Friday, February 15, 2008

Stamping


I took today off to prepare for my first trip to Get Croppin's Cropbowl http://www.getcroppin.com/. It's a weekend of women gathering at the Dulles Expo to work on their scrapbook projects, take classes from fabulous teachers, hang out with your friends and meet new ones. The event starts on Friday night and runs through Sunday afternoon. My girlfriend, Trace Ann, went last year and invited us all to celebrate her birthday (Saturday), by attending this event all day Saturday.

I had to pack up all my tools, paper and class supplies that I would need for the day along with snacks and soda to help me last the day. Andrew was trying to "help" me get ready tonight and it was really not working so I thought I would try and distract him with some stamps. So I brought out all the cute litte ministampers I bought and the yellow ink (he's a sucker for anything yellow!) He bought it for at least a half an hour...all I needed to finish up and get ready for the big day tomorrow!



Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Eat your heart out Williams-Sonoma

My girlfriends and I took a cookie and cupcake decoration class at the local Williams Sonoma store last year. By all accounts, the techniques "taught" in the class were definitely made for people who have ALOT of time on their hands. For example, the instructor showed us how to "frame" the cookie with a outline of icing and then "color" the inside of the cookie. The catch here is that you have to wait 4-6 hours between the framing and coloring...who the heck has 4-6 hours to wait to frost cookies?

Fast forward to February...Andrew's class has a Valentines' Day party 2 days in a row and I signed up to bring cookies on Day 1. I totally fast tracked the whole outlining and coloring into 1 1/2 totalwith the help of a 4-year old. Check out how we did! The kids were definitely on a sugar high when I picked Andrew on Wednesday afternoon.


Icy wonderland

Yesterday we got another round of "wintery mix" and in Northern VA, wintery mix equals traffic nightmare. True to form, the road crews did not pretreat the roads and the commute home was a complete mess. It took Colin almost 4 hours to get home from DC. Dulles Toll Road had to be completely shut down so the road crews to get around to treating the roads so you could actually stay on the road.

It did make for a pretty picture of my tree in the front yard though..

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Bryce

Last night we went to have dinner at a friend's house. I worked with Andy at a small consulting firm before Andrew was born and we have kept in touch since we both left the company and moved on to other roles. Colin and I love hanging out with Caroline and Andy - we have such a great time and we definitely do not see them enough.

Caroline and Andy have 2 kids - Anna who is 7 going on 17 and Bryce who is almost a year younger than Andrew. We got to Caroline and Andy's house and Andrew sat in Colin's lap for about 2 hot seconds - until Caroline announced that there was a MOONBOUNCE IN THE BASEMENT. Well, that was it...Andrew jumped up and said "Come on, let's go downstairs to the moonbounce" After that, we did not see/hear those two boys unless the came up stairs on their way outside to the trampoline or the little drivable jeep. At 11:00 pm we had to pry Andrew away from playing with Bryce and take him home. The entire way home all he talked about his new friend Bryce and asked when he could play with him again.

Captain Curiosity

This morning Andrew started a class at Curiosity Zone http://www.curiosityzone.com/. Curiosity Zone is a store/science lab for kids and Andrew attended a birthday party there in December. I was totally impressed with what the "teachers" at the birthday party were able to do with 15-20 wild 4 and 5 year olds, so I was interested to see how Andrew would react to a class there. He LOVED it. The theme of this session's class is called Captain Curiosity and it's all about help the armadillo (Captain Curiosity) find a good place for his home. Today, they learned about ants and if the colony would be a good place for Captain Curiosity to build a home. They made ant hats with feelers so they could learn how ants communicate by rubbing their feelers against each other and carried food through tunnels like ants do. Andrew brought home a little book that they will fill up with pages during the class and he will NOT let it go. I cannot wait to see what they do next weekend.

Friday, February 1, 2008

Andrew's version of breakfast



This is what happens when Mommy is all wrapped up in getting organized for a weekend away. Andrew makes himself his own breakfast - pretzels and goldfish. Nutritious way to start the day!