar on each chip. I couldn't control my laughter at this point. And then... he picks one up and puts it near my mouth. He says, "Taste it - it's sweet." I was dying. The kid is hilarious.

I found this gem at my house. The lady is my mom and the rest of the boys are her friends. Half of them look like my dad looked when he was young. Alexa and I asked if these were all her lovers and that is why she married dad (ya know, cuz they all kinda look like him in some way). She assures us they are not but that they are like my "mormon boys". 

Washington is by far one of the most beautiful places on Earth. And by Washington, I mean the Western half. :)

The weather was so beautiful. It was nice to be out of Utah's bipolar weather for a while. It snowed here this morning... that's right... SNOWED. Goodness.

I took this picture of a random stranger on my walk to David's house. I sent it to Eric while he was in Utah still and said, "jealous?" He wants one of these so badly. 

Friday rolled around, and I picked up Eric from the airport. We then went to dinner with MacKenzie and Jarad at... LAS MARGARITAS! Two times in one trip? YES PLEASE!

The next day we went shooting at the range, saw my granddad, and ate lunch at Costco with my dad. We also stopped at the John Deere store for some parts, and Eric told me all the things we HAD to have.

That night was the baby shower. Next post will be all about it. :)

Sunday we went to church, ate a baked potato/pot roast dinner with the family, then headed down to Stephanie and JD's apartment to eat dessert and see where they live. Monday morning, we flew out. 

Isabelle is SO smily. You just look at her and she smiles. Adorable.

At my baby shower, some people contributed to a group gift of this AMAZING stroller - the city mini in GREEN. :)

Because it was about an inch too big for either suitcase Eric and I brought, I pushed it around the airport with my luggage instead of with a baby. I'm just practicing. :) People kept asking, "um... where's your baby?" Eric would stop and go "OH NO!" HAHA

I definitely miss Washington. 

Nesting

So... I don't know when nesting is supposed to start for pregnant women, but it's already started here! haha Eric continually tells me we need to start food storage. My answer? When he organizes the crawl space (everything into clear buckets and onto shelves), we can have one. His response: oh that's right...

So I put it in his calendar that we would clean out the crawl space. We tried for days to do it but kept running into other projects to do first. So general conference weekend, I tackled the first part of cleaning it. Putting everything into a "place" and section, so we can easily go down there together and go through it all. Mostly ALL of the camping stuff Eric owns.

Before: 

Under our kitchen

Under the stairs

Under our dining room - AFTER I had already moved some stuff haha

Under the living room

After:

Under the kitchen 

That whole back corner is FULL of camping stuff. AND...we just got Eric's other stuff out of Natalie and Ethan's crawl space, and now my garage is full of MORE camping stuff. I'm calling my husband a hoarder. 

Under the dining room

Under the living room

Now... we need to go through EVERYTHING and throw it away, have a yardsale or keep it in nice clear buckets. Can't wait until it's all organized. I LOVE being organized and not being organized is driving me NUTS. Especially now. 

Well... back to that whole nesting thing...before we went on vacation, I did all of our laundry and needed Eric to help me go through all of our clothes. I haven't given away clothes since I was 12. Why would I? They all still fit! My sister said, "BECAUSE IT ISN'T THE 90s ANYMORE!" HAHA

Eric hasn't given away clothes since at least high school and so our closet was entirely too full.

The pile started like this...

Then grew to this...

To give you a better idea... that piles equals SIX black trash bags. :)

Besides all of that, Eric has put up additional shelves in most of the rooms, and I've been plugging away at changing the craft room into our new guest room and the old guest room into the nursery. Needless to say... I'm throwing away a lot. 

I kinda love this nesting thing.