Baby shower invite

As a favor to a friend, I put together invitations for her niece's baby shower. Here's what should be the final draft. Babies, babies, everywhere...and LOTS of girls!

Cute though, right? She loves animals and picked baby giraffes for her shower theme.

I'm considering starting a side Etsy business--invites, announcements, that sort of thing. Just stuff that I can design and have printed [by someone else] rather than re-living our wedding invitations fiasco of 2008. The pains of dealing with an inkjet printer that liked to crunch paper and needed ink refills constantly--not to mention paper cutters and vellum issues and trying to have the monstera leaf on the insert cards line up just so--evidently last longer than labor pains. Who would have thought it? The computer I used for these is limited to Paint and Microsoft Publisher...I can do a lot more with my normal software programs. (There's more I would have liked to do with these, like have the polka dot pattern slightly show through under the text.

Oh well, just a thought. If anything develops out of it, I shall let ya'll know. There's a lot of competition in the Etsy market, after all.

I like it. I love it.

The Hubs showed me how to use his digital SLR camera yesterday. I've become a little--er--photo obsessed since the birth of our adorable little girl. Like most new mommies, I don't just want pictures. I want good pictures of Kaelyn as she grows. So it was only natural that I ask my very talented hubby to give me a crash course. I had taken 2 photography classes before so the terminology was familiar, but I had just never really utilized the concepts and techniques. When she starts sitting unassisted (and when the average daytime temperature is not 3 digits), I'm sure I'll get better photos. Right now, Little has to either lie down or be propped up. I'm also learning tricks in Photoshop, but have to fine-tune these skills a bit. A few of the highlights:

No smoke monster allowed.

It looks a bit like the island on Lost, minus the "Others," plane wreckage, smoke monster, and polar bears. (To see polar bears, you'd need to step to the left into Kaelyn's nursery.) The best part? It's finished. It's been a "labor of love" for the past several weeks. I started it while still on maternity leave and have been using weekend time to get it done. This past Saturday alone, I worked on it from about 10am to about 7pm and finally finished it on Sunday. Now I'm so excited that the time we spend in here won't be spent painting the mural, but playing!

It's a bit empty right now, but will definitely be filled up with toys soon enough. We have plans to gradually fill it with a ball pit, a rocking horse (or puppy, which I found on Amazon), a slide, a table and chairs set, etc., etc. For now, here's Kaelyn's playroom! To start, here are a couple of BEFORE photos...

...and now, a little tour :)

It's a bit brighter, yes?

Looking at the sliding glass doors leading to nursery (left) and guest room (right). We put the paper lanterns from our wedding in here because Kaelyn loves to look at them! She has her own custom surfboard too...

Looking the other direction toward the nursery. See her macaw next to her door? I think I'll call him Hugo ;)

In this corner, we have a toucan! He's probably my favorite thing in the mural.

Another look at this corner. The Hubs hung up the stuffed animal net in the corner and is going to put another in the other outside corner. You may also notice a momma and baby dolphin swimming toward the beach...

Don't mind the step stool--it's not staying ;) Turtles!

Room with a view. You can tell how big this room is by how little Kaelyn and I look. I just got that toy organizer behind me (it's much bigger in person) yesterday--it's great for organizing stuff and clearing off the floor. Speaking of the floor, we got those foam floor tiles from Amazon.com. They definitely make the floor a little more cushy.

We'll post more photos when we get the bookcase and other things in there. We're definitely looking forward to spending a lot of time in this room, particularly during the summer when it's too hot to play outside!