it'd be plagiarism if i didn't write this

so, the halloween costumes. aren't they cute?

i have to admit, my mom and my sister are mostly responsible for that. i bought the most difficult patterns i could find (by accident, of course. i just happen to be attracted to the most complex or the most expensive of anything. it's a curse) and then i pinned and cut out the lion pattern. then everyone got sick and my mother sewed everything.

all i did was cut out the ribbons and sew them on. until my mom and i thought about it for a minute, realized that seth wasn't going to be able to reach the ribbons in the back of the hood and we glued them on.

so i didn't really do all that much, my mom did.

and isn't she amazing???

a month of birthdays

ava and seth's birthdays fall two weeks apart and, two weeks after that, my parents birthdays fall only a week apart. so for about a month, we are chin-high in birthdays. this means that at dinners end, when we begin to pull out the birthday candles (or, in my parent's situation, the matches since we ran out of birthday candles), ava climbs into the lap of the birthday person and prepares herself for the blowing out of candles. lucky for her, the birthday people are also her grandparents. i can't think of anyone else who would be more willing to hand over a birthday than ava's grandparents. oh wait: i can: her other grandparents.

want to hear the story of my dad's birthday cake? i was comissioned to make it and looked for something with lemons since i somehow had a million lining the walls of my fridge. i have no idea why that happened, it just did. so i settled on a lemon pound cake with a cream cheese glaze. and then i made it. and it looked (smelled) really good. so i put one on a plate for presentation purposes and put the second in a tupperware container for backup purposes. then we got in the car to head to my parent's house. miraculously, i remembered the cakes, my camera, pajamas, extra diapers, camera battery, the proper lens, blah, blah, blah. . .as we turned the corner to exit our street something made an awful scraping noise and then there was a dull thud on the street behind our little care.

great, i thought. my engine just fell out.

now that i think about it, that was a very drastic thought to have. do you want to know what it was? the cake in tupperware of course. do you want to know what's sad? i lost the keys to my mother's suburban on the freeway the EXACT SAME WAY only a month ago.

really? REALLY? WILL I EVER LEARN?

let's just all be grateful that it wasn't seth that i stuck on the roof of the car and forgot to take down.

so i arrived with one lovely lemon cake presented nicely on a plate and one ugly cake that looked like someone had thrown it from a moving car. . .which is sort of (exactly) what happened. good thing i have a really cute daughter. the way to make that situation a good one is simply this: give the 3-year-old the cake and have her carry it in. worked like a charm when i brought home two chickens without discussing it with ryan first. what? i was perfectly willing to take them back just in case he thought it was a terrible idea! don't judge me.

the following is what happens when you don't get your way at grandma and grandpa's house:

happy birthday, mom and dad.