Five on Friday

1. I can't believe Claire is half a year old already! To celebrate, she got to play in the doorway jumper for the first time. I'd say it was a successful venture. In a day filled with teething and shots, that grin was a quite a rare occurrence. {Grandparents, here's a cute video for you!}

2. Much to Adam's relief, I am finally back in the swing of actually planning meals and not serving frozen pizza every other night. But, somehow my culinary abilities have dramatically plummeted since becoming a mother. I froze some blueberries back when they were in season, so I decided to try Meg's blueberry buckle. Well, it turns out that it's sort of important to actually defrost the blueberries before baking them into a cake. Otherwise your dessert will be bright purple. We'll just say it's in honor of Mary's birthday, right? 

3. For Claire's baptism we gave her a little patron saint doll. I am more than a little obsessed with them, so we had to order one for her new cousin, Estelle. Isn't it the cutest? We chose to include this prayer with her doll. It's one of our favorites.

4. We discovered our daughter finds tape weirdly hilarious when we were hanging up some frames last weekend. Our method of hanging frames in our first apartment was to hold it up, decide it looks basically straight, hammer in the nail, discover that it's actually completely crooked, and repeat. We were very surprised to get any of our security deposit back. Well, we have devised a much improved system this time around. We trace each frame with wrapping paper {not newspaper because it will leave newsprint all over the wall - found that out the hard way, of course}, mark where the nail hole should be on the paper, tape all the paper templates on the wall where we'd like them, hammer in the nails, remove the paper, and add the frames. Ta da! We thought it would be cool to make a time lapse video of the process, but we were too lazy.

5. Well, if you'll excuse me, I have a date with the season premiere of Parenthood and my ironing board. Are you as excited as we are for Parks & Rec to return next week?!