My British friend, Alistair (hence the funny spelling of “neighbor”):

My neighbour asked if he could use my lawnmower and I told him of course he could, so long as he didn’t take it out of my garden.

My best friend’s 10-year old daughter is in the Nutcracker this weekend and I’m going to see her perform today. This is her fifth year (or maybe sixth?) performing and it’s been fun to see her move up from hopping across the stage in a bunny costume to performing in two scenes this year. I’m so proud of her!

Last night, my son “cruised” for the first time, pushing his wagon walker across the living room. Very exciting!

And yesterday, we met with both the builder and decorator for our home. We made a few minor changes to the floor plan, like moving windows around, and made a lot of color and finish choices. We selected the exterior color (a blue-gray) with light tan accents and a dark Chestnut wood for the doors. We got the inspiration for the color palette from one of my son’s outfits!

I was at a marketing association lunch the other day and sat at a table of folks who work for a staffing company. They tell me that their business is growing and orders are up. I’m hopeful this means the economy has turned the corner since jobs are a lagging indicator.

What’s open in my browser? Well, I’m still shopping so Amazon is up, Red Envelope is up, and Toys R Us is up. Later today, I plan to do a holiday card so I imagine I’ll be spending some time on Shutterfly. But in terms of what might be interesting to you, check out these sites:

DesignPublic – a great site with modern furniture, accessories, and lots and lots of gifts. Plus kids stuff! You’ll find everything from Jonathan Adler to Thomas Frank to Dwell to Amenity here. Happy browsing!

CoolMomPicks Holiday Gift Guide – I always think I have good gift ideas until I check out their gift guide and realize I am SUCH an amateur. They have such great ideas and discounts on a lot of them. If you’re stuck for someone on your list, check them out.

Parenting.com’s Toy Contest – You may enter twice a day until Dec. 14th to win $900 worth of their selections for toys of the year. Get all your relatives without kids to enter, too, and increase your chance of winning!

Hope you all have a great weekend! We’re going to take the tot to Gymboree tomorrow and hit up some showrooms for interior house ideas (cabinets, tile, etc.). Atlanta’s supposed to be cold and rainy tomorrow, though, so that may put a damper on activities. What do you have planned?

I wanted to subtitle this post: How to Outsource an Entire Birthday Party because in essence, that’s what I did. I fretted about it for about a minute; after all, I can use scissors and glue and could probably have made pinwheels and decorations myself, but given that we just moved, have a new nanny, have had too many illnesses to count, have a stove with a finicky oven (meaning no way was I going to attempt a cake), etc., etc., it seemed wise to just buy everything. But — and here’s the catch — I didn’t want it to look like some pre-packed party from the party store. I wanted it to look creative and unique and just like I did it all myself, which many of the party  goers thought. Haha! Fooled them!

The Occasion: My son’s first birthday

The Location: Our temporary rental (while our house is being built). 2BR, teeny tiny, so we limited the guest list to 20.

The Theme: My son loves anything that spins so I came up with the idea to do pinwheels. I also wanted a “color story” and focused on orange and yellow with pops of red.

The Planning: I did nearly all my research online (surprise, surprise) and used Evernote to keep track. You can see my notebook here. There are all sorts of random pinwheel things I found, including pinwheel jewelry (I contemplated wearing some) and shirts for Hunter to wear. I’m a HUGE fan of Evernote and will tell you more about it next week for Tech Tuesday.

The Vendors:

• Email invitations: I contacted Ariana at Becoming-Mom, because she just opened an Etsy store and she designed some darling pinwheel invitations for me. (If you haven’t read her blog, yet, you should check it out. It’s one of my favorites.)
• Pinwheels, pendant banner (with pinwheels), pinwheel favor boxes: Twirlie Whirlies Etsy shop. She could not have been more pleasant and fun to work with. I picked four papers from her selections and she made pinwheel after pinwheel for me. They were “real” pinwheels, too (meaning they spin) and the pendant banner she made is SO cute that we’re putting it in Hunter’s room. The stuff was perfectly packaged and really, really cute.
• Photo banner (also with pinwheels!): This custom banner was made by MaryHadALittleParty’s Etsy shop. When it arrived and my husband saw all the photos of Hunter, he got very choked up and quietly asked me if there was a way we could preserve this for him some day. I emailed her pictures from each month of the last year and she picked the ones that worked best in her format. She stuck with yellow, orange and red circles and added some pinwheels to the end. Really sweet.
• Pinwheel repositionable wall decals: These were a stroke of luck: bright, colorful pinwheel wall decals from Flair4All. I also bought some alphabet decals from them to spell out things like “Happy Birthday.” These are all going in his room as decorations. (I figure even though we’re only here for six months, I can totally use a lot of this stuff to decorate his room!)
• Food/Cake: The cake was made by a local woman who works with a friend of mine, so I don’t have a link to share with you. I gave her very little direction beyond “pinwheels” and love what she came up with. The food came from SouperJenny’s, which if you’re here in Atlanta, you probably already know about. The only catch with the food is that the party was on Sunday and they aren’t open on Sunday so we had to pick it all up Saturday. Our fridge is WAY TOO SMALL so we had to drop it all off at a friend’s house. The same friend who knows the Cake Lady. Good friends.
• Lollipops, candy: I found all the candy at a local candy store and got the jars at the Container Store. If you don’t have a candy shop locally, Google “whirly” or “swirly” lollipops. Lots of folks sell them online. I also got the favor boxes at the Container Store.

The Result: My dad, sister-in-law and niece came in for the party which was soooo nice. My best friend, who is insanely busy with her own kids, was able to make it (we held the party on Sunday to work around her kids’ schedule), as were several other close friends. Hunter was a bit overwhelmed by all the people. He did NOT smash his cake. Just kind of looked at it like, “Huh? What am I supposed to do with this?” All in all, a fun time.

OK, enough talk. Time for some pictures!

Today’s post is a two-fer, meaning I’m including it in both the Works for Me Wednesday series AND the Wordless/Wordful Wednesday series. For more great Works-for-me-Wednesday tips, check out WeAreThatFamily. And for more great pictures, go to SevenClownCircus, 5MinutesforMom, and WordlessWednesday.

Obviously, he doesn’t look like he’s starving because he eats baby food, but he will not put one bite of finger/table foods in his mouth. He’s about to turn 13 months old and the doc is referring us to an occupational therapist. Anybody had any experience with this?

We’ve tried everything: those melting puffs, Cheerios, CAKE, small bits of cheese, cookies, and more. When he was younger (7 months till about 10 or 11 months), he would gnaw on a teething cookie or those little Arrowhead cookies but he won’t even take that now. He used to eat the puffs, occasionally. He refuses it all and freaks out if I try and force it, which I suppose I shouldn’t do. About a month ago, I could force the first bite and then he usually would eat more bites, but I can’t even get him to do that now.

He eats Level 3 foods but prefers Level 2. Since he has eaten some table food before, I’m guessing it’s not structural (as in, an underdeveloped gag reflux or something) but he gags and chokes and coughs like it’s KILLING him when we try to get him to eat anything not pureed.

We have an appointment with a specialist next week (speech pathologist) who works on feeding issues.

I’ve read that babies need to get off the baby food because the table foods help them develop chewing muscles which helps them with speech, plus it’s easier to get his nutritional needs met. I’ve also read that this is slightly more common in babies who’ve had reflux, which my son had (maybe still has; I’m not sure).

Or could it just be that he’s a little behind? He didn’t crawl until 11 months. We did just move and got a new nanny. Maybe he just wants “comfort food” and for him, that’s smooth, pureed foods?

I literally couldn’t sleep the other night because this was worrying me so much. I’ll postpone the worry until we see the therapist next week. The pediatrician did say they see this texture aversion often and it’s correctable. I just don’t know anybody who’s dealt with it before. Do you? Let me know if you know anything!