Kansas City

It has been the most crazy summer! We have been living temporarily in Kansas City for the past five weeks for Joe to work at one of the hospitals here for a rotation. We are living in a teeny tiny corporate apartment that has a parking garage and a balcony and noisy neighbors {what a change from life in Wichita!}. We have a friend watching our house in Wichita and our mail is being held and we are having our lawn mowed by our neighbor. It's like being on a very extended vacation!!

I am loving it!

The first couple weeks we had swimming lessons every day. Swimming lessons with my child has always been one of my "envision yourself with kids" things that I have always, always looked forward to! I just kept thinking to myself that last summer I spent every single day inside because I was either huge pregnant or I had a newborn and now here we are taking swim lessons. It cracked me up because they had the kids try to practice kicking, going under water and even trying to climb out of the pool by themselves! It was really neat that they challenged the kids so much!

carousel at the mall

We have also had a lot of play dates with all of our Kansas City friends and I am hoping to squeeze in some more things before we go home.

We have a big park right by our apartment. We are also within walking distance to the Country Club Plaza and I have eaten at The Cheesecake Factory..well.. I won't tell you how many times. ;-)

blurry 4th of July

It's been such a fun summer so far. I don't think I want to leave! Well.. maybe I do want to sleep in my own bed again..

Landon's First Birthday {Sherlock Holmes Birthday Party}

I am so late in telling you about Landon's first birthday! If you know me in real life at all you know I had been planning his party for months ~ I love party planning and celebrating my little man! I wanted to pick a theme that wasn't too popular so I could really be creative with it. Joe and I both love London - we love the food, the people, the layout of the city, the double decker buses, royalty.. you name it! So I decided to play off that and go for a vintage Sherlock Holmes type party.

We had my friend Sarah {who is seriously a genius} design box invitations for us. She designed the invitation so that the details of the party were in a small font and we mailed a magnifying glass in the box for people to read the invitations with. We got so many compliments on the invitations! I am so sad to say that I didn't get our photographer to get a picture of the invitation all assembled but here is the design. I seriously loved it!

My sister helped us rent a clubhouse in Kansas City for the party. We are here for the summer and our families are here so it was perfect. Plus, I didn't have to get my house all clean for lots of guests. That was a big advantage to renting a room! Sarah also designed banners, bottle labels and signs for the party. Everything was in old fashioned plaids and red and white houndstooth prints.

We catered fish and chips from a local pub and my friend Trish helped us get food baskets to put it in. It was really authentic to London and I loved that. We found newspaper liners for the chips from World Market. I really wanted to serve old fashioned Coke out of the glass bottles so we found some at Wal-Mart of all places! I ordered mustache straws from Etsy. They were a huge HIT the entire party!!

 Landon's cake was done by Sprinkled with Sugar of Kansas City. It looked good and tasted even better. I was so impressed that it even had fingerprints all around the sides and bottom. She nailed the theme perfectly! I ordered his first birthday bib from Etsy too. I am going to keep it in his memory box. :)

 I made little goodie bags for the kids with a notepad for "detective" notes and a crayon shaped mustache I ordered from Etsy. I thought they turned out so cute!

 My friend Audrey came and took professional pictures during the party for us. That was the BEST decision because I could really be "in the moment" and I didn't have to worry about keeping my camera with me to document everything. She takes better pictures than I could ever do and she captured so many moments that I didn't even see on the day of the party!

We had such a fun party! The best part was having everyone we love in the same room at the same time to help us celebrate our little guy.

Happy Birthday Landon!!!!