Tennessee-erific!

Flight vouchers that were expiring, a baby on the way, and a love for home = a trip to TN!

Our week in Tennessee brought lots of family, friends, fun, and food! As always, we were running from one place to the next most of the time, but really enjoyed getting to see so many people and share with them our joy of the soon-to-arrive bundle! Matt got his fill of southern food (and white cheese dip) and we even got to have two baby showers while we were home! How fun is that! Even cooler yet, Jared (my brother), his wife Melissa, and two kiddos - Kailyn and Connor - were able to drive up from Orlando while we were there!! It was so much fun to see everyone but it also really made me miss my family... someone needs to rearrange the U.S. and make FL closer to UT :) Can someone work on that? We love and miss you all!

Our wee garden - in all its glory!

Our back patio has been transformed a few times since we've lived in our condo, and this year it took on a new task! Growing some vegetables! Mind you, our patio is tiny... and the planting area is even smaller, so we had to limit our farming ambitions. However, you will quickly see that the squash are 'winning' the territory battle - in fact, I'm not sure if our peppers are even going to produce at this point! However, the satisfaction seen in Matt's face as he picked our first yellow squash and cherry tomatoes is worth the jungle we're currently dealing with!

Where to start?

I am rather behind on blogging, when you get right down to it.  So, hang with me while I try to catch up and keep it in some kind of order!

In the last month, Matt and I tried to compete in the category of  'worse thumb injury' -- he started the event by cutting cheese (yes, cutting cheese, not cutting the cheese).  That's right, cutting cheese!  His knife blade came out of its handle and neatly sliced (deep) into the end of his thumb (weird, I know)!  He possibly should have gotten stitches, but a little over three weeks later he is almost completely mended (yay!).  Eight days later I took my own stab at the event (hardy har har) and decided to dice my thumb with the onions... yikes!  While I waited for Matt to fly home from school to rescue me from myself I laughed like a maniac in my kitchen (can we say shock?)... and ended up unloading/loading the dishwasher and wiping down the counters to distract myself... weirdo?  If thats how I react to trauma, I think it'd be pretty great if I laughed while giving birth.  Yeah, right! :)  I ended up at InstaCare, but managed to escape stitches (hooray for a clean cut with a chef's knife).  About 2 weeks later now, my thumb is looking less mutant and is starting to regain some sort of feeling.   So, the moral of the story: take care of your thumbs (especially when around the Spanns!).  

When the doctors are away...

the Pokemon deck comes out?

Can't say I was ever into Pokemon (still not), but here is our office living it up over lunch the other day... people have come a long way from 'just playing a game', we do our research now! I was just there to bake the cookies :)

Neglect

I feel like I've been neglecting our 'child' on the blog... so, here are a few pictures of him!  Figure we'll give him a little spotlight before his world gets turned upside down by our new addition  :)  

WHOA

I had no intention of blogging today, but just noticed we're in the double digits! (see ticker) I remember reading when other people hit that milestone and feeling like I would never be there... and poof! here we are. I have to say everything is going so well! I had a doctors appointment this last week and had the great opportunity of having my glucose (gestational diabetes) and iron tested and passed with flying colors! ... so far so good! (knock on wood). I had heard horrible things about the glucose test - about how disgusting the drink was, but really, not so bad. It was just like a sugary off-brand orange soda - definitely do-able. The receptionist told me I had 10 minutes to drink it and had to be poked exactly an hour afterwards... I took a look at the 10 oz. bottle and couldn't imagine sipping on it in the waiting room for 10 minutes, so I quickly guzzled it down and handed it back to her!

The nursery is slowly taking shape... in my mind at least! We got our baby bedding this past week (thanks Mom!) so the hunt for paint is underway. I went and got some paint samples yesterday and am still trying to decide what I want to do... Matt is really involved in all this picking-out business and as cute as it is, it is making progress a little slow! Oh well, I'll take that over the alternative :) Hopefully we'll be able to agree on a design soon so I can get going on it!

Celebrating the land we love

4th of July was spent in our typical fashion -- checking out the scene downtown, swimming, bbq, fireworks, and watermelon!  I even made a homemade apple pie - how American is that??  I had to include a picture of our snowies we got downtown... Matt's cost $2 and mine cost $4, who got the better deal?  Guess we should have just shared the $4 :)  Hope y'all had a great day too!!

Waiting for the fireworks... waiting... and waiting... 

forget Hannah Montana, we want fireworks!

(p.s. in this picture you can see my patriotic quilt in the background - king size for $20 at Walmart!  how great is that?)