"How can a flower be nerdy?"

On Saturday, April 10th, I had the pleasure and honor of attending a dinner at the Elsmo household.  The dinner was hosted by my boss and his wonderful wife to celebrate our staff.  Knowing that Mel was going to make us a feast (she's a chef)...we were ecstatic for the invite and couldn't wait for the day to arrive.

I wish I could tell you that we were not impressed....because then maybe Mel and Leif wouldn't have to wait for our request for another dinner!  The food......OH THE FOOD.....was absolutely delicious.  Poor Mel had to try and figure out how to feed a large staff that had a lot of food issues (people don't eat fish, someone is almost a vegan, etc.)!  We didn't mean to be trouble at all, but I can only begin to imagine how stressful it was to try and come up with something that was easy to feed a large group and that could feed all of us.

So what did we eat?!  An Asian-inspired delight.  There were Vietnamese rolls, wontons, shrimp toast, etc for appetizers...and then the main meal was a Chinese box make-your-own-meal.  I have no idea what to call it, but I hope you get the picture.

I keep forgetting to upload the pics I took with the office camera, so I'm stealing the pics from Mel's blog.  Here is what our dinner table looked like!

Isn't this just deliciously ridiculous!

There are no words to describe how much we all ate...and how late some of us stayed.  I will confess that I was shocked when I realized that I was leaving their house at 2AM!  Wow!

During the course of dinner, the beautiful 13 year-old Emma Grace was encouraged by her mom to ask me: "How can a flower be nerdy?"  I thought it was the silliest of questions, and asked why she wanted to know.  I was promptly informed that her mom thought Baby's Breath was a nerdy flower.  Ha!  Inside I kinda agreed, but I had a sneaking suspicion that the beautiful flower arrangements I saw by the appetizers might have been assembled by Emma (and yes, they had Baby's Breath).  So rather than outright agreeing with mom, I remarked on the positives of the flower...it's delicate, tiny qualities.  This seemed to please Ms. Emma immensely :)  I will definitely post pics of her arrangements soon - they deserve their audience.

However, Emma has no idea that she has in fact created a challenge for me!  I vow to try and find ways to make flowers "nerdy," in my scrapbooking....so I also put the challenge out there for my readers.  Show me how you make flowers nerdy.  Emma Grace might one day get a mini-book with all the examples of nerdy flowers I can think of :)  She has a backyard recital (she's a ballerina) in June, and this might be my form of "flowers" to celebrate the amazing show I'm sure to watch!

Lastly, I mentioned that I was working on a secret project for one of my readers.....I chuckled at the thought of Mel reading my blog and wondering if I was talking about her.  OF COURSE I was talking about her.  My department does not have a small staff, so I knew that Mel and family were going to be getting ready for us all day.  I tried to come over early to help, but I was banned.  So I wanted to give her a small token of thanks for the amazing night and for her new friendship.

I scrap-"lifted" the idea from someone at Scrapbook.com (I'll look for the original pic to share).  The original design was a trifold thank you card.  I decided to take the overall design and modify it into a mini-album for my friend.  I also took some pics of the album, but was stunned to see how beautiful the images she took of it were.  I should have let her show me how to take some pics when at the house, but the batteries were dying on the camera and I wanted to make sure I took a few shots of the book for future "replications."

Anyway, here is the small and quick token of appreciation that I was all too happy to make!  This is a 4x4 mini-album.