The week following Easter was a busy one, Tuesday brought with it a celebration for Magz and Lukes birthdays.

Since I decided to host Magz’s baby shower (in late August), I decided it was a perfect excuse to start my baking prep.

As such, I decided to start with trying my hand at a yummy carrot cake.  A few days prior, I happened upon a recipe for carrot cake on the blog of one of the Coupon Ladies I follow and decided it was a sign for me to try it.

Personally, I loved it, I thought it really was the best carrot cake I’ve ever tried (and no, that’s not me being big headed since the recipe was entitled ‘Best ever Carrot cake’).  Col came home – and he loved it too! 🙂

We were a little late to dinner, mainly cause we’d no idea where we were going!  We were technically first to arrive, but we ended up sitting in a car park on the wrong side of Town Centre cause I’d only ever been there once (for an SSA event) and had no idea where we were supposed to be!

Magz, Sam, Emily and Luke were already at the restaurant when we arrived.  We ate at a restaurant called, the ‘Straits’ in Town Centre.  It was delicious!!

It was almost ‘family style’, where they bring out your food in bowls and you’re expected to have a little of everything.

We tried some roti prata, which is a crisp griddled Indian flat-bread that came with a delicious curry dip.

We had salad, jasmine rice, coconut rice, butter chicken, basil chicken, wok fried rice noodles (“Chow Kway Teo” Wide Rice Noodles, Prawns, Chinese Sausage, Bean Sprouts), straits style beef – it was all sooooo good! It was nice to try a little of a number of dishes too – great serving style!

Not only that, but the server had taken my ‘bake and take’ tray from me and put it in the fridge when I got there.  When we’d finished eating, she brought it out, with plates, knives and it made a yummy dessert – it went down very well!

We had such a lovely night, when the 6 of us get together, it’s always a lovely night!

Wednesday morning, Magz picked me up and we headed to Panera Bread for a yummy lunch with Julie, little Hazel and Lori.  Once lunch was over, Magz and I headed to the British shop to pick up some ‘home’ supplies.  I took home sausages, bacon, Lilt, Tayto and Chewits – which went down very well!

Magz took me back to Casa Madden to wait for Col to get off work and come by.  Once he arrived, we enjoyed a tasty dinner and a game of Ligretto (which we hadn’t played in a long time!!) with the Madden crew!

Thursday, Magz and I did a spot of cloth diaper shopping.

Yup, we went shopping for cloth diapers.

My lovely friend Magz, is pregnant!!!!!!!!!

Whooooohoooo! – and in case you can’t tell, I’m so excited for her and Sam!  I can’t wait til October/November when she’s due to give birth!

She had found a nice baby shop online that she wanted to try out and I decided to tag-along with her and see what the fuss was about – cause we all know, I’m a fiend for baby stuff!

On the way home from shopping, we came across a fatal accident on Westheimer, less than a block from Magz’s house.  A guy tried to run across the road, a car hit him, and, by the time we arrived, there was a dead body on the roof of a car.  Less than 10 feet behind the car, lay the body’s shoes and, at the side of the road, a couple of bags of groceries lay, too.  It was really, really sad.  It upset us both and even shook us up a little I’d say.

For dinner that night, I kept up my new culinary experimentation and decided to try out a chicken Florentine casserole recipe that I’d found on Allrecipes.com.  It went down a storm – it was delicious and Col has already requested that I make it for dinner again!

So far, Las 2, Cooking/baking experiment failures 0!

There you have it, it’s finally public news!

Magz and Sam are gonna have a baby (currently dubbed, ‘Lentil’) and it’s all very exciting here in H-Town.

I’ve known for a while, so I’m SUPER relieved that it’s out in the open, cause, if you know me well, you’ll know that I don’t do well keeping secrets.  Though this time, I didn’t do badly at all!

I’m so excited and have already started the baby-shower planning, the baby-gift buying and trying to wrap Magz in cotton wool (whenever she’ll let me, which, if you know Magz, isn’t very often at all!)

Until next time!