Baby Shower & Baby Room - no, not mine silly!

Ok, I have been soundly chastised for that tiny previous post. Since I've got some time right now, I'll try to update as much as possible.

Item 1 - Mike & Annette's awesome baby room which I helped paint. They went with a transportation/automative theme after seeing something similar on the internet. The entire room is that carribean blue color, with a wide tan stripe around the middle. The mural above the crib is from a picture of Austin's 360 Bridge (a major landmark here).




All of the signs painted were done using Mike's projector from the upstairs theater and pictures from the internet. He projected the picture onto the wall and we traced it with pencil. Using small art brushes we just painted regular wall paint within the lines. It was really tedious but it came out so great. Mike did all the work on the mural. I did the I-35 sign, the Slippery When Wet, a Stop Light Sign (not pictured), and half of the No Parking. Mike and Annette did the Stop Sign and the green Welcome to Texas sign. Annette did all the clouds. I realize that as much as I'm not 'artistic' in that I can't free hand worth a damn, I can follow the lines quite well. The No Parking sign looks like a real sign from a distance. Growing up on the east coast Mike & Annette are used to smooth walls. The texture on their walls here was so annoying when trying to get smooth lines!



The truck is a decal. It came in a really cool set that they found that had a bunch of car/truck/racing decals.



One of Annette's uncles in New York works for Mack truck and he got them these die-cast models that are 1/32 (or something) exact models of the trucks. The hoods of the trucks come up and everything is so detailed. They're a great addition to the room. The little trucks on the wall are decals, the Stop Sign is painted.

Item 2 - Annette's Baby Shower

As soon as we heard Annette was going to have a baby, Judy suggested throwing them a Baby Shower. So she and I got together to plan a N0-Kidding group baby shower! Heh, is that ironic? Since neither of us goes to many baby showers, we decided to have some fun with it and do a few games. The first one was 'Meaure the Tummy'. I brought ribbon and everyone had to cut a piece that they thought would go around Annette's tummy. The closest one wins. I was so close! I was only 1/4 inch off from the winner. (and don't you think the tiara is cute? Judy and I had a lot of fun shopping for this!)

Another game not shown was guessing the number of M&M's in a baby bottle. I had counted every single damn one of those, and in fact Judy got it right!

The last game we did was something that Judy had done before and it was a BLAST. You go around in a circle and everyone says a baby's name that matches the next letter of the alphabet. Since they're having a boy, we only did boy names. As the alphabet goes around, if we get to a letter and no one can think of a name (like for X or U or O), we would all agree to stop that letter and go to the next. But, if you had K and couldn't think of a K name, but other people agreed that there were other fairly common K names out there, then you were out of the game. I don't even know how many times we went around, but we came up with a lot of names! In the beginning I said you couldn't use 'Chair' or 'Window' or some crazy ass word and say it's a 'name'. All names had to be commonly accepted as a boy's name. We did accept older names though. We also said if Charles was said, you couldn't use Chuck or Charlie. Samething with Robert - couldn't use Rob or Robby. They had to be 'unique' names, so to speak.

Here's the list. The dash means the letter was stopped. I think if you click on the picture it gets bigger. I especially liked 'Zule'.

Heh. Judy pointed this out. It's their to-do list on the fridge. Check out what I circled in black.