the weekend that had about 5 days in it , or seemed to!

Friday was a crazy busy day with all that back and forth with Liberia, while planning for a baby shower for Hannah on Saturday, rescheduling Sopheak's flights so Malachi could fly back to LAX with her, planning out the music of Praise and Worship for Sunday, recovering a diaper bag in Marine uniform BDU fabric and patches as one of Hannah's gifts, tentatively booking my own flights, and getting the house all in order for a 2 week absence by the Mamma, and decorating the cake.
Hannah


requested that I do for her shower. NOT JUST ANY CAKE, but the GIFT BOX cake. I saw this done some years ago and recreated it for several showers after that. The idea stuck with Hannah. She told me years ago, and then quite recently that she wanted one for her first baby shower. Bake 3 9x 13 cakes, let them cool, make your favorite butter cream frosting recipe (mine uses real butter and coconut extract rather than the traditional vanilla) separate the frosting into bowls for dying your choice of colors.
Cut the cakes into squares and rectangles somewhere in the 2x2 3x2, 3x3 size range and frost each "gift box" one at a time , using decorator tubes and various frosting tips, decorate each "gift box" with frosting ribbons and bows. Arrange the cake pieces on a large tray as you decorate, so that you eventually have a pile of gifts as the finished product. What's the hard part beside the time it all takes? The "raw edges" of the cake pieces crumble and the frosting tends to slide right off, looking just like a mudslide!!!! For a person with perfectionist tendencies, this is a stressor !!! IT did turn out just fine, but not until I had picked on myself for quite a while!! I got the diaper bag done about an hour before we left for the shower. OYE!
Piles of Presents shower cake

Marine Camo diaper bag!!



The shower was a lot of fun!!! New friends, co-workers, local friends and family, relatives visiting from Guam, Sopheak here from Cambodia, a childhood friend from Louisiana who also lives her too...........all celebrating the upcoming arrival of Baby Charlie David. What a great group!!!
The day continued with a bar-be-que at our favorite lake spot for Malachi's 21st birthday and sort of farewell party for Sopheak who leaves, sadly enough, next Thursday...... So from one big gathering of mostly chick pals to this gathering of mostly guy pals but our big family and one of our very best friend's families as well ,I think we partied with nearly 70 people by the time we put up the bbq tools at the end of the day!! We played a couple of tradtional games at the shower and then one crazy game that had us all in stitches. HAVE YOU EVER PLAYED THIS ONE???
4 players are selected to race against each other. They are instructed to slide a potato into the leg of a pair of panty hose, and to tie the other leg around their waists. The potato now hangs down in front of each player, like a pendulum. The game?? An orange is placed in front of each player, and a finish line marked off about 5 feet away: the object being to see who can swing and sway their hula hoop hips to make that potato in the stocking leg bat the orange across the finish line first.
It was so hysterical, and not as easy as the players first thought it would be. Esther won the first race, but laughed herself silly in the process!!
Playing "The Game"


At the beach, volley ball was the main event but dousing each other in cups of water was a close second! And Malachi................ I KNOW its not proper to start a sentence with "and", but its my blog.................This boy, this young man is the only person I know who makes opening a 99 cent box of colored Goldfish crackers a fun event!! He and Sopheak had taken the younger children shopping for his birthday gifts the day before so they'd pick right (with a dollar or so each, hard to go too wrong at the candy/beef jerky check out section of the store) Gag gifts of course, and a preponderance of underwear, some Khmer cds from Sopheak, a great pounded metal gecko for his wall from Cambodia as well, serious clothes and a gift card to Red Lobster completed his gifts. It was all so much fun!!!!

gifts from Sopheak

Malachi who makes everything fun!


in the lake

Leah and friend Abby watch the swimmers


The evening continued with a request from Casey for permission to marry Esther, about two miniutes after "the talk" she released a bulk text message to tell her world that he'd asked and she'd accepted; no date set till her family knows Casey better and her dad gives his blessing. Sunday she and Casey were in church and she was sporting very proudly Casey's gramma's engagement ring on her finger. What can you do with all that but go eat pizza at your favorite pizza place after church????????????? What Esther had not told us when they came out to the lake was that when she was painting in her bathroom she fell and her foot went right through the toilet lid, into the (thankfully CLEAN) bowl, and slid so fast and hard that her foot got stuck!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! In typical, practical, just-like-her-mamma-fashion, when she realized that she was stuck, that her phone didn't have service at the moment, that her roommates were all gone and Casey was helping a friend at Lowe's, she reached for the roller and continued to paint until someone came back to the house!!! Well, upshot was she may have broken a bone in her foot. When she did get it unstuck, it was bruised and swollen and sore!! After our pizza lunch together, Casey took Esther to the walk in clinic for an exam. We'll know today if she broke something, but for now she's in an air cast and she is sore. Hannah and I took advantage of having Charlie's truck, Hannah's day off from work and everybody else around to keep my mom company while they watched "Legally Blonde" and we drove to "The City" aka Oklahoma City, to Babies R Us to pick out car seats, maybe a stroller and other baby goodies. Esther was not walking anywhere but the clinic, my mom had taken something for a headache and said she was just going to fall asleep during the movie anyhow..................Fun afternoon, a "Father of the Bride part 2" kind of afternoon if you've ever seen that movie...Married daughter gets pregnant with her first baby, Mom thinks her body is acting a bit oddly, turns out she's pregnant too. The story is their multi-generational pregnancies and births in a zany love filled family. Yah, that's us, with an adoptive twist, but like that. The Grampa in our story says he wants a photo of his new son and his new grandson together in his arms when they are crying and fussing. He is going to call it his "Charlie Daniel Band" and he plans to send a photo to THE Charlie Daniels who does have a band by that name!!! Life is so rich and so blessed. Even when things take a turn we don't expect or that we don't want, it is so peace granting to know that God had it all planned; there were no surprises in His script, no unplanned events, or "Plan B" events. The weekend was not only full of the expected but the unexpected, a few speedbumps run over a bit too quickly, causing a few jerks of the necks, but God's love prevails!