It finally feels like summer is officially here. Tomorrow is our last day of school for the spring semester (yea!), this week we made our first trip of the season out to Regions Park for a Barons game, and we enjoyed a sweet friend's wedding this weekend and ended up spending most of the reception outdoors on the patio enjoying the cool summer evening.
Thursday night we ventured out to Regions Park (I like calling it the Hoover Met for old times sake) with our friends Drew and Caroline and my brother Kyle. We had great time just hanging out and enjoying the game.
My good friend Margaret who I worked with at EBSCO got married Saturday night. It was so good to be able to celebrate with her and Dave, and I also got a chance to catch up with a lot of my old coworkers who I haven't seen in forever. The wedding was beautiful, and so was Margaret. It was so great to see she and Dave and her family having such a great time. (Dave was trying to read the words of the Beatles song written on his cake.) With Margaret and our good friend Rachael. Rachael worked with me and Katie Snow (um...Crawford) at the Alabama Alumni Magazine in college and now works at EBSCO. We had a great time catching up with her. My friend Aden, another former EBSCO coworker who now lives in Austin, Texas also was at the wedding and stayed with us for the weekend. Somehow I managed to not take a single picture with her, but it was wonderful to have her as our guest and have time to catch up.
My mom captured this moment of Victoria meeting her new baby sister and getting some time with her mommy. She's holding Presley's prayer necklace we all made for her at her baby shower. It was really special as everyone in the room shared the prayer they would be praying for this precious child and then added a bead to her necklace. Everyone is excited to go home today!
And here's a pic of Victoria passed out in my parent's bed. She's been staying with mom and dad these past few days. Dad called me last night and said Victoria reminded him of me when I was little...something about her "sleeping all over the bed, stretched out sideways, etc., etc." Haha! She sure does look innocent enough in this picture though. It's a tough job being a big sister. Wears you out.
I have a beautiful new baby niece (not technically a niece - officially a second cousin, but for all practical purposes she's a niece)!
Sienna "Presley" Blackwell made her debut yesterday at 3 a.m. 7lbs, 2 ozs, 19 inches long...
Got to meet her for the first time over my lunch break yesterday. Unfortunately did not have my camera but she is beautiful. Mom and dad are doing great also. So proud.
Hope to drop by the hospital again later this week to get some pics.
Yes, I have been a horrible blogger for the past month or so. I do not deny it. My apologies for my non-existent blogging. Here's my attempt at an excuse. Grad school has been crazy busy lately, and Rob and I have been running around between work and class trying to finish up our last assignments and finally wrap up this semester. The good news is that all (presentations, papers, final exams, etc., etc.,) will be said and done by about 9:30 p.m. on May 4th. Then summer can officially begin.
So here's the long overdue snap shot of the past several weeks. There's not too many highlights since, as I said, our boring lives revolve around work and school. But, to name a few.
1. Presley's Baby Shower. I had the privilege of helping host a baby shower for my cousin Kristi earlier this month. It was a great time with family. We are all anxiously awaiting baby Presley's arrival. The due date is April 29th, but I'm honestly surprised we don't have a baby yet since Kristi is quite with child. We're expecting a call anyday. Here are some pics of the fam at the shower.
2. Twilight I finally finished the Twilight series after much encouragement from many friends. It's actually the most non-school-related reading I've done in years. Robert had lots of fun telling folks I was reading vampire love story books, but they really were great. My friend Anne actually just finished a teen fiction novel similar in some ways to Twilight. Just last week we found out she got signed with a literary agent, so I'm hoping the next book I read is hers!
3. Art This morning we ventured down to Linn Park for the Magic City Art Connection with our friends Drew and Caroline. It's Birmingham's annual art festival held downtown each spring. We had a great time moseying around, but boy was it hot. I think we've skipped spring and gone straight to summer! And and I had my first Sips N Strokes experience with a good friend from school who convinced me I could actually paint something worth keeping. I'm not going to lie; I had my doubts (knowing all too well my severely lacking artistic skills), but the final product was actually something that resembled the original. And we had lots of fun. Jennifer is from Chicago, so she picked this really beautiful Chicago skyline painting for us to attempt. Here's us just getting started... ...and with the final results. Not sure how mine turned out so yellow. Must have gone a little crazy with the gold paint. So again, here's the painting we signed up for. And my final product (with some help from the instructor after several comments from myself of, "Can you fix this?"). I'm no Picasso, but I'd say it was definitely an evening worth the $35 I spent on it. Thanks for suggesting this Jennifer! It was a great girls night out!
4. A-Day We didn't get to go, but we watched it on TV and got pretty excited about the coming football season. The guys looked pretty good, but the Anthony Grant commercials were really awesome. Check it out.
5. Yardwork Rob and I havebeen itching to get out in the yard and make some much needed improvements ever since the weather warmed up. This afternoon was quite historic. It will forever go down in Adams history as the Day the Nandinas Died. If you don't know what a Nandina is, let me enlighten you. It's the plant from hell. If Satan had a shrub, it was be a Nandina. Note Exihibit A below. We had five of these guys (only about four times larger) growing like crazy in the beds in front of our house. To be honest, we've hated them since we moved in nearly two years ago and have debated taking them out countless times. Today, we got the nerve to actually take them down. And boy was it a hassle. Somewhere down the line these shrubs must be kin to kudzu, because they reproduce faster than rabbits. If you cut one down, five spring up in it's place. And their root system in ginormous! See Exhibit B below. So, after lots of hacking and digging and pulling and sweating we finally had them gone. The poor shrubs behind them were completely deformed, but we're hoping they'll bounce back a little now that there's room to breath. And, we now have some space to revamp our flower beds and hopefully install the window box I've been wanting. I also managed to plant some lantana, sweet potato vine, and a few other colorful annuals in our planter on the back patio. We're getting ready to spend some time grilling out and enjoying the summer weather. And here's my feeble attempt at gardening this summer. Two adolescent tomatoes - a Celebrity and Better Boy - which I'm hoping will produce enough to feed me for the next three months since Rob isn't a huge fan. Only time will tell how green my thumb actually is.
I'm loving this new website - Eat at Home Alabama - that features all of the food products made in Alabama so you can buy local and support local producers.
Some of my favorite Alabama-made products include Sister Schubert Rolls (the next best thing to my mother-in-law's yeast rolls), Mr. P's Sauces, Seasonings, and Marinades, and Bud's Best Cookies. (Actually took a "field trip" to the cookie plant back in the day when I was a kid. They had a train - thinking back on it now, it was more like several golf carts hooked together - which we road around the plant in, and then they gave us tons of free cookies. I'm sure that experience has influenced my liking of their product). And then there's lots of others like Mayfield ice cream, Milo's sweet tea, John's Slaw Dressing...
Two Christmases ago we made Robert's Nana and Papa (Alabama transplants to South Carolina) a gift basket of all Alabama-made foods. I was amazed at how many there were. We had a huge basket and barely even touched the surface. The whole list is on the website, along with some great recipes, coupons, and frugal meal ideas.
Last weekend we had our first annual reunion weekend with some of our closest friends from college. Since we had zero college weddings to get us together this year, we planned a visit to Charlotte, North Carolina to stay with our friends Amy and Matt. Jess and Ben drove up from Jacksonville, and we picked up Jonsey from Atlanta on the way.
We had such a great time catching up, watching basketball, visiting Charlotte, and just hanging out. The boys enjoyed the lovely weather with a round of golf while us ladies took in some shopping. It all went by way too quickly between laughing at old college home movies Amy made, visiting the campus of Davidson University, and catching up. Amy and Matt were such wonderful hosts!
It did hit me how old we all are when the conversation moved to home improvements, mortgages, future kids, car payments...(need I continue). Let's just say were not in college anymore.
I didn't manage to take too me pics except for our game of cornholl on Sunday. Matt actually made their cornholl set, appropriate painted to represent Alabama and Tennessee. (It's a mixed marriage, but they compromise well. :) ) s A few pics from our lunch on Saturday and then with Erin Edwards in Atlanta when we picked up Ash who miraculously broke away from the KPMG office during tax season for a free weekend! Erin is the RUF intern at Emory, so it was great to see her and her new place. Next Year Reunion Trip Destinaton: Jacksonville!
