Love you Bets! Can’t wait to meet your little girl!

Comics Dad – Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth, $23 – By Chris Ware, the most beautiful & depressing graphic novel ever.

Photography Dad – GorillaPod , $20-90 – Little portable camera tri-pods.

Typography Dad – Ampersandwich Tee, $23 – Typography t-shirt!

Reading Dad – Amazon Kindle, $114 – My sister & sister-in-law gave me one of these for my birthday, and it’s pretty cool. Great for commuters (at least the public transit kind)!

Vegan Dad – Vegan Dress Shoes, $39+ – Delicious shoes made of tofu! Mmm, comfortable!

Sporty Dad – Klipsch Earbuds, $97 – Put these in your head while you’re jogging!

Toy-Loving Dad – Parrot AR.Drone, $300 – Its a flying helicopter you control with your iPhone. Whaaa?

Cycling Dad – Chamois BUTT’r, $12 – Grease up your bottom, cause, um, things get burny after a while.

Coffee Snob Dad – Hario v60 Cone, $19 – For the true coffee engineer. Hat tip to @mic_dee for this recommendation!

DVD Dad – RipIt, $25 – Okay, also need to be a Mac dad. DVD ripping software, for putting all your DVDs on your computer.

And if all else fails, and the dad you’re shopping for is your husband, you know what to do. YOU KNOW. Wink. Nudge. Nudge. Toot. Cough.

After brunch Josh took Eleanor out for a while so I could relax with some peace and quiet watching Friday Night Lights on Hulu and getting a little work done. And then I decided to spend the rest of my day cleaning out my closet. Seriously. I really wanted to do it, and had been meaning to for a while. So, since it was my day to do what I want, I cleaned. I know, I have a problem.

Because Maria & Christian are so popular they had a total of five baby showers! Crazy! I was at two of them. One, thrown by our dad and step-mom, was a more traditional shower with blue booty decorations, cake, and gift opening.

The second was thrown by myself, our mom, and Maria’s friends Ariel, DaBin, and Mary! Thanks ladies! This one was more of an evening cocktail party that Christian could enjoy (he’s not a fan of traditional showers). It was baseball themed and I set up a photo booth for the guests!

You can see more photos in my post at Maggie Keegan Gross Photography!

And the Maternity Portraits will be coming soon! They are pretty amazing! I can’t wait to show you!

On the actual day of his birthday, we both skipped work and Eleanor was home from school. We started the day with a little hike. You’ve seen some of the photos already in Josh’s birthday post, but I’ve added a few you didn’t see.

We found a caterpillar on our way home and helped it to get across the street and into some bushes.

Then we headed to lunch and a movie (Rio was great, we recommend it, Eleanor loved it). After the movie we stopped at the Apple store to pick up Josh’s birthday present. I didn’t want to buy him the wrong thing so I let him pick it out. He got that fancy Magic Mouse. Which was greatly needed since his mouse just died on him.

After shopping we came home for a nap for Eleanor and some light cleaning for us. I know, cleaning on the poor man’s birthday! Terrible! But his dad and step-mom were coming over to babysit and I just think it’s rude to have a messy house when you have guests.

We went out to a nice little dinner at a local Italian place where we had wine and lasagna and decided it was finally time to start trying for baby number two. We sobered up (we are such lightweights these days) across the street over coffee and desserts at Starbucks. Then brought a mini cupcake home to share with Eleanor.

I think it was a lovely way to spend a 30th birthday.

Thank you for being the fantastical momma that you are. You are the engine that makes our family GO, even when you have to drag us behind you like broken-down trailers. You are our fearless leader, and we will follow you wherever you think we should go, unless we are feeling very tired and then maybe we’ll just sit on the couch for a little while. But you will be there too, and I will have your baby get your booties because your feet are probably cold. Also, ice cream? Because even if your feet are cold, ice cream is a good idea.

So today is your day, to do mommy things, or to more likely not, depending on you how feel. Maybe Mother’s Day really means No Mothers Day, because the mommas can all disappear from mothering, and we should all remember how nice it was to have a momma to momma us, and we will write poems, make brunches, draw cards to convince them to come back for another year. And in the meantime, you can just be a Person, who may or may not continue to momma this family, depending on the quality and quantity of our toadying and the majesty of our tribute, and you can just chill, and watch some Weeds or 30 Rock or something, or maybe just banish your subjects from sight because those guys are like ALWAYS here doing stuff and it gets old. So old.

But hopefully we can show you that sticking around for another year really is a terrific idea, or that at least you’ll break-even, because look at all the hilarious stuff we can do!, and you wouldn’t need to find any packing boxes. And also I made you this food! Yum!

Now, we put our heads together and made a list of your finest qualities, all of which we’ve witnessed in person, so the people can believe that they are bona fide, but I left it with your daughter and now suddenly as if by magic it is disappeared and while I don’t believe her story that the shadows on the sun took it and then gave it to the bubbles bubbles bubbles with the spider and now its in the tree on her wall (with the pink owl) and we can’t get it anymore, I haven’t pressed her. But because I am all grown up and have lived with you for like a long time now, I can still remember most of them, some being 1. you are the sweetest 2. the most positive 3. the most reasonable 4. most smartest and 5. most loving momma in our family. So thanks for that. “Daddy, say ‘Good Job!’” she says to me. To say to you.

Good Job!

Happy Mother’s Day!

And we love you.

Last Monday we went to Josh’s Aunt’s house for the annual family Seder.

I know that many people aren’t very familiar with Jewish holidays. When we went to Disneyland for Eleanor’s birthday in December we overheard a tour guide explaining Hanukkah to the crowd as if it was some exotic foreign holiday. It was pretty funny. We assumed the tour was full of Midwesterners who had only seen Jews on tv.

If you don’t know what a Seder is, please read about it, this Wikipedia Article on Passover Seders gives a really good explanation.

Don’t worry! We didn’t give her any wine! That’s white grape juice she’s drinking.

Eleanor is excited to be the only small kid in the family. She get’s the find the Afikomen the every year. The Afikomen is the half-piece of matzo which is broken at the start of the Seder and then hid for the children to find. The meal doesn’t end until it is found and traded back to the adults. It’s usually traded for money or a small gift. This year Eleanor got Seder plate fridge magnets.

I’ve decided that we’ll do our own, more casual, Seder next year! I just love Passover, one Seder a year is not enough!

She had just gotten up from a late nap and was lying on our bed while we got ready. Josh had said that she felt a little warm and seemed like she didn’t feel well when she woke up. But we were concerned about getting out of the house on time that we didn’t really think about it.

I laid down next to her to see how she was and ask her to get changed so we could leave. She sat up, made a sad face, and then starting vomiting! On our bed! Yikes! The poor girl! After she was done, she still wanted to go out to dinner and was pretty disappointed when we told her that we had to stay home because she was sick.

After we had changed her out of her vomit clothes and cleaned up the bed, and put the bedspread and everything into the washing machine, I finally remembered to call my mom and tell her we weren’t going to dinner. But by the time I called, everyone was on their way downtown. So, they had a delicious dinner in honor of my birthday, while Josh and I stayed home taking care of a kid who was throwing up every 45 minutes or so. Happy birthday to me!

We did have a fun evening though, camping in the living room. I didn’t want to leave my poor sick girl all alone in her room and I really didn’t want anymore vomit in our bed, so I decided that we would all sleep together in the living room. I put down a bunch of blankets for us and brought our pillows out and let Eleanor stay up late watching Princess and the Frog.

photo taken with my iphone, processed with the Hipstamatic App

photo taken with my iphone, processed with the Hipstamatic App

She pretty much thought it was the most fun thing we ever did and now asks if we can campout in the living room every night!

p.s. She stopped throwing up by bedtime was pretty much fine by the middle of the next day. Weird 24 hour flu or maybe food poisoning.

Aleks, our editor extraordinaire, put together a little party to celebrate the first issue. She said that it was always a dream of hers to get dressed up in prom attire and go bowling. And because she has some amazing friends who seem to be up for anything, they made it happen!

We had a fantastic evening of drinks, donuts, and of course bowling!

me, taken with my iphone

You can read more about the fun over at the blog of my dear friend, Susan Fujiki (pictured directly above in the black & hot pink), The Tatami Mat 4.0: Part One, Part Two, Part Three.

The morning of my birthday we went out to breakfast at The Egg Plantation with my dad, step-mom, brothers William and Elliott, and Elliott’s girlfriend Lily.

photo taken with my iphone

Apparently, my choice of restaurant was perfect, because they give you a free breakfast on your birthday! And the coffee is good! Score!

After breakfast we said goodbye to the family and went on a little craft store shopping trip for some Valentines supplies. And then to pick up some birthday cupcakes, because according to Eleanor, birthdays=cupcakes, of course!

We tried out a new cupcake place in town, Bake You Happy. It’s very cute and the cupcakes are awesome, and I don’t even like cake!

We shared a banana cupcake there, soooo good! And brought three more home for my birthday night dessert!

Later in the day Josh and Eleanor gave me my birthday gifts!

Josh got me a book I’ve been wanting for a long, long time. It’s a collection from my favorite photographer, Cindy Sherman’s series, “Untitled Film Stills.” They are a series of amazing self-portraits. I’ll write a whole post about it soon!

Eleanor (with Josh’s help) got me some yummy butterscotch chews from See’s. Tasty!

We had our weekly family movie night and for dessert we had the cupcakes we had brought home!

A Chocolate Cherry Licorice (an amazing combination of chocolate cake filled with melted red licorice, topped with pretzels and marshmallow–incredible!), Snickerdoodle (like the cookie, a yummy cinnamon spiced cake the uneaten half was delicious with coffee the following morning!) and a Heavenly (a gourmet grown-up version of a Hostess Cupcake, delicious chocolate cake, with marshmallow filling topped with dark chocolate ganache–awesome!)

Happy Birthday to me!