Birthday celebration

On November 29th, I officially celebrated my golden birthday (29 on the 29th). Of course, we had our baby shower on that day and then we had a great dinner with Donna and Mark at Players, a great restaurant in Cleveland. Then yesterday, we celebrated with family in Rochelle.

We headed to my Mom and Randy's house for a fabulous lunch of some of my favorite foods, along with some yummy cake. It was great! Although we lost a few folks because of being sick, we got to hang out with a few nephews - Luke (for a bit), Noah, and Dylan - and our niece, MaKayla.

Of course, they are all so cute and growing like weeds these days. I took a few photos, like this one of Dylan in his fun winter hat. Unfortunately, I missed the highly entertaining moment when Noah rolled away with his blanket in his hand, making himself into a giant blue taco. It was pretty funny! MaKayla also modeled her new coat for me for a minute!

Click on the link if you'd like to see all of the pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/laura.wilmarth/LauraS29thBirthday#.

Aside from all of the birthday fun, we also spent the weekend on our continued quest to prepare our house for baby. We went to Babies 'R' Us and used some of our shower money/ gift cards to purchase things like a Pack 'N Play and accessories. Who knew that babies could be so expensive! When we got home, I tried to keep up with my goal of washing all of the baby stuff we'll need to get started. Now, I admit that I've heard lots of people comment on how much laundry babies make, but I can't BELIEVE how many loads of laundry I've done in the past week. This kid already has more washable stuff than Joe and I combined!

While I was hard at work on baby stuff, Joe was a rock star and put up our Christmas tree. This is the tree that Dan and Agi gave us, as they're downsizing this year. It's a beautiful tree and it's huge! If you want to come get lost in the forest we once called the dining room, feel free to drop by for a visit ;) Here's a picture of me at 34 weeks next to our tree. You can't quite capture the size of the tree from this... but you get the idea. It looks great!