Well, hello! It's been a long time since I took a few minutes to sit down and blog. Last I wrote, I was preparing to move to the burbs and have a baby. As luck would have it, since my last post, I did in fact move to the burbs and did in fact have that baby! Just two weeks ago to be exact.

In the weeks leading up to having said baby (Hazel Anne Topliff, born January 21st, 2010) I spent many days horizontal (on partial bed rest) thinking about what clever ideas I would put together for baby Hazel's birth announcements. I was sure that I would get around to this project right after she was born. I was determined. I was hell bent on making sure that Hazel's baby announcements wouldn't go the way of Grace's baby announcements (the way of of not existing, I mean!).

When Grace was born nearly 2 years ago things were very different. First of all, Grace was born 2 1/2 months early and was in the NICU in the hospital for nearly 5 weeks. My husband had started a blog, and almost everyone we knew (and lots of people we didn't) were following our story religiously online. I had all intentions of doing baby announcements for Grace, but as I had to throw myself back into work as soon as I came home from the hospital without Grace, and the blog was filling people in on a daily basis, the ol' baby announcement project just sort of disappeared. And how comical, let me tell you, for this to happen to moi - the graphic designer specializing in invites and announcements! You can imagine how many calls and emails I got asking "WHAT amazing, clever, genius thing was I doing for Grace's birth announcements?". She was my firstborn after all, and a perfect excuse to go overboard, creatively.

As a designer, there is no crime more heinous than sending out the typical, flimsy 4x6 card from (sorry) tinyprints, shutterfly or minted.com, with a boring baby picture and baby birth stats, in an even more boring plain white envelope. How many of these tired, templated birth announcements have we all received in the last few years? How many of them felt original? How many of them were the exact same? This is everything I never want to do - this is everything I don't believe in.

So, in order to avoid being unoriginal, I went so far as to purchase a $500 (as seen on tv!) at-home silk screen printing machine. My ideas were elaborate... they involved silk screening cloth diapers, or towels or burp cloths. They would be baby announcements combined with the holiday cards and moving announcements I didn't get to earlier, because of the difficult pregnancy + overcommitted work schedule! They were de-luxe in my mind, award-winning even!

However, now living in the burbs, now home from the hospital with baby #2, I was (I mean, am!) determined to finally put together something totally overboard and creative and juicy... I just don't know what. Oh, and I don't know how. Oh, and I don't know what time I'll have to do it in. And, ohmigod, dare I say it outloud... I have been looking at some online digital baby announcement places to produce baby announcements for me. I'm ashamed. I feel dirty! I feel like I'm about to commit designer-sin... but when I think about the diapers, the breastfeeding, the other client-work I have lined up for the next several months, I just can't figure out how I'm supposed to go overboard on my own project. I'm in the deepest darkest design quandary of all time... and I lay awake at night thinking about this, instead of getting 20 minutes of sleep.

I don't know how this story ends - but I do know that people are already asking me what AMAZING announcements I'm working on and I've got nothing to report yet!

So stay tuned...