birthday extravaganza

doesn't she look thrilled?

it was 1st birthday funday this weekend!  she had no idea what was going on, but she was excited to see friends and family and even more so to see cupcakes & cake pops!

my first pinterest project.  saw this & thought it looked easy enough for me to try and it worked!  they turned out really cute.

thanks to my sister and Jen we had little owl cake pop favors!  they turned out so cute and delicious too!

 

luckily the baking fairy has blessed both sides of our family!  my sister-in-law has done the cupcakes for every single one of emma's parties and now she keeps the tradition going with olivia's first party with these way too cute owl cupcakes!

 

olivia had no idea why everyone was singing to her and didn't know what to do with the candle.  she's lucky to have big sister around to help her blow it out.

 

she loves her food, but she's generous enough to share with cousin.

 

not too bad, but it was straight into the bathtub for her!

 

she was much more interested in opening presents than emma was at her age.  though the cards seemed to be much more fun than the presents until emma got them open for her!  she's clapping her thanks for all her great gifts.  she's one lucky girl!

we were able to get her down for a nap in the morning before the party and then one in the afternoon, but i think there was too much cupcake in her tummy.  she woke up in the evening pretty unhappy with all of us!  but today she was eying the leftover cupcakes already!

thank you to all of our friends and family who came out to help us celebrate!  we're so incredibly lucky to have all of you!

probably not your typical pinterest

Months ago my sister sent me an invite to join pinterest.  Once I signed on I mostly ignored it.  Sure the decorating ideas were great, but my house is never going to look like that.  NEVER.  And yeah, those nail polish ideas are super stellar but if I took the picture of the newsprint manicure to the woman who does my nails I'm pretty sure she'd punch me right in the solar plexus.  I'm already married, have already birthed my kids and decorated their rooms, don't garden, don't sew or do other crafts, I don't decorate cupcakes and I don't accessorize.

So really, why should I use this pinterest?

But I started pinning anyway.  Things that made me laugh or things that I wanted to remember to cook later.  Or photography ideas.  And I got hooked.

But I still felt kind of weird because people pin stuff like this:

And I pin shit like this:

'Cause damn it, when I saw this I really thought it was pin-worthy.  And I still do.

But I must be doing something right with my awkward pinning because in the last week I've been getting email alerts that so-and-so is following one or all of my boards.  And these are people I don't know IRL.  Or even in bloggie-land.

Part of me is flattered and highly entertained that someone got a kick out of something I pinned so much so that they wanted to make sure they caught other crap I found funny.  The other part of me feels slightly pressured to find junk to pin.

It's kind of like having followers on your blog.  Once you have followers who aren't relatives you feel an extreme amount of pressure to keep blogging.  My last seven posts were book reviews on the graphic novels I read this past week.  The last time I wrote a non-review post was on the 11th...quite some time ago.  But I promised myself this year that I would try really hard to review all the books I read this year.

And to be honest, I haven't felt like blogging.  I haven't had anything I wanted to talk about.  But I will try better.  I promise. 

In the meantime you can check out the rest of my tasteful and elegant pins here!