Almost 2006

So here it is a few days before the new year. It has been an interesting year for me - that's for sure! :) But for the most part, I really can't complain because it has been a good year with just a few bumps in the road.

I am so grateful that I am healthy and that I have a healthy baby boy on the way! And I am SUPER grateful that I have finally found a job that I truly enjoy and a good work environment to be in. This year, I thought I made a good move the first time around, and it turned out to be even worse than the first situation I was in, so I am so happy that I was given a second chance in August.

I am so happy that we are able to build our new house and that we will be able to move in it soon after the new year. It will be so nice not to have to deal with pesky apartment issues and annoying neighbors blasting music in the middle of the night. Oh and the STAIRS! I can't wait to live all on one floor - no hauling groceries up and down. :)

I hopefully am going to be able to leave work early today, and I have off tomorrow and Monday (although I have to go to the dentist again tomorrow morning for a tiny cavity - boo to that!). So the next time I post it will be in the new year!!! I can't believe it's already 2006. I've decided though that 2006 will be a GREAT year - new house, new baby, new life. Thank you all for your support over this year and for allowing me to be MIA for so many months while I collected my thoughts and got some sleep! LOL Hope you all have a WONDERFUL New Year's Eve and New Year and please be safe! See you on Tuesday! :)

Pictures!!!

Happy Smiling Baby! :)


Side profile and hand/arm


Our fun kitchen set - the leaves swivel underneath to make the table smaller which we LOVE!

And Now I Need a Nap!

So I survived Christmas weekend. I say that so dramatically like I didn't think I was going to or something. I mean, I guess it would have been very possible for it to have gone badly, but luckily it was manageable. Now I'm just exhausted (physically and mentally) and ready to have some time to me and my wonderful husband and our pets. Thank goodness we have another long weekend this weekend because I need it to recuperate! :)

Let's see......Friday we got to have breakfast with our friends, Jen & Bobby, from D.C. It was really good to see them - the last time we saw them was their wedding in June - and spend some time talking. Friday afternoon was a trip to the jewelry store with my parents and then Friday evening was dinner with Austin's family and ours. Saturday was cooking and football, then a great dinner in downtown Fort Worth, and Christmas lights. Sunday was visiting our house (yes I will post pictures soon - need to load some new ones from this weekend) and Christmas gifts and lots of yummy food. Monday was errands and furniture shopping. We found the COOLEST table and chair set for our kitchen nook - I can't wait to get it! I will have to post a picture when we have it (of course with pictures of the new house) because it is just so cool!!! This morning was 3d/4d sonogram and back to work and my parents to the airport. Relief! ;)

The 3d/4d thing was SO cool. I will definitely try to load those pictures up tonight and post some tomorrow if possible. Actually, I think Austin sent me two today that I may be able to post today if I can remember how! LOL It is amazing how great technology is these days! I go back to the doctor next Thursday, but the good news is that the slight swelling in the kidney that we have been watching seems to have gotten MUCH smaller so hopefully the doctor can confirm that next week. Too bad I have to do the glucose test or I could look forward to that appointment! It will be the first one Austin can't go to either because it is in the middle of the day, but Austin's mom volunteered to come with in case I get to feeling sick or anything like that.

Okay, I'm going to see if I can figure out some picture stuff! ;) Talk to you all soon!

All I Want for Christmas Is You

So I've been listening to Christmas music on and off for weeks now, and one of my favorite Christmas songs (which is so silly) is Mariah Carey's All I Want for Christmas is You. So that is now stuck in my head, and therefore gets to be the title for my post today.

Things are really slow around here. My boss and the other girl in the recruiting department are gone for the holidays, so it's just me here holding down the fort. I finished up my last real task that needed to be done (mailing out the holiday cards/calendars to our recruits), and now I'm sitting here trying to figure out what to do with myself for the rest of the day. Before I left yesterday, my boss told me that if it was slow today and nothing was going on, that I should just go home and not worry about it because we work hard other times of the year so I deserve it. But I always feel guilty! I do have a work laptop that I could bring home and do virtually the same thing from home that I'm doing here (which is just sitting here waiting to see if any e-mails come in that need to be answered and surfing the net). But still....hmm maybe I'll get up enough nerve and leave at 1 after a half day of work.

I have Friday and Monday off for the holidays so that will be nice, and my parents and grandmother arrive from Florida tonight to spend the long weekend with us. Hopefully all will go well! ;) I love my parents and miss them, and it's especially weird since they are so far away when I'm pregnant. But my mother is a lot to handle, and I can only take her in small doses. I have noticed though that she is MUCH better when she is out here in my territory than when we go to Florida so maybe I'll have to convince them to come out here more often rather than going there. Besides they can afford the plane tickets much better than we can! :)

On Tuesday morning before I come in to work, we are going to the doctor's office to have a 3d/4d sonogram. I can't wait! It's our Christmas present to our parents, and they are all coming with us and then we got them frames to put the pictures in afterwards. I hope we can get some good ones of little Cooper! :) I'll try to post some next week.

Other than that, our weekend will be pretty low key. Saturday night we are going to a yummy dinner in Fort Worth and then going to look at Christmas lights. Sunday we'll have lunch/dinner at Austin's parents' house after opening gifts and enjoying Christmas morning in our apartment. It's kind of weird because this is the first Christmas that Austin and I have been together in Texas (last year we were all in Florida and before that we had Christmas separately when we were dating/engaged). In fact, it's the first time I've EVER had Christmas out here even though I've lived out here over 8 years! So it will be nice to wake up in my own place on Christmas morning and not have to pick something out of my suitcase to wear for the day! LOL Monday, I think we're going to take my parents by our house and measure the windows for the blinds we want to order and show them how it looks now that it is actually a house and not a bunch of boards any more! :)

Well, I'm sure my post wasn't super exciting, but that might just be how it is these days! Hope you all have a wonderful weekend and a merry Christmas! I'll check back in probably on Tuesday after the doctor's appointment. Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night! :)

Gift Exchange

I'm not really sure who came up with the idea of a "gift exchange" - also known to some people as a White Elephant party or Chinese Auction. If I were to plan a party, I would NEVER include that as part of it, but that's just my personal preference I guess.

Today, we had our administrative staff holiday luncheon including a gift exchange. We were each to bring in a gift of $20 value and write a one-word clue on the tag. Then you could either shop or steal (in order of your number of course). The lunch was great, and then the gift exchange began. I personally would rather do secret santa or even a regular drawing of names because at least then you know who you are buying for and even if you don't know that person that well, you can always get some ideas from other people of what to get them. But with this, you had to buy a gift that a man or woman in various age ranges would enjoy. It was a lot of pressure!!! :) I was more concerned with getting a good gift that people would want rather than what I ended up with. I like giving much more than getting especially when the whole group is watching you open the present and how you react. And the whole idea of taking from someone else just makes me uncomfortable!

Luckily for me (in my opinon, but probably not in others), I got #3 (which was really #5 bc they miscounted originally and had 00 and 0 as the first two numbers once they realized) so I just picked a gift. There were so many, and I didn't want to take forever with everyone watching me pick a gift. So I just picked one that said "crackle" - turned out to be a red crackle glass votive which is pretty. Not super popular so no one stole it from me, and that's what I ended up with. It will be fine as a Christmas decoration, and like I said earlier, I wasn't that concerned with what I got! My gift was a hit though which made me happy - I ended up finding this cute foot massager thing made by Dr. Scholl's and it was traded the max three times including a stare-down between two people over it. That's the thing I don't get though - people get all pissy when someone takes their gift but that is the point of the whole thing to begin with so you can't really get upset.

Just now, my boss brought over this amazing gift basket of goodies for me. Did I mention I LOVE my job? I got this super cute basket I can use to put our Christmas cards in and inside there was homemade strawberry jam and pear butter, a giant gingerbread cookie, an awesome gift certificate to Nordstrom's, and a year subscription to Parent's Magazine! I couldn't believe it!!!! :) My co-recruiter and I went in together and got this 3-in-1 dessert station with smores supplies and sterno kit for our boss, but this is great! :)

Today is a good day - tomorrow will be slow I'm sure, but maybe I'll sneak my book in and catch up on some reading! LOL More posting tomorrow - but no belly pictures. As lucky as I am that I am just a growing belly up front and not other places, I do not really care to share my tummy with the whole wide world! I may take some professional shots in January and post one of those then depending on how it looks, but until then, you'll just have to imagine! :)

You Know You Missed Me - Ha! :)

So I know I said it was my blog and I could be MIA if I wanted to. And it was true! I definitely was MIA for a really, really long time - almost 4 months to be exact. Lots of changes have occurred as you can probably already tell! :) Thanks first off to Jes for the site redesign - I think it looks great and just what I needed to start my blog off fresh.

So here's the scoop: I started my new job in August and absolutely LOVE it! I couldn't be happier with where I work, the people I work with, and the job I do. It is a great fit for me, and I am very blessed to have found such a great company to work for and with such great benefits. It was definitely something I needed and came at the perfect time! Needless to say I was quite busy in the fall with all of my recruiting, so I didn't have a lot of time to write. But I promise to keep more up to date on this blog so possibly a few of my readers may come back to me and maybe I can even entice a few new ones!

In other news as you can tell by my site, Austin & I are expecting a baby! It's a BOY!!!! :) We couldn't be more excited about his arrival, and his due date is March 25th. Just a little over three months more to go, and I feel like I'm getting bigger every day! ;) I'm sure there will be plenty of posts to come about my impending motherhood and beyond, so hopefully I won't bore you to death with all of that!

Also, after much hunting and searching, we decided to build a new house in a development about 20 miles from here. It is closer to Austin's parents which will be nice since Austin's mom will be our daycare when I go back to work after the baby is born! :) It is a beautiful house and is coming along quite nicely, so we can't wait to have a house of our own (especially after all the problems we've had with our apartment complex this year!). We are hoping to close February 1st and move the 1st or 2nd weekend in February so we'll be in the house a little over a month hopefully before our bundle of joy arrives!

So that's the quick recap of all that has been going on in my life in the last few months. Lots of fun and exciting changes! Hope you all keep on reading - I've missed you and lurked around your sites to keep up with everything that has been going on. Just time for me to start being involved in it all again! I promise to write soon (probably tomorrow - who knows maybe this afternoon!). :)