Surprise Baby Shower
While Larissa and I were on the mainland last week visiting with family (on both her side and mine), Larissa's family surprised us with a baby shower. The "surprise" portion of this was no small feat: Larissa is notoriously difficult to surprise.
The closest I've come to surprising Larissa was when I gave her an antique secretary desk as a Christmas present a year ago. She had no idea until Christmas Eve, when she followed me downstairs at my parents' house and found me putting the finishing touches on it.
The way the family managed the surprise this time around was pretty ingenious. Larissa had contacted her cousin, Kristal, asking if she and her husband wanted to get together while we were on the mainland. Kristal invited us over for dinner.
A couple of days later, Kristal mentioned our dinner date to her mom. Aunt Anneliese suggested that they could jump on that opportunity and turn it into a baby shower. Pretty much all of the female sisters, cousins, and in-laws were able to make it work. So we went over on Thursday and had dinner with Shaun and Kristal, and about fifteen minutes after we'd eaten there was a knock on the door and the house flooded with women!
(Larissa cried! It was cute and sweet.)
I spent the evening with Shaun, watching sports highlights and talking about music, books, and movies. In the meantime, Larissa was being showered generously with gifts. Along with all kinds of newborn diapers, toys, and clothes, we also received a brand new car seat! So that's one of the Baby Fund items crossed off the list. We've been taken care of so well that I think the Baby Fund is more or less fully funded at this point. I may have to direct future writing profits towards something else! :)
Thanks so much to our extended family for the baby shower and all of the wonderful gifts.
For more pictures and another write-up of the evening, check out Aunt Anneliese's blog post. She also has a tutorial on how to build your own Diaper Cake, like the one featured in the picture above.
Help Us Win a Free Anniversary Photo Shoot
Vanessa Voth, the photographer who did such an amazing job on Larissa's and my wedding, is holding a contest this month. She's invited all of the couples whose weddings she shot in 2011 to compete to see who can get the most Facebook "Likes" on the appropriate post on her blog, and whoever has the most on December 31 gets a free one-year anniversary shoot!
We love Vanessa's work, so that would be an awesome prize for us. What would make it extra special is that our baby will be almost a month old on our anniversary, so we could get some great pictures of Baby out of the deal, too!
Please help us win! All you have to do is go to the blog post, scroll down through all the pictures (and look at them, if you want!), and click Like at the bottom.
We're doing pretty well so far, but we need a boost! We're counting on all of you to help out.
Thanks!
Update: We've created a Facebook event now, too, to help organize things, so head over there and invite your friends to it!
Diaper Fund Update
Last week I set up the Diaper Fund as a way to track my progress towards buying a set of cloth diapers by April, through selling my writing.
Within two days of launching the Diaper Fund, you generous people brought me to within 5% of my goal. So far I have $288 of my $300 target.
Wow!
Thank you so much to everyone who has contributed. There's still a little ways to go, and once I pass the diaper threshold I can start putting money towards a car seat or a change table, too, so I'm still going to be coming out with new products after Flare Fiction 1 is released.
Plus, in case you haven't heard yet, everything in the FiftyWordStories.com Store is 25% off for the month of December.
Again, thank you, and Merry Christmas!
The Diaper Fund
As you may know, Larissa is currently pregnant with our first child. The baby is due in the first week of April 2012, and we're so excited!
Help me raise enough money to buy a set of cloth diapers from bumGenius.
Larissa is currently keeping us afloat by working at a local boutique hotel. I'm job hunting, having recently completed my Master of Arts in Sociology at the University of Victoria. When I'm not searching through job postings and sending out resumes, I write various forms of fiction and post them here on my blog, at FiftyWordStories.com, and, since about a week ago, at Special People.
Most of what I write gets posted online for free, but I do also sell a few things here and there. With the baby on the way, though, it's becoming more and more necessary for me to find a way to contribute to preparing for his or her arrival.
So as of today I've set up the Diaper Fund. The goal of the Diaper Fund is to raise enough money by selling my writing to pay for a full set of cloth diapers by the time Baby arrives. That's going to cost about $300, according to Larissa, so I've got my work cut out for me!
If you'd like to help me reach my goal, please swing by the TimSevenhuysen.com Store or the 50WS Store and see if there are any products that interest you. I have more projects in the pipes, too, so check back again later if you don't see anything you want right now.
You can track the progress of the Diaper Fund on its own page.
What If Our Baby Grows Up To Be A Volcanologist
What if Larissa's and my baby grows up to be a volcanologist? It's a very real possibility!
I think I'd really like having a volcanologist in the family, if for no other reason than that I would get to say "volcanologist" a lot. The word's even fun to type, let alone speak out loud. Try this out: insert "volcanologist" into one conversation and see how much it improves your entire day. Add the word "eruption" on top of that, and you've got endless funtimes.
I'm not much of a worrier, but I think I'd probably get a little tense if I knew that my baby was staring into the mouths of volcanoes all day. I wouldn't want to hear that my kid was playing the starring role in a real-life disaster movie. And lava may be one of the most compellingly imaginative substances in the entire world (major props to God for inventing it, by the way), but it's also super scary. If there's one thing I've learned from classic video games, it's that touching lava will kill you instantly. And it destroys magic rings, too.
I think I could get over all that, especially if we continue to live in the Ring of Fire. Here on the west coast it would certainly be useful to have some inside connections with earthquake- and volcano-predicting agencies... That would be a definite plus!
As with anything, there would be positives and negatives to having a child who was a volcanologist.
Volcanologist. Tee hee.
Thanks to @meaganhogg, who suggested that I do a What If Our Baby post about being a geologist. I liked the suggestion, but I hope you don't mind that I decided to take it a step further.
Special People
Special People is serialized superhero fiction with a fistful of twists.
Special people have special problems.
Losing Freight
Losing Freight is a serialized sci-fi novel where you get to vote on what happens next at the end of every page.
DISCOVERY
Prefer the feel of paper to the look of a screen? DISCOVERY is the first quarterly Year of Stories print book. You get nearly 200 pages of exciting fiction for only $11.99! Grab your copy now.
Flare Fiction: Volume 2
Galloway’s Hunt
Galloway's Hunt is a novelette set in the world of Galloway's Voyage, my work-in-progress novel based on the same title character. Buy it now for only 99¢!