Happy Diwali!

Alternately titled: Why I may have a slight addiction to garland/paper flower making.  And to this laughing baby.

{I love when she lets me put kajal on her.  You can't see it but she's also wearing her payal so imagine the sounds of tinkling bells with these pictures.}

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Ok, so I really only made two flower garlands and then hung them up right next to each other.  Both are Martha Stewart-style crepe paper flowers.  Orange marigolds and pink lotus flowers.  She has lots of other ideas for flowers on her site, but I really like the way these turned out on garlands.  For the marigolds I just tied the garland string around the center of the crepe-paper instead of using the floral wire and then stringing them all together later.

Nandini, clearly admiring Mommy's handywork.

{Linked up here: PaperMama, 5 Minutes For Mom, Parenting by Dummies, Project Alicia, TheIdeaRoom, And Then She Snapped, Jenni from the Blog, and Live and Love Outloud.}

The night before Diwali.

Happy Diwali to everyone! Wishing you a bright and festive holiday!

{An artist's rendering of the bug attacks taking place.}

After barely surviving the mosquito-armageddon of Houston over the weekend (I seriously had over a hundred mosquito bites on me at least!  I never even came close to that in India) and accidentally missing the Diwali fireworks show at the mandir over the weekend, we geared up to decorate around the house a bit.

Ryan and I hung lights around the house, while Avi helped by blowing the fuse on at least two strings on lights.  Don't ask me how he did that.  I have no clue.  And, yes, I know he shouldn't be playing with them, but it is awfully hard to keep him away from that which he must not do.  Ha!

Nandini got in on the action too.  She missed the major coloring that took place during her nap, but woke up just in time for finishing touches.  And to pose for pictures of course.

As you can probably tell, I did not use traditional rangoli materials.  Just chalk.  But it worked out well.  Pretty sure the brown basmati rice that I have wouldn't look that good anyway.

Avi helped with this one too.  Mostly by coloring in his footprints and splashing water all over the place.  Thankfully he obliged me by not splashing water on me.  I also made lots of flower garlands and am still debating about where to hang them up. 

I also decided to make a nice Indian dinner at home since we may go out tomorrow to the temple.  I made channa from scratch.  Boiled it all afternoon and then roasted in the oven with onion, garlic, tomato, ginger, and peppers (from the garden).  And lots of ghee of course.  Then added watercress at the end to make it all fancy.  I also made pulav with basmati rice, cooked in ghee and water, then added garlic and green onion towards the end and fresh ricotta, diced cucumber, and grapes right before serving.  Plus cucumber raita with fried lentils for crunch.  It is nothing like the Diwali dinners my mom makes.  No delicious fried breads or any sweets, but it still turned out really well.  And, ps, fresh grapes are about a thousand times better than raisins in pulav.  Case closed.

We lit some diyas and did aarti after dinner.  Avi put tikka on everyone, so it was a bit more like Holi for a while.  He was so cute and insisted we read to him from his Hanuman book after so we all read the story of Ram's victory and return together.  And, like a true holiday miracle, both babies went to sleep early and haven't heard a peep out of them since, whew!
{linked up at the idea room.}

more baby album pages

I can't stop working with all of Nandini's baby pictures.  I already have one full album entirely of Nandini and two more with mostly her stuff in it.  Some of the pictures are sort of new because I finally printed the ones from my Dad's iphone. 

This one I never scrapped because I initially hated it.  I thought I looked so gross, but it was a great moment and that's all that really matters.  The paper is really busy but I tried to balance it with simple kraft borders and journaling stickers.

This picture cracks me up and I finally got it on paper.  I kept it simple with some tissue border strips and chipboard butterflies.  I created all of these pages over two days, so simplicity was key.

A rare two page spread.  I save all these little bits of paper and love being able to use them.  Unfortunately it gives me hives trying to match them all correctly, even though they are all pink or pastel.  I love the final look when it turns out right though.  These are most of the iphone photos from my Dad.

This and the next one are of Nandini at different times but wearing the same hoodie.  I loved the pattern on it and knew I would eventually find a matching paper.  I was also waiting to get that heart punch you see from Martha Stewart.  It had little holes all around the heart shape so I can easily stitch a border around the heart.  I love that. 

I think I may have used too much of heart paper here, but I like the buttons and embroidery.  And the ruler, which Ryan wanted me to paste right next to her mouth so we could really measure how big the yawn was, sheesh.

Houston Zoo Boo

Avinash had no school today for some reason, so I took up a friend on the offer of a morning zoo outing. Plus, it is Zoo Boo time right now, so there are lots of cute little activities all over the place.  And, I like to dress them up (and myself, you know, just to fit in...ahem. Don't judge me!).

Just two little kittens out on the town (that's my Cheshire cat hat if you can't tell).

Fireman, one of the few costumes Mr. Avi will deign to wear.  He also now loves eating bagels with white cheese, mmm, really good as he says.  Just wait until he gets to try a real H&H bagel.  New York is in his blood.  (Born in Texas but made in New York, ha!)

Yes, my friend wore a crazy hat too.  Totally unplanned, but awesome.

He loved the elephants of course.  He calls them hathi's as well.  He kept counting them, their were about 7 or 8 visible at any given time.  Which made him really worry about where the other 2 or 3 (to make a complete set of 10) were.  The baby elephants are still so cute and now they have a little pool to splash in.  He was more into the elephants than the trick-or-treating going on anyway.

Our little kitten at the pumpkin patch.  She got red paint all over the place trying to help Avi decorate his pumpkin.

These are the best I could do with one hand because I was to afraid to not keep my hand on her the whole time.  Avi is just excited here because he is looking for his little friend JP.  They had a scavenger hunt which he only completed half of.  We may come back over the weekend when they have some more activities, including a thriller dance lesson!!!, and finish it up. 

I was completely and totally exhausted afterwards, so luckily Ryan took us all out to lunch.  I thought Avi would be full after eating lots of almonds, carrots and pomegranate seeds, but he asked the waitress a dozen times for tofu.  And then ate all of Ryan's rice with egg and only half of his own food.  Nandini wanted to try everything and loudly and happily screamed unless we gave her a constant stream of rice, carrot and tofu pieces. I had a great strong cup of Vietnamese coffee too, which was probably my favorite part of the meal, yumm.  Still totally exhausted though.  Both kids are now home and fast asleep.  And I'm thinking about joining. 

starting points on my disney album

I never got around to scrapping my Disney photos from earlier this year.  And the task of editing and choosing which photos to print from our most recent trip was feeling to daunting, so I finally dug out my old photos and got to work.  I have been keeping my pages fairly simple and just trying to put together as many memories as I can.

I borrowed this starting point from Shimelle for this page.  I used SC patterned paper too for the base.  I used a watermark stamp on the yellow cardstock and added a square of crate paper.  The last pp kind of got lost in favor of the butterflies.

I used two different thickers for the title because I'm addicted to thickers and love to mix and match them.  I restrained myself from using a third as well.  Most of this was done with new SC kit as well.

G+S baby shower

I had the fun of helping to host a baby shower for our friends Garima and Sameer this weekend.  Pretty much, they took care of everything, but I did try to help a little bit where I could. 

 They did an amazing job with the food and decorations. The ended up getting really gorgeous table linens and chinese lanterns, all in blue.  I was able to make a few things that we hung up. 

First was this hot air balloon mobile.  I used lots of different patterned paper, glue, and string to create these.  I drew a pattern on cardboard and used it as a template for the paper and just hand cut it.  I kept a string in the center and glued the sides to each other.  I repeated this in blue, coral and green.  I added a few tiny embossed hot air balloons and chipboard clouds, to give the effect of flying in the sky.  I attached the string to an embroidery hoop and varied the lengths a little, then covered that in tissue paper.  It hung very easily from the ceiling and can also serve in the nursery after the shower.

  

We put up streamers under the tables as well and used tissue paper flowers all over the place.  I tried to get the fruit punch to look blue by freezing blueberries and blackberries as ice.

The other thing I made to go with the blue sky theme were these clouds.  Again I drew out a template and then cut these clouds out of white cardstock.  I then stamped and embossed more little hot air balloons and punched stars out as well.  I just used a hole punch to string these up.  I really love the effect these give and would also look cute in a baby's room as well.

The two cakes, one for baby and one for Sameer's birthday.

One was tres leches and the other chocolate with mousse filling, yum.

Lots of bubbles and candy for the kids.

And facepainting, for the um, kids.  The adults were actually way more adventurous than the kids when it came to designs and a lot of fun to paint.

Nandini and I with our fabulous baby-game necklaces.  We also gave everyone a waterballoon 'baby' to take care of and the person who snatched the most waterballoons by the end from other negligient parents won a prize.  I did not participate in that one because I could barely keep tabs on my two real babies at the party, ha!

Avi and his many new friends (still trying to figure out where he gets his social personality from). 

(He actually blew out the candles and licked a piece of cake before I could stop him.  Luckily this was after we sang happy birthday.  It's sad because I was cutting the cake at the time but still was not fast enough to catch him.)

The very happy couple cutting the cakes.  They were so cute and fed each other a bit of each cake. 

 

And, the official candy and icing taste tester gets a much needed break for, um, more sugar. 

 (I guess he was worried about other people taking his cake? He did by the way help set up the party with us by taste testing all of the candy and popping all the balloons that did not meet quality control standards.)

Congrats to Garima and Sameer, we all can't wait to meet the new baby soon!

  

linked up at the Idea Room.