Eva, who is currently living in Miami, was home for the Christmas holidays, as were many other out-of-town friends and relatives.  My cousin Helene felt this would be a good time to have a baby shower for her, and so it was done.

The Petrusha women, and lots of Eva’s friends headed for the East Side, a foreign land to some of us,  to help her celebrate the coming baby.  Now, generally, I hate don’t particularly enjoy these sorts of events There’s usually lots of giggling and cooing over cute baby stuff, talk of episiotomies, incredibly long and painful labors, colicky babies, and diaper disaster stories, as well as  horrible games involving toilet paper and bows.

Luckily, this was not to be such an event.  The food was good, there was an open bar (always necessary but not usually available at such events) and there was only one game (we had put Lisa in charge of games, counting on her to not get around to doing much).  Gifts were opened to much cooing, true, and with help from Eva’s little friend, but there was no talk at my table about any of the above topics.

And it was nice for us, as the entire female half of the Petrusha clan was able to make it. We did quite poorly at Lisa’s game, which was twenty questions about the minutiae of Eva’s life, including her complete name (1) and the name of her first (unrequited) love (2). We did get yet another chance to gab, as we often do, and even got to take a nice group photo.