Ol' Wiggly: we

Shhh shhh shhhh shhhh

The weekend before last Erin's friend Maggie organized a surprise baby shower for Erin at Rockaway Beach. Maggie convinced Erin that they were going to surprise their friend Dana with a girls weekend, and that they just happened to get a super-awesome, super-huge house right on the ocean last-minute from one of Maggie's firefighter friends.

You should have seen Erin's face when she walked into the kitchen after dinner to five crouching figures in the dark, screaming "Surprise!". I think she almost fell down the stairs. (But probably not really, I'm sure we wouldn't let that happen.) Fortunately, her pregnant bladder seemed to hold up. At first Erin had trouble processing what was happening, then she figured it out: "It was a secret wrapped in a secret!"


Surprise!

One of the activities that Maggie and Dana had organized was a baby food tasting event, where we had to taste unlabeled jars of baby food and guess the ingredients. Some were pretty gross. I did terribly, tending toward the exotic: for one jar, I guessed tamarind where I should have guessed apricot.

Maggie, Dana, and Erin tally the points.

Molly clenched the win with Pear and Mango, a flavor she guessed spot on. She attributed her win to time spent as the taste-testing older sister to four rather than her current status as a mother, and her advice for future game players is: One ingredient for texture, one for taste.

Molly wins the grand prize Booty Pop. Congratulations, Geoffrey!

There was a four-way tie for second place, so to determine the next level winners we had to move on to part two of the challenge:Which Candy Bar is Melted in this Diaper? A baby shower isn't really complete without some in-depth discussion of upcoming baby poo, and while it was more implied in this case than explicitly discussed, there were plenty of poop jokes to be heard. As this is a family blog, none of the funniest ones can be published here.

Insert your own caption, there are lots of good possibilities.

And, Maggie even scored a personal Karaoke kit. Everybody took a turn. The program somehow scored your performance as you went along, and cut you off if your score dropped too low. It was hard to tell what the scores were based on, though enthusiasm and high octave singing seemed to be a hit: Emily got the highest score of the evening with her spirited rendition of Material Girl.

So that was the secret wrapped in a secret. But Emily and I discovered the biggest secret of all: Leaving your baby behind to go to the beach with a bunch of girls is totally awesome.