2010 Year Review

Since basically the entire year of 2010 I was pregnant we were a bit on the slow side for happenings in our family. That is until August 6th came around and we found ourselves w/ one more family member. Like years past I’ll do a quick little 2010 review.

January
I came out of the baby closet and shared my news with the interwebs that we were expecting little nugget late July.
Kara and Todd got engaged! Yippee!

February
We worked on getting the house ready for a baby. Painting, building and installing. Fun and exciting stuff!

March
Went wedding dress shopping with Kara and she found the perfect dress!
Found out nugget was a GIRL!
April
Finished up our garden in the back.
Celebrated E’s 30th birthday at Stellas.

My grandpa passed away. Miss you Paps. :(

May
Participated in the Des Moines MS Walk.

Family came up to celebrate Wade and his MBA graduation.

We remodeled our shower.
I got pregnant fat face and turned 31! Ahhh!!!
We went to our first Twins game at Target Field.
June
Drove to Indy to celebrate Shannon and Derik’s wedding where I raised the roof.July
Wade broke his wrist racing his motorcycles and had to have surgery to repair it. Todd broke his dancing at a wedding reception (numerous drinks were involved so we'll let it slide... I guess.)

We finally finished the nursery just in time!
Remodeled the rest of our bathroom (halleluiah!)
My due date came and went and no baby!

August
Nugget (aka Charlie) is here after 16+ hours of labor that would not progress and ended in a c-section!!!

The rest of August is a blur. :)

September
Road trips to Des Moines and Galesburg so that Charlie could meet more family and friends.

October
Charlie attended her first ISU game!

Kara had 2 bridal showers that Charlie and I went to.
My maternity leave ended and I went back to work part time.
Charlie’s first Halloween and she dressed as a cute bee.
November
Charlie started daycare.
Kara had her bachelorette party and I had a 2 day hangover.

Wade and I celebrated our 4 year anniversary.

December
We said goodbye to our wonderful neighbors, the Bormann’s, who moved back to Iowa (we miss you guys!)
Charlie learned how to roll over front to back like a champ and is SUPER close to going back to front.
We got 17.1 inches of snow in one day which was the 5th largest on record! We were stranded in!
We celebrated our 1st Christmas as a family of 3 (+ Kobe). (Now if only I had a picture of all of us together...)

All in all not a super eventful year unless you count the birth! But you can’t do much when you’re pregnant! And through the ups and downs of the year we realize we are very blessed. What a life we have!

Here’s to a happy and healthy 2011 to you all!

Cheers!

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Chicago + 2 times + 1 summer = FABULOUS!

The Corner Bakery - our favorite eating establishment due to the entertainment

Not that anyone would have questioned, but us ladies had an absolute blast in Chicago! It was 100% stress free and just splendid! Just what us girls needed!

I arrived in Chicago last out of the group and quickly made it to my shuttle van only to have to sit and wait for almost 15 minutes while it filled up and then of course, just my luck, I am the last one to be dropped off. So I raced up to the rooms and was greeted by all my lovely chicas and promptly poured myself a drink!

We played it low key b/c I didn't even get to the room until 10:30. So we just all relaxed and drank in the VIP room. (VIP = vodka in pineapple) We joked, gossiped, laughed a TON and caught up with each other before crashing around 2 am.

Saturday afternoon was spent leisurely shopping on the MAGNIFICENT MILE. I love that street. A shoppers paradise. I controlled myself fairly well and only bought a new red spring coat, some purple leggings, some bangle bracelets and a short sleeved tunic. I was proud of myself for restraining somewhat, but what I really wanted was this or this or this.

Or all three! But I resisted. Even though I REALLY, REALLY wanted to splurge.

That evening Kara, Nicole and myself got ready to head out for dinner and I grabbed the door handle to our room and it broke! The damn thing nearly fell off and we were STUCK in our room! We called the other ladies to have them come down and try to open it and they couldn't. We had a slight meltdown before the "engineer" came up to fix our door and let us out. It was hilarious in the end and thankfully we were only stuck in there for 5 minutes or so.

OMG! OMG! OMG!!!!

We had dinner at Carmine's that night which was a hoppin place! Great chicken parmesan and wine too! Then we wandered out into the neighborhood to see what kind of trouble we could get into. We ended up at McFadden's where we met a bachelor party and they did the N'Sync "Bye, Bye, Bye" dance perfectly choreographed. I think they had spent a lot of time practicing for just such an occasion. It was hilarious. After too many drinks and shots to count we slowly made it back to our hotel. Jenni passed out in the elevator which was so funny. I'm just glad we all made it back to the hotel in one piece. The gracious Lord was watching over us b/c I have no idea how we made it back. I don't remember a damn thing from that part of the evening.

(PSA: Overconsumption of alcoholic beverages may be dangerous to your health and hamper your ability to walk, talk, remember things from only moments ago, recognize whether or not another person is attractive and/or make it home safely. Please drink wisely. *yeah right* The more you know.)

The start of the night at Carmine's for dinner

The whole group of us at McFadden's

Sunday I woke up hungover (go figure) and needed to prepare myself for the White Sox/Red Sox game. I wasn't feeling too great so I think I watched about 10 minutes of the whole game. We decided that since we are old we needed a nap and after the game we headed back to our rooms for a quick nap before getting ready for another night out on the town. Dinner Sunday was at Cafe Ba Ba Reeba which we called Cafe Ba Ba Ba Barann. Their menu is mostly made up of tapas so we each selected 2 since they are generally quite small and sampled a lot from their menu. So many good things but I think my favorites were the bacon wrapped dates, the goat cheese and tomato sauce and the beef tenderloin skewer. Mmmm... so tasty!

All of us at the White Sox/Red Sox game

After dinner we cabbed it over to the piano bar, Howl at the Moon. We definitely howled! My already hoarse voice was basically a goner by the time we were done there! When you are talking and laughing constantly it's hard on the vocal chords and my girls definitely crack me up. We closed the bar down and headed back to the hotel making sure to reinact the elevator scene from the previous night b/c we are cool like that.

Our bathroom line up (way to fuck it up Ang) :)

The whole group at Cafe Ba Ba Ba Barann
Howl at the Moon piano bar

Ang, Me & Meggie
We are good sing alongers
The necessary elevator shots :) (Eat your heart out CB!)
Reinacting the pass out from the night before
This is my beer baby from the weekend. It's getting so big! I'd guess myself to be about 4-5 months along! :)

And those are my Chicago highlights in a nutshell.

In other news the hubs went back to school this week so Tuesday and Thursday nights will be quiet for me. I'll get to watch all the girly shows I want! Yippee! And this is his last semester as he graduates in December. I couldn't be more excited for him! What an accomplishment he will have!

This weekend is the big rivalry game: Iowa vs. Iowa State. We will be heading down for some massive tailgating! ISU knows how to tailgate even if our football team isn't the greatest. Let's hope we can pull this win off though and kick those Hawks asses! Whoopee!

Oh yeah, and It's Always Sunny starts in ONE WEEK FROM TODAY!!! Yayyayayayayay!

Lata gatas! <3 align="left">

You Win Some, You Lose Some

The actual reason we went to Vegas was for the ISU/UNLV football game. The UNLV folks are a bit different than us ISU fans. I'm not sure if all of you are familiar w/ tailgating festivities at ISU, but we enjoy it (thoroughly). What I mean by this is if the game is at 6 pm, we are out tailgating by noon (at the very latest). If the game is at 11 am, we are lined up to get into the stadium parking lot by 5 am. Some may call this extremely ridiculous. I call it extreme fun! We really know how to throw a tailgate party and are proud of our tailgating skills.

The second our bus pulls into the UNLV parking lot we realize that these UNLV folks just don't kick it like us ISU fans do. The lot is empty and it is only 3 hours until game time. When the lot finally begins to fill up we realize that it is not filling w/ UNLV fans but with more ISU fans. There are more people who traveled extreme distances to come to this game than those that only needed to drive 10 miles. I couldn't believe it. Does this team not have any fans? And if it does then why aren't these fans tailgating (ie: partying!)??? How strange.

Not to disappoint our ISU standards we set up camp and begin the drinking. Heavily. We were even drinking shit (aka the worst whiskey EVER). Kara even did a flabongo! We weren't messin' around. We finally head into the game and I will admit that UNLV does have one thing over us at ISU. They serve liquor/beer in their stadium. I've been informed this is b/c the stadium is not on school grounds and is not owned by the university. Regardless, they should definitely have more fans if they can drink in their stadium. What is up w/ that?!?! We promptly order beers and find our seats. The beers go down like water. We get more beers. The beers are no longer satisfying us. We need something more. So we get mixed slushy drinks = awesomeness. These drinks were strong. They were delicious. I chugged it. I missed out on half the game. From what I remember we sucked through the first half, made a come back in the 3rd quarter and tied it, then went into OT and lost due to a stupid mistake. I can't recall what the mistake was, but I do remember yelling insanely at the field that we sucked. We leave the game and head back to our bus area...wasted. The grass they had there was so soft it felt like velvet under my feet. I was running around barefoot and rolling in the grass. You'd have thought I was high on magic mushrooms or something. Nope, just incredibly, ridiculously intoxicated. The bus ride home was a blast. For some reason our drunk asses kept yelling "oompah!" Don't question it, just let it go. We get back to our room and I hit the bed. I say I need only 20 minutes to rest up and then I'll be ready to party. Yeah, right. Those 20 minutes turned into 3 hours when I was awoken by my hubs and friends coming back to the room for the night. Oops.

Warning: Overconsumption can cause early passouts.

Oh well, fun was had. Extreme tailgating fun. And at least I didn't puke at the table. :)