I love baby showers, and bridal showers. . . as long as they aren't mine. I'm not down with all that attention. But I love throwing them. I'm a big planner. Its so exciting to create menu plans, activities, favors, etc. I have currently gotten into making my own invitations. I believe it started with a friends bachelorette party last year. Right now, I'm just clipping relevant pictures from magazines and gluing them to blank card stock. However, I want to refine my process, well the product. Instead of taking someone else's photographs, I want to take my own to develop and clip. Now if only I can get stupid batteries for my camera. Anyways, all of this planning has put me on the hunt for glass bottles, preferably with screw caps, but I'm not opposed to finding corks for them. Because this is a second baby baby shower I want to focus on pampering. This current mom of one toddler is about to have her life become super crazy with the new arrival of baby girl number two. I don't have any experience with being a staying at home mom with one baby, but it I think it is definitely trying to say the least with two. I can't imagine how much harder day life is with more that two. Thus, for shower favors I want to give homemade bath salts in glass bottles, it would be cool if I could just get some bottles that someone has already emptied, you know we could save them from the trash can and give the girls something eclectic to sit in their bathrooms. I also want to find a way to decorate a few of those plain white mugs that are starting to look like a double decker in my cabinet. It was a brilliant idea to get a few sets of the solid white Corelle dishes while they were on sale, I appreciate having the extra place settings, but the mugs are killing me, we have reached our capacity for coffee mugs. So why not make them into cute gifts. Yeah, yeah, I know, I'm cheap, but you know what its going to be cute, well it should be, I have a little over a month to guarantee it. I will post pictures later.

In other news, my uncle had heart surgery yesterday morning. The surgery went great, he came through with flying colors. He had to have a valve replaced due to a birth defect that doctors discovered just a few months ago. He was born in 1961. But praise God they found it, period. My uncle is of the work horse breed. Him, just like my grandfather, and many of the other Breeden boys in my family work all the time, and they work hard. Its how they were raised. And they are stubborn, and rarely take the time to care for themselves, unless they are forced to. Anyhow, leave it to me to find the small piece of irony in this, but tell me if you agree that this is amazingly funny. My family, well my grandparents, whom I lived with for nearly all of my adolescent life; raised and slaughtered pigs from before me until I was about thirteen. I remember those same Breeden boys plus a few extra guys piling into our backyard with their shotguns to kill the pigs. By the way, my grandfather used to make the best sausage ever. It was always so much better than anything in the store. I'm sorry I digress. But yesterday morning the wonderful surgeon replace my uncles broken valve with a pig valve. Tehe, a pig saved his life, after all those years of killing them. Oh, silly medical advancements, how we do appreciate you.

I just wanted to note that it was almost out of necessity that our family slaughtered pigs. My grandfather worked for an asphalt company and like clock work was laid off every winter. Who knew you couldn't lay asphalt when its super cold. Anyhow, even though his check wasn't coming in every week he still had to feed his family. He was a very proud proud country man, he had to do something to take care of his family. I was so young for most of that, I still don't know how we afforded to keep the lights on. But we did have enough meat to feed all of us that were around all the time. Sometimes we could go back to the simplicity of hard work to succeed. But life requires a lot more than that sometimes.