WOW

Wow is all we can say. Today, Alison's school psychologist coworkers threw a baby shower in Truman's honor, and we were literally astonished by the kindness and generosity that we received! There are no words strong enough to express how appreciative we feel. As you all may know, we are currently living in North Carolina while all of our family members live in New York. Well, today we certainly felt surrounded by family! We know that we will not be alone in welcoming Truman to this beautiful state!!

To provide some more details, several of Alison's coworkers volunteered to throw a shower. We quickly chose a Mexican Fiesta theme (you all know Shea and Alison love Mexican food!). Well, Shea and Alison arrived this afternoon and the conference room at Alison's work looked beautiful! There was a table with a beautiful spread of homemade food stuffs, including an inflatable sombrero filled with ice and drinks! And yummm, the food was delicious! Here's a picture of the delicious foods that were brought:

Then, people began showing up and mingling! It was really fun for Shea to finally meet Alison's coworkers, who he has heard very much about the last 2 years. And there was such a good turnout!


Then, at each table, every person at the shower was given a blank scrapbook page and some stickers and markers in order to make pages for a scrapbook. It was the coolest idea ever!! And Alison's friends picked out a beautiful cover with hand-cut ribbon. The pages that people came up with were so creative and touching! All we have to do is add photos once we meet Truman, and shazzam - scrapbook created! Here are some pictures of pages that people created:



And Alison's friend Carey made an unbelievable diaper cake! We are still amazed by her craftiness!

And we ended with presents. And holy cow, it was pure craziness! We are still in shock over how many great, wonderful, useful items we got! As you may know, we were very shocked by the early referral of baby Truman (we weren't expecting a referral until late fall or early winter!) so we really have no baby products. Well, that's definitely not true anymore! Here's the craziness before we began opening the presents:

And here's some pictures of Shea and Alison opening the gifts:


To complete the Mexican Fiesta theme, there was a fun lion pinata full of baby products like pacifiers, spoons, and wipes! Here's a picture of Shea swatting at it :-)

Here's us filling up the "school psychologist shopping cart" with our gifts to carry them to the car:

And here is our trunk literally overflowing with kindness:

When we got home, we decided to sort Truman's special presents by category (Alison actually borrowed this idea from another blog that she follows). Here's a picture of all the clothes Truman was given:

We call this category "books and toys":

And finally, "essentials":

And then, of course, there were the gift cards...no picture necessary :-)

So yeah, can you see now why we are so overwhelmed? We will never be able to put in words how lucky we feel to be surrounded by such great people, and will never be able to show enough thanks for the wonderful friends who put this shower together for us. So we'll just end with a great big THANK YOU!!!!