Nerd Conference, Girls Trips, and House Demo

It's hard to blog when you have no home laptop because it got ruined in a flood of water falling from the kitchen ceiling!


The last several weeks have been a mix of fun, exhausting, and everything in between.

 First up, I met my college roommates in Chattanooga for a fun girls' trip.  We left all of our babies with their daddies and spent a couple of days shopping, eating, and getting pampered.

Robin, Becca, and Whitney

The next week, I headed to Kentucky for a super nerd conference while Matt hit the racetrack in Atlanta.  I submitted a paper for IEEE that was accepted, and my employer paid for me to go to the conference in order for my paper to be published.
 

The best part was that three of my coworkers/girlfriends agreed to come too!  They got to tour the Wild Turkey distillery while I made friends with the other super nerds at the conference, but showed up just in time to crash my briefing.

I'm pretty sure I was the only pregnant girl at the conference.  And to have an entourage of three cute females, I am even more convinced we stuck out like a sore thumb in the sea of (literally) hundreds of engineers.

 Manda, Becca, Staci, and Jennifer

It was the perfect trip.  We had a great drive up, got to chat about our lives/husbands/babies/jobs, eat really good food, sleep in (on really good beds!), and just enjoy one another.

I really love these girls.  

And the food was super delicious too!

When I got home, I was refreshed and able to enjoy these two, the loves of my life:

Anne Marie has really been testing me lately.  I guess it's the "terrible twos".  But when she's "on", I have the most fun with the cutest little rascal I could have ever asked for.

She's also entertaining me throughout the work week as Dad sends me updates of their escapades while I'm at the office. 

Here they are at the museum playing with hats...

On the house front, things are starting to turn around.

We spent the first three weeks of January in a hotel before State Farm hooked us up with a furnished apartment.  The location is great and we're really thankful to have a place to sleep and fix (very) simple meals.  However, I miss my house! 

Anne Marie has become very wary of sounds and often comes running with a worried cry of "Noisy!" whenever she hears the neighbors upstairs walking around or flushing the toilet.  The bed in our room is so cheap that we have been rolling into the middle and bouncing the other almost out of the bed anytime one of us moves at night.  And let's not forget poop patrol... having a fenced-in back yard for the dogs to roam is such a luxury... following the dogs around with a plastic baggy at the apartment multiple times a day is a lot less enjoyable.

Hopefully we won't be in the apartment for too much longer.  The house is finally starting to come along.  After seeing almost no progress on the house for almost eight weeks, things started to turn around this month. 

My kitchen has gone from looking like this:



and this:



To this...

New floors, ceilings, walls, paint, and cabinets (pictured mid-refinish) in the kitchen!  They just put the lower cabinets back in and the granite in on Monday.  We still need them to finish up the cabinets, shelve out the pantry, and install the backsplash.   

The living room got all new hardwood flooring (just sanded and stained in this photo), replacement door and trim, and fresh paint.

Matt and I spent all day Saturday trying to get some of the things on the contractor's list that we could handle ourselves done in order to save a little bit of money.  By the end of the day, when Matt started to talk about how he'd like to move the cabinet on his side of the master bath up 4-6 inches (you know, because he's freakishly tall), I started to cry.  I didn't want to add another single item to our to do list.  It's felt so overwhelming!

We've still got a lot of work left to wrap up, but it's looking manageable now.  Things are looking like we can (crossing fingers and toes) be back in the house before Baby Bravo makes his arrival.

We have a lot of crap to move back into the affected rooms, so don't be surprised if you get a mass email begging for help in the coming weeks!