Our First Thanksgiving 2010

Stuart and I didn't have the kids with us for our first Thanksgiving as a married couple so we decided to stay home and make our own Thanksgiving feast. It was a lot of fun and we got to use all of the cooking and serving goodies that we got as wedding gifts!!

Here's a shot of our Thanksgiving/Halloween/Fall dining area.

Here's our Thanksgiving spread once it was ready to eat! We made a turkey, mashed potatoes, rolls, green beans, and stuffing. I don't remember what we had for dessert!

Stuart cooking earlier in the day. This was a major production for us the first time so it took us a while to get everything done!

Me after we pulled the turkey out of the oven.

We had a great time cooking and hopefully we'll have the chance to do it again sometime!!

Kids: Fall 2010

Here are some pictures of the kids from the Fall of 2010. They've grown up so much since then!! It's amazing!!

Ben as Carlos Carmel in a play about dental hygiene that his 4th grade

class put on in school. It was really cute and entertaining!!

Here's a picture of Caroline on her 9th birthday. Such a sweet little lady! This was the year that she got her ears pierced. She did a great job with her new earrings and her ears never got infected!

Here's a picture of Sam after he made his bed one day. He was really proud of himself for doing such a great job and we were too!!

We have a ton of soccer pictures of Ben and Caroline from Fall of 2010 and Spring of 2011 that I'll put up in another post. Now we have Sam Taekwondo pictures to post too!!

Back to the Future: A Current Update

Hello Everyone!! We hope you all are doing well! Everything is going well here in Topeka today! Stuart is mowing the lawn, the kids are all at a soccer tournament in Lawrence, and I'm here waiting for a baby to pop out while I catch up on the blog. AND it's a beautiful sunny day. Our really good news today is that the legislative session is OVER as of yesterday and the baby waited until it was done before making an appearance!! There were definitely a few times I didn't think that was going to happen. Now it's just a waiting game! We have everything ready to go here. I think we just need a few more nights of uninterrupted sleep if we can get them and we can do this!! Here's to hoping! We'll let you all know as soon as anything comes up!

For the time being I'm going to keep trying to chronicle our last year and a half as family here in a photo journal format. I think I might need to start jumping back and forth between last year and the present as we get baby activities going, but I'll do my best to keep some kind of linear order!

We hope that everyone has a great weekend!!

Moving Day: From One Home Sweet Home To Another

As I think everyone who reads this blog probably knows, Stuart and I waited until after we were married to move in together. There were some good things about this order of events and some not so good things, but more good than not so good. We didn’t wait to move in together because either of us was old-fashioned. If anything, I think it had more to do with my new-fashioned sense of independence and my complete and total love of my apartment.

I moved into my apartment in August 2005 when I moved to Topeka to start law school. My apartment was in the historic Devon Apartment Building. It was built in the 1880s and had tons of charm (and a few quirks). It was a perfect fit! It was the biggest place that I had ever lived in and it had twelve-foot ceilings. I had a living room, a dining room, kitchen, bedroom, long hallway, bathroom, and my own porch. There was a cute little courtyard in the back of the building too!! I moved out of my apartment in October of 2010, just a little over five years after first making it my home.

Over the years I spent a lot of time turning my wonderful little apartment into a home. I really enjoyed decorating it and hosting little gatherings of friends. I loved the space and I loved spending time there. I was really lucky to have lived in such a great place. I am also very lucky that I got to move on to another great place to call home. Here are some pictures of my sweet little apartment. Please indulge me a little on this post, once I got started with the pictures I couldn’t stop!!

Here is my cozy little living room.

Did I mention that there was a park right across the street from my apartment? It was a beautiful little park with a nice little swinging bench. I used to walk over there for study breaks during finals.

I love Christmas time and I loved decorating my apartment for Christmas every year. This was Christmas 2007. Part of my motivation to get through finals every year was that I wouldn't let myself start decorating until I had finished with all of my tests and then I would go pick out a tree!

Christmas 2007 again.

Christmas 2008. Fake tree this year.

I don't have very many pictures of my bedroom so I had to use this one with my lovely unmade bed.

My back porch!! This was a wonderful space that I used as much as I could. I sat out on the porch all of the time to study. We also grilled a lot out there too. I was a bit of an urban gardener as you can see.

More awesome little porch.

Porch at night. Sorry there are so many of these, but it was just such a great space!

Again at night.

Another picture of my cozy living room. The place was a little cluttered, but I'd like to think the clutter gave it character:)

Christmas 2009. No tree this year. Stuart and the kids and I all did a tree together at his house.

Christmas 2009 again.

The dining room. BTW, all of this furniture was either a garage sale or antique/junk store find. Garage sailing used to be a hobby, but I've since moved on to having my own garage sales to get rid of some of the stuff I've picked up garage sailing.

The view out my kitchen window in the spring. Didn't suck at all!!

The cats absolutely loved the porch and the courtyard.

Dining room with peonies that grew all over the courtyard.

Sweet little courtyard.

Something Happened

Just an FYI: something happened while I was editing the last blog post that I put up and it went out before I was done with it. Some of you might have gotten an email with either not all of the pictures or without the text. I republished the post, but I don't think it will send another email out. I just wanted to let you all know that the blog is up and fixed and ready to read on the full website now!! Hope everyone is having a good afternoon!!

The Wedding and the Honeymoon!! Part Two

Hello Everyone!! I hope you all are doing well on this almost spring weekend. Our whirlwind (hopefully) tour of the last year and a half continues on! I've blogged more in the past month than I have in the past year and a half, but it seems like catching up on everything to get us to the present day is going to take so long!! This morning I was looking through all of the great pics we have from the past year and a half and I'm not sure how I'm going to edit them down for the blog! I hope to have that figured out soon and that I keep moving this project forward as fast as I can!

These are some pictures from our honeymoon that I wanted to share. We got some great pictures that captured some wonderful memories and beautiful places!!

Paris: Luxembourg Gardens

This is where we went when we first arrived in Paris and several times afterward as it was just down the street from our hotel. The flowers here were beautiful! This is just a small sampling of some of the beautiful landscape. We went running here a few mornings on our trip.

Here we are strolling across a bridge on the Seine before dinner on our first night in Paris.

This is the charming little restaurant we ate at on our first night in Paris.

Parisian culture is so fascinating!! Parisians just hanging out along the Seine. Probably a few tourists mixed in there too, but most seemed to be locals. Everyone was out enjoying the warm Indian Summer temperatures that year.

This is the cute little hotel that we stayed in during our visit to Paris: Hotel Louis II in the 6th Arrondissement.

Stuart and I ate a lot of "picnic" lunches during the day so that we could spend more on nice dinners in the evenings. This is a picture from our picnic lunch outside the Centre Pompidou modern art museum. Great people watching, fabulous scenery, delicious sandwiches, and cold beer!! Perfect!!

I'm holding the Eiffel Tower!! Wow!! This is actually about as close as we got to it. We decided to avoid the crowds and leave the close up views to the other tourists.

An untouristy thing we did: we visited a farmer's market one morning. The flowers were amazing. We had a ton of pictures from here of all of the fresh food, but I couldn't put all of them up here!!

Beautiful tomatoes!! This place made me wish that we had a kitchen while we were there!

The beginning of our journey to Capri: overnight train ride from Paris to Rome. Our seat/bed was "kaput" as described by our train steward. At the time I thought it was going to be a really big deal, that our seat wasn't going to stay up while we sat in our cabin, but it ended up not being an issue at all after we wedged a suitcase in between the top and bottom seats. Also, the seats were up for about 2 hours before they were made into a bed. Silly American.

Train cabin self portrait.

In front of the Colosseum on our 5 hour layover in Rome. I still think we looked pretty good after an overnight train trip! It was SO humid while we were there. We did a lot of walking and a lot of sweating!!

Enjoying another picnic lunch outside the engineering school in Rome. We had paninis and Peronis here, I believe.

Capri!! A beautiful, magical island off the coast of Italy near Naples and Sorrento. The whole entire place is like a postcard picture. It's almost like you're dreaming when you're there, it's hard to believe it's real!!

View of the pool at our hotel, La Minerva. Again, there were so many great pictures of the island and our views it was hard to edit them down!

Stuart and I at the top of an overlook.

Looking down!! Amazing blue waters, indescribable!!

Here we are at the bottom of the cliff after we hiked down.

La Fontelina Beach Club: we went sunbathing and swimming here one day. We were nestled in a little cove along the cliffs. It was an amazing setting!! There was also great people watching.

Sun soaked after a great day at the beach club and a wonderful time on Capri!!

The Wedding and the Honeymoon!! Part One

Continuing our year and a half in review, here are a few pictures from our wedding and honeymoon. Such a great time!! Everything about our wedding day and honeymoon was absolutely wonderful!!

Our first official day as a family! It wasn't that long ago, but look how much younger the kids looked!!

We had the most sunny, beautiful, perfect day for our wedding!

All the wedding party ladies!

Dancing under the Crane-mobile! It took us so long to make that! I was really happy with how it turned out!

Our dreamy wedding reception.

There were so many great pictures, but this is one of my favorites!!

Stay tuned for part two: honeymoon pictures!!