Trip to Boston

I got to attend a conference in Boston for work, and Paul came with me to help make it more of a vacation. We had an awesome time exploring the city (well, everything except the subway which really was not fun) and spending some alone time together.

We walked the entire Freedom Trail and got to see lots of historical sites including the Old North Church, Paul Revere's house, the assembly house, old cemeteries, and the USS Constitution. We also checked out some nightlife on the waterfront, at Quincy Market, and caught the Blue Man Group stage show in the theatre district. Our only regret was not getting to Fenway because it was raining the night we had planned to head out there. The food was great - I got a lot of fresh seafood and clam "chowda" while Paul sampled all the local beers. We checked out the Union Oyster House, had drinks at the oldest tavern in the United States, and went to the Barking Crab - a restaurant that Man vs. Food featured on one of his FoodTV shows.







Paul also took a tour of the Sam Adams brewery (wish I could have gone!) and a tour of MIT, which was his favorite thing in all of Boston. He's convinced our daughter is going to go there. :) Check out this cool MIT building:

Bathroom Renovation Complete!

As many of you know, Paul has been working on renovating our upstairs bathroom for a while and as of a few months ago, it's finally fully completed! It took some time because he did everything himself. Seriously, he is my hero. I'm amazed at the results and so incredibly happy! We now have a full guest bath and a separate, brand new master bath with the most amazing shower I've ever had! I can't thank Paul enough for all of his hard work and the incredible job he did. I think about it every single day as I get ready in my lovely new master bath. Love you babe!

Check out some before and after pics:

Carly's Graduation

I can hardly believe that little Carly Jean just graduated high school! I remember when Cindy first got pregnant with Carly. And I remember watching Carly when she was a tiny little baby and I had to keep propping her up with pillows because she kept flopping over. Then she was a little tyke who followed Jena around like a shadow. And now, she's a beautiful, intelligent, bright, thoughtful, amazing young woman. I love you Carly! Congrats to the 2010 graduate! You deserve all the best life has to offer.

Nesting?

So, I'm thinking maybe this "nesting" thing is actually real. Since last weekend, I've been on a cleaning frenzy. We had to clean out the spare bedroom which will be the baby's room so that we could get started painting and replacing the floor. But... the spare room was filled with just about everything we own that we weren't sure where to put when we moved in - yearbooks, school books, sewing and scrapbooking supplies, boxes of old hockey jerseys, random pieces of leftover furniture, photo albums, dog toys, blankets, tons of stuff that should go in a bathroom cabinet, and all of the construction tools Paul has been using for the bathroom remodel over the past year.

You'd think that clearing out the room wouldn't be such a problem but somehow we had to find places to PUT all of the stuff. Luckily, now that both bathrooms are completely finished (I promise I'll post pics soon!), I was able to get all of the bathroom supplies and linens into our new bathrooms and new linen closet. And Paul took all the construction supplies down to the workshop. But as for everything else.. where was it going to go?

So... this sparked the major cleaning frenzy. Paul ripped out his closet and the baby's closet which were really old fashioned with no hanging room in them and built new shelves in them both. I went through all of the contents of the closets (including mine) and all of our drawers and racked up 4 big bags of clothing donations for Goodwill. I also completely cleaned out the hall closet and all the drawers in the living room, and Paul and I both started cleaning out the closet and random piles of junk in the office. Next, I tackled the hundreds of books that I had stored in the spare bedroom. I took 5 big boxes of books to Half Price Books (and made a nice $100 out of it) and reorganized the remaining ones and moved them into the office bookshelf. (By the way, this was really painful because I wanted to keep each and every one of those books!) That got us more room, and I spent the next 3 evenings getting the rest of the junk out of the spare room into the newly opened spaces. Our garbage man probably hated us this week. :)

Now we just have a few remaining pieces of random furniture to give away and then the room will be ready to paint!

I still have the cleaning bug, though, and plan to tackle the storage area in the basement next. Paul started joking that I must be "nesting" and I thought he was crazy because that usually happens at the end right before the baby comes. But, I was wrong - I Googled it and found that the nesting instinct often occurs in the 5th month of pregnancy -- exactly this month for me!