Baby Girl's Birthday Party Kit

Baby Girl (or I guess you can tell by now that her name is Caitlin...)'s birthday is this Saturday. Since we've already had her fancy cheot dol (or dohl, meaning birthday in Korean) birthday party few weeks back, we'll do something more low scale on her actual birthday: go to ToysRUs and pick out her present and her birthday balloon, go out for a luncheon, outing with her birthday girl outfit and cake. A week later we'll have to do the same for her older brother, yes, their birthday is eight days apart.

As I have mentioned before, I decided not to outsource party decorating for Caitlin's first Korean birthday. So that meant I had to do everything myself. I wanted to save money, but I also wanted to make it special, so I designed everything myself and printed everything in-house (except for the doljabi board and the banners, they are from Costco and Vista Print). My inkjet printer is not the best printer out there, but it gets the job done for a three hour party.

01  doljabi board
02  doljabi raffle tickets
03  doljabi labels
04  trifold centerpiece
05  birthday banner in English
06  birthday banner in Korean
07  PowerPoint presentation template
08  birthday party invitation
09  thank you card
10  table numbers
11  place setting cards

By the way, things are not to scale, obviously a wall banner would be so much bigger than a trifold paper centerpiece.

Baby & Child: Restoration Hardware's Children Furniture

Baby & Child

I love Restoration Hardware, every time I am at Tyson's Corner Mall I have to stop by their store. I love their apothecary bottles, the shiny chrome (and I don't even like chrome!), everything in there looks timeless to me. But when they branched out to children, I wasn't crazy about that. Their pink/blue and brown line (which are now on sale) was too bold and harsh in my opinion and it was more towards mod than what I'm used to seeing from Restoration Hardware. I never looked at their catalogs and drool over their things; I had Pottery Barn Kids for that.

Last year Restoration Hardware was going towards new direction when they introduced that distressed finished line of furniture, but I still paid no attention to their children's line. So imagine my surprise when I see a mail leaflet and I see on it this cute little neutral lion sitting on a linen chair and I'm like, where are these fantastic items from? I look all over and I see that it's from Restoration Hardware!

So I go to their website and see this:


and this:


Oooooh...... I LOVE IT!

It kind of has that french-old-school thing going on... How awesome is that chalk map up in that play room? It's on sale for $638.99.

Boa - Duvet

I love this song by the UK band Boa (and yes, it's not this BoA, the South Korean pop singer). I first heard it when I was junior in college and I admit that I only knew of it because of Serial Experiments Lain, don't judge me (if you read the comments on the video page everyone is poo-pooing people who only knows of this song because of the anime).

Bedtime Prayer: So be it.

I let the Boy do his bed time prayer solo sometimes. Tonight his prayer was:

Heavenly Father,
We pray for bug bites (his sister and I broke out in rash and he thought they were bug bites and was praying that God will heal us). Amen.

I tried to give him ideas on things to pray for:

Why toddlers throw temper tantrums

From CNN: Parenting

Why toddlers throw temper tantrums

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• The average tantrum lasts about three minutes, according to Potegal's research
• You can predict a tantrum down to the second
• Kids from about 18 months to 4 years are simply hardwired to misbehave

Lord, help us.

The Challenge of School Pick-Up

I always wondered how people with full time jobs pick up the kids... I guess they go to after school program?

From The Wall Street Journal

The Challenge of School Pick-Up

Adele

I'm subscribed to NPR on Facebook. I love NPR, it introduces me to so many new thoughts and stories that I would never even bother to think about. One of their feed had the title "Adele: Tiny Desk Concert". It was about an artist. I normally don't click on music links; I click on scientific ones, stories, but not music. It's not that I don't love music, but I just prefer to read news, not hear it.

But something about the headline "Tiny Desk Concert" piqued my interest. I don't know, I guess I just wanted to know what that "Tiny Desk Concert" meant (in my head I was envisioning concert with little instruments, a la Zoolander style, hahaha). Boy, oh, boy! Was I ever glad I clicked on the link!

I heard the singer's voice and I was thinking, she sounds familiar, she sounds like the artist that sang the music to one of my favorite "So You Think You Can Dance" performance!

So beautiful, both music and dance!

I google and it was the same artist! I listened to more of her music and all are so good! Definitely buying her music, it's been ages since I've been this excited about an artist.