Decorating walls and cakes

We have lived in this house for six years.  I can hardly believe it has been that long.  But now, after six years, I finally decorated my kicthen wall.  About two years ago, we painted the walls red and now I finally have things hanging there.  For a long time, I just didn't know how to decorate it.  Then, after we painted, I knew what I wanted to do, but didn't (and still don't) have the money to do it.  I wanted a very large, nicely framed, black and white picture of the temple.  Anyway, this is what I have come up with, and I love it!  My kitchen is black and red, so I think this black and white arrangement looks good.  I got the metal sign at a craft fair, I made the magnetic picture frames, and the temple picture is on a stretched canvas.  And taking pictures of pictures is pretty hard--the flash washed out the temple picture a bit and the pictures aren't that crooked.

On Friday night I did a baby shower for someone in my ward.  She is actually my brother's wife's brother's wife.  Haha... confused??  :)  Her husband's sister is my sister-in-law (married to my brother).  Got it?  It's not really that complicated but I guess it is easy enought to just say that we aren't really related but we share some of the same neices and nephews.  Anyway, it was a lot of fun.  It rained like crazy--even for here during monsoon season.  It gave some added meaning to the term "baby shower."  Some people actually called and said they turned around and went home because they thought they were going to get washed away or killed by all the lightning strikes.  I made a cake for the shower that matched the invitation.  Sadly, I forgot my sister-in-law's advice (yes, the same one as mentioned above) about doing frozen buttercream transfers and words.  Since you flip the finished image over, you have to make the transfer in mirror image.  Since I didn't do that, my finished cake looked like this...

Oops.

Luckily, I discovered my mistake with enough time left to redo the letters (correctly this time) and put them over the top of the backwards ones.

30 on the 30th!

We celebrated Nate's 30th birthday on August 30th.  Since 30 is kind of a monumental birthday and it just happened to be on the 30th, I wanted to make the day extra special for Nate.  Per tradition, the kids and I woke him up (at 6:00 a.m.) singing "Happy Birthday" and had him open his presents.  I gave him Bucky Balls (those little magnetic balls that you make shapes and stuff with--intriguingly frustrating little boogers if you ask me) and new pillows and nice sheets for our bed.  I had Natalie, with a little help from Kelton, draw 30 pictures and I laminated them and made them into a book. 

Nate had to go to work, but I still wanted him to have a good birthday.  So I made 30 cinnamon rolls and took them to him at work to share with everyone.  Then we went to Chick-fil-A for lunch.  Then I gave him a book I put together that had 30 birthday wishes from 30 different people.  It turned out really good and I think he really liked it.  Later that night we took the whole family to Chilis for Nate's birthday dinner.  When we got home we put candles on Nate's birthday banana cream pie and sang "Happy Birthday" again.  I think Nate would agree that it turned out to be a pretty good 30th birthday.