Oh My Cupcake!

For my mom's birthday, I try to do something special every year to show how much I appreciate her! One year, she went out of town so I redecorated and painted her room and threw a surprise party at our house, another year I took her to the beach with Christy and Meg (I nannied Jay and Christy's kids, Meg and Brooks, for years...they are like family! Brooks and Meg were junior bridesmaid and groomsman in our wedding.) One year I took her on a cruise, but it's getting hard to come up with good ideas now! My mom and I took a little trip to New York City last October and had such a great time, that I thought I would try to recreate it for her birthday. Little did I know, it would be a very accurate recreation of the trip.





We started our "Night in New York (in Atlanta)" by going to Chocolate Pink, the world's best cupcake shop EVER. Seriously. I wanted a good dessert place to replicate Serendipity's in New York, where we went to get incredibly huge desserts for dinner.





They all looked so amazing but we chose 4 flavors. Starting from the left, Chocolate Fudge, Carrot, Pink Lemonade, and Red Velvet.

I think the Carrot might have been my favorite.

And then they were gone...




They went too quickly, so we decided to get 4 more to go. Once we were in the car, we asked ourselves why we only got 4 more. That was stupid! Next time, we plan to go during Cupcake Happy Hour...yes, this is a real thing. Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it?

So after our visit to Cupcake Heaven, we headed over to the Fox to see The Phantom of the Opera! I think the Fox is my favorite Atlanta landmark...or the Varsity...I love me some frosted orange and onion rings. Mmm I just love Atlanta!


This is the part that is weirdly similar to our trip in NYC. We went over Halloween weekend, and of course we went to see the Halloween parade in the Village. It was raining all day and night, but we had to see it while we were there. We got a good spot on the sidewalk and waited with our umbrellas in a smooshed crowd of people. (One thing you might not know about my mom- she is very claustrophobic.) We watched some of the parade then decided to go back to our hotel, since we were drenched. We made our way towards the subway station, which was less than a block away from where we were standing at the parade. Apparently, many of the other people there had the same idea we did. So it was pouring rain, people were pushing, trying to get into the crowded subway station, and we were stuck in the middle of it. I grabbed my mom and pushed through the crowd and got us into the station. We were walking towards the trains and everything was fine, until we saw an even bigger crowd blocking the exit and the stairs to the trains. Obviously, mom was flipping out and she eventually found a policeman to pull us back through the entrance gates away from the people. We stayed down there for probably close to 2 hours, but the crowd wasn't going anywhere. I begged her to just get on a train with me, but she wasn't going back in that crowd! So the policeman and I decided we just needed to get a cab. The stairs to the street were just as crowded, but we eventually pushed our way through (with the help of our 6'6 cop) and got a taxi. We were safely on our way to the hotel....and then our taxi driver got in a wreck. Fun! He hit another taxi but refused to get out of the car to confront the other screaming taxi driver. It was one crazy night...one that I thought was in the past...wrong again!
When we came out of Phantom, it was pouring, which made everyone in the front of the crowd stop so they wouldn't get wet. But people kept coming out and we were stuck in the middle again! We eventually made our way out and had to run 4 blocks in the pouring down rain. It was truly a Night in New York.

After the dejavu, we went for some authentic NY Style pizza at a little dive called Baby Tommy's Taste of New York. I read reviews online that claimed their pizza tasted just like NY pizza, and they were right! It was exactly like the pizzeria across from our hotel in NYC that we visited every night. It topped off a memorable night perfectly! Happy Birthday Mom!

I stayed in Marietta for a couple days while Doug was at work and class all day, so mom and I went out to lunch with one of our favorite people! Carolyn and Cotton are so fun to catch up with!

Cotton is a gorgeous Bichon, but this picture absolutely cracked us up. I guess my camera caught him by surprise!

On Friday night, Doug and I went to the Steve Miller Band concert with my parents. The band is Doug's favorite, so he was pretty dang excited! We went to see the same concert 2 years ago just after we had started dating, so it was fun to recreate this memory, too.

The set was pretty amazing, too!

I will leave you with this bit of sunshine....my little puffball of love! As we were putting away clean dishes, this is what we found: