We haven’t done anything exciting lately. Since Bob is his own boss he’s been sleeping in until 11 and working on evenings and weekends. I’m absolutely thrilled about this.

Not.

Since we have nothing fun to share, here is my ode to cleaning! WOOHOO! (Seriously, tell Bob to stop working on weekends so I can write about something more fun). Oh, he’d probably want me to tell you he isn’t ignoring me. He did take me out for BBQ on Friday night, but ya’ll don’t want to hear about dinner.

When I was snowed-in 2 weeks ago I cleaned the kitchen. Majorly cleaned the kitchen. My baking dishes drove me crazy because if I wanted the item on the bottom of the pile, I had to cause an avalanche to get to it. Colorado has already seen a lot of avalanches this season so I didn’t like creating more.

I found vertical pan organizers on clearance at Michael’s so I bought two and went to town on organizing the cabinet. It is MUCH easier to navigate now!

I also wanted to clean out my oven and thanks to Pinterest, learned that baking soda and water work wonders.

Before:

I mixed enough water in baking soda to make it as runny as Elmer’s glue and painted it on the oven. This was quite fun, actually. Look out, Picasso! My work was very abstract. I call it “Grease Be Gone”.

I let it sit for 30 minutes and with a little extra elbow grease, I ended up with this:

It’s the little things that make me happy: ice cream, Paco beating up Wellesley,and an overly clean and organized kitchen.

Bob kept complaining about a hole in his coat pocket so I decided to fix it.

He wouldn’t let me just sew the hole back up and insisted I make a whole new pocket with new fabric. I didn’t sign up for that. I told him I wasn’t making a special trip to the fabric store to get a matching color pocket and he had to deal with whatever fabric I had at home so I picked the prettiest fabric I could find on my shelf.

He is now the proud owner of a pretty pocket in a manly leather jacket. He didn’t even flinch when he saw it.

Bob was out of town over the weekend and I normally like to work on a project that involves power tools while he’s away but I didn’t have any big ideas this time so I cleaned the house and did Martha Stewart-ish things.

First, I made a paper owl paper bag. Who loves you? Owl always love you (ya know, the title of that Whitney Houston song. Too soon for a Whitney pun?)

Then I made conversation heart cookies. Pardon the lumps in the icing.

Lastly, I made red velvet cupcakes and I even made the decorative tooth pick things from scrap booking stuff that I had.

I don’t understand what the big deal is about red velvet cake. You never hear anybody say “Oh I LOVE vanilla! It is sooooo good!” But folks seem to drool over red velvet. Are there any southerners out there that can tell me what the big deal is? Perhaps it is because southerners like to make cakes in the shape of armadillos and raccoons and other roadkill so the red makes them look more realistic when the cake is cut open.

I hope ya’ll have a wonderful day full of sweets tomorrow!

My friend Jen welcomed her son, Maxwell David into the world at 11:59 last night. She had a scheduled c-section this morning but Max wanted to meet mommy and daddy sooner, so he decided to come early.

I can’t handle the cuteness and I may have cried at my desk this morning when I saw his sweet face.

It is weird to think that 20 years ago Jen and I were playing house with dolls, and now it is real.

Welcome to the world, Max!

Bob and I adore little Liam and for Christmas we decided to take photos of him to be framed and given to his parents. The first hurdle was finding a way to steal him without his parents knowing that we were taking photos, so we jumped at the chance to babysit him while they attended a Christmas party.

We had to decide what types of photos we wanted. I thought a little vest and tie would be sweet for his mom. Bob saw visions of Superman flying around in his head, so we ordered an outfit for each vision.

Bob didn’t want to just photograph Liam in a Superman outfit. No sirree. Superman needed to FLY! So we schemed for about 2 weeks to figure out a way to suspend Liam and we ended up buying 2 dog harnesses.I know. Worst babysitters ever.

When it came down to it, we couldn’t fathom putting such a sweet baby in a dog harness so don’t turn us in to CPS!

We had about 45 minutes to take photos before Liam’s bedtime, and he’s also a toddler on the move so I used every ounce of energy and every stupid face I could possibly muster up to keep him content and smiling in one spot.

Thank goodness he’s a happy kid to begin with!

Outtake #1. Chewing on my sweatshirt:

Outtake #2. Jen is making absurd faces and he’s appalled:

Outtake #3. Trying to hold him up so it looks like he’s flying. He wasn’t happy unless I was swinging him, which I couldn’t do because he had to stay still for the photo.

Outtake #4. Yummy fingers!

Here is the final photo of the handsome boy for mom:

And the strong superhero for dad:

We told our friends how we wanted to use the dog harnesses but couldn’t go through with it, to which they basically said “Dude, that would have been awesome! We can still try that sometime!”.