I’m so excited about my impending birthday party! We’re going to have a “Beach Birthday Brunch Bash” (I’m a sucker for alliteration.)

I’m keeping it pretty simple: We’re going to borrow a beachfront condo from one of Matt’s colleagues and head over to Galveston after sleeping in on a Saturday morning. We’ll spend the afternoon together just hanging out and relaxing (and probably watching TV, since we don’t have one at home, and it’s quite alluring!). On Sunday morning, we’ll sleep in again and then wake up and start cooking breakfast. We’ll ask one or two of our friends to arrive early to help make a frittata,

Matt used some of his Christmas money to pursue his newest passion: The Banjo. How exciting!

He ordered this one from Amazon and now spends his spare time watching instructional videos on YouTube. I love that he’ll be modeling a musical instrument and constant learning for our little boy. He hasn’t decided on his first real song yet. He wanted to go with Modest Mouse, but I begged him to pick something a) a little easier and b) that could be our baby’s song. I read this excerpt from Living Passages for the Whole Family: Celebrating Rites of Passage from Birth to Adulthood and have been thinking about our “baby’s

I’m way overdue on this recap of Matt‘s birthday party. Initially, he was going to host a Mexican fiesta in our backyard (with a bouncy house and taco truck), but he decided to pull together a last-minute scavenger hunt at IKEA instead.

Since we had already made way too many trips to IKEA to prepare for the baby’s arrival, we decided to write the scavenger hunt items without taking yet another tour through the store. Here’s what we came up with:

Take a photo of each of the following:
o five people sitting in a one-person chair (5) o a member holding a stack of fifteen pillows (5) o