30 things for 30 years

My cousin celebrated her 30th birthday last summer.  My sis and I wanted to make her something different and something that stood out from your normal birthday gifts.  Upon browsing pinterest, I saw a pin of 30 gifts for 30 years.  I thought that would be perfect. Here's what we came up with:

We found 30 random things that we thought she would like, and we wrapped it up into a gift basket, with cellophane and a bow on top (we added a bow after the picture... sorry).  We added a card where we wrote inside all 30 gifts.

These were what was inside:

We did face some challenges:

1.  It sounds easy, but after a while it gets hard finding small random gifts.  I think the last 10 were the most difficult.

2.  We used this small sand bucket to hold all the gifts.  Lucky for me, I played a lot of tetris, I was able to get it to all fit, and not be top heavy.  Good luck to her if she ever wanted to take it out and fit it back in tho.

3.  We put small bottles of alcohol in the mix.  Ususally, this would not be an issue, however, when the party was inside a small water park, having alcohol is more than frowned upon.  Not a big deal, the weather was cool enough that I could leave it in our car without worrying about melted chocolate.

I'm happy to say that she loved the gift and all the thoughtfulness that went into it.  :)  

Overall, I'd do a gift like this again.  Hope this gives you an idea for the next birthday gift you give. :)

Woodsy Themed Baby Shower

Early last month, I helped a friend host another friend's baby shower.  We asked her to think of a theme she wanted, of which she decided on a Woodsy Foresty theme with neutral colors.  There were a few of us working on it together, and everyone did a super awesome job.  Here are the results:

Another great party. :)

2013: Our Garden

This year we're finally attempting the garden that we have wanted to setup for a while now.  A few years ago, we had the idea of expanding our garden to cover about 1/3 of our backyard... That's about a 18' x 36' area (I think).  Well, the last few years were quite busy... and we just didn't find the time to do it.  But last fall, we finally put up our new fence (to segregate our garden from our lawn and dogs), and as of earlier this month, we cleaned it up, built some garden beds, put some weedblock down, and filled the beds with dirt.  :)

Here's a look of the garden after we put the garden beds in.  We also completely flattened the back side, and made it into a big flat in ground garden area (wasn't done yet when the picture was taken).

Even with the dangers of frost still here (...yeah, I live dangerously like that), I planted a few of the seeds outside, and also began a few trays of seeds inside.  I still have a few seeds that I recently bought and need to plant outside.

The good news is as of today, I finally saw something start germinating in the garden.  I took a picture of it, but you have to look really close at the first few leaves of my bok choy plants. :)  Exciting isn't it!

The indoor plants aren't doing too bad either.  Most of the first tray are tomatoes, the back tray are an assortment of peppers, which usually take longer to germinate.  I'd like to make a heating mat of some sort to lessen the germination waiting period one day.

Anyway, that's what's going on. :) I can't wait to share some more mature garden pictures and harvest pictures with you guys.