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!!