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Last year, 5 weeks old
This year, 13 months old
Poor Ruby. Not so into Santa this year. We’re hoping that one day she’ll get a kick out of this pic in her baby book at least?
Unfortunately, Ruby wasn’t the only anti-Santa kid this year either. We decided to get together with our good friends The Shriers and The Arzates so that we could get a group pic of the future BFF’s Berlin, Violet and Ruby all together. Complete chaos.
Whew – Halloween was a big one this year! Of course, with this being the 1st one for Ruby, we were pretty excited. After solving the great costume debate (Ed wanted Ruby to be “the chest-bursting alien from the movie, “Alien”. He was going to put her in the Baby Bjorn, put a shirt over it with a hole cut out … you get the idea. I wanted her to be a cupcake), we found the cutest little garden gnome costume. It was perfect! (Big thanks to our friend, Jennifer for sending us the link to the costume!) We were just happy that Halloween went over better with Ruby than the trip to the pumpkin patch!
First things first – our friend Elizabeth decided to throw a super-fabulous Halloween Party just for our girls! We were so lucky, the Arzates threw an amazing party. Tony made his annual Pumpkin Stew (served inside the pumpkin – so cool!) and Elizabeth planned all kinds of cool activities for the kids.
We tried hard to get a pic of all of the kids – but wow, it was like “herding cats” (Actual quote from Elizabeth!). Here’s our best shot:
Ruby got to trick or treat in the backyard and got all kinds of cool stuff like a Gerber Graduates cereal bar, goldfish, a mini-book and more! Plus, she got to go “ghost-bowling”. It was an awesome time!
Ruby also got to ride her favorite car at Violet’s house:
Then, on Halloween day, Ruby’s Halmoni came over with a special box of treats for her.
Lucky girl! In the box was also her very first pair of TOMS!
They are a special edition from the UNICEF/It’s a Small World line carried at Nordstrom. Ed & I almost died because the pattern on them is a Mary Blair pattern, one of our favorite artists from the ’60s. Mary Blair did a lot of work for Disney and her artwork is iconic. We LOVE her. So … thats why we are flipping out over these shoes!
Back to Halloween … Grandma & Papaw came over and we took Ruby around to the neighbors to trick-or-treat. After we got home with her candy, we dumped it all in the bowl and passed it back out again! But she wanted to keep one piece of loot … so we let her :)
See more cute pics of our Garden Gnome here. It was a very Happy Halloween!
My love of Germany and all things German is legendary, so it was with great excitement that we took Ruby to her very first Oktoberfest! We’d been to other Oktoberfests throughout Southern California before, but they had always come off as pretty cheesy and not very authentic.
As it turns out, having a real German friend to find a good Oktoberfest is very valuable. Our friend Malte, who lived in Munich for some time, found out that the Phoenix Club, a German cultural center in Anaheim, CA, held a pretty large one, and much more authentic as it was staffed mainly by Germans. Perfect!
So off we went to this quasi-Munich celebration that originated with Crown Prince Ludwig’s wedding in 1810 with friends (Malte and Amy, and Daniel and Amber) and babies in tow, ready to drink some fine Bavarian beers and eat some hearty food.
As it turned out, the Phoenix Club’s Oktoberfest really was the best local Oktoberfest I’d been to, by a long shot. It certainly helps when Germans are running the show. The food selection was great (far beyond the bratwursts that most local Oktoberfests serve), as was the beer selection.
Even the giant tent looked pretty legit!
And how did Ruby and her baby buddies Paloma and Nora do?
Well for starters, Ruby LOVED the pretzel. But wait…sauerkraut too? Yes, Ruby DEVOURED the sauerkraut. She even cried when we’d stop feeding it to her. Who knew?
Me, Ruby, Daniel, and Nora…kickin’ it Bavarian style.
And the German Tiger and her Cub.
Excellent times. Bis zum nächsten Jahr!
Ruby has been quite the social butterfly and has had some fun days with her friends lately! Here are just a few photos …
Ruby with Ollie and Bailey at our house. Ruby hosted her 1st playdate!
Hmmm … we’ve got a little work ahead of us teaching Ruby to share! :)
Ruby also went to the Long Beach Aquarium this week with Georgia & Olive. They were the most stylin’ babies there!
I just love this candid shot. Olive is on the move, Georgia wants to climb right in the tank, and there’s Ruby … just sitting up straight with some impressive posture!
For those of you who know us, you may be surprised to see our name and the word “camping” next to each other in a sentence. But our friends suggested we should all go camping together, so we decided to be open-minded and try it out! All of our girls are staggered in age, and since it was the 1st time for all of us to camp with a munchkin, we figured we’d all be in the same boat. To make things somewhat easier, we decided to stay at Campland in San Diego. It’s on Mission Bay, and basically – right in the middle of the city. The only thing that made it camping was sleeping in a tent and having a site with dirt … everything else was pretty easy and convenient. Campland had showers, electricity, a market, a pool, a park … and even Domino’s was delivering pizzas to some of the sites! It may not necessarily be “roughing it” … but at times, it was a little rough! :)
Thank goodness Ed is so awesome – he set up the tent right away with no problems.
The girls got cozy (and dirty!) right away as well …
And once the sun went down, Ruby got to debut some super cute campfire fashion – the little lamb pj’s!
Unfortunately, despite many trials in the pack and play, Ruby just didn’t like sleeping in the tent for some reason. This can also be translated as unfortunately, no one in the Kim family got much sleep in the tent.
Although we had a major lack of sleep, there were some highlights. The 1st was that Ruby was happy as a clam in the pool!
She spent an hour and a half in there non-stop! She was a very happy baby in the water.
Also super awesome was our introduction to “Hobo Stew” …
Basically, you chop up a bunch of veggies, potatoes and sausage. Then you take a piece of tin foil and load up whatever fillings you choose. We had a variety of sauces to add to the mix, such as ketchup, bbq sauce, mustards, wine, beer, etc. that you could top off with before sealing your creation in the tin foil and setting it in the fire pit. The sausage starts cookin’, the steam rises inside and cooks your veggies, and then about 15-20 minutes later you have a pretty good hot meal if I do say so myself!
Thanks to our friends the Arzates for introducing us to Hobo Stew!
All in all, we’re glad we did it – but its safe to say the Kims won’t be camping anytime soon. (Unless you’ve got an awesome vintage Airstream trailer we may be able to borrow from you … :)