November Photo Dump!

Squish has been making it incredibly difficult for me to sleep lately.  I started looking on Craigslist for a "Snoogle" pillow, which retails for about $60 - yikes!  I found one for $40, and offered the person $20 for it.  I was pretty surprised when the reply email came from someone I worked with last year, who had a baby over the summer!  Now Addy and I get sleep all wrapped up with pillow! 

Eric took me car shopping a few weekends ago, and I was pretty amused by this mirror. 

On Veteran's Day, Old Chicago gave everyone $5 of Foamer bucks on our World Beer Tour cards, so we asked Paul and Deb to come to dinner with us.  Along with that, they had a cardboard standup that you scan with your phone and it gives you a chance to win free food or drink.  Deb, Eric, and I all won something - I got cheesy garlic breadsticks, Deb got a big cookie, and Eric won a large pizza!  We could only use one, so we treated everyone to a Thai Pie pizza.  Nine beers, a pizza, and a fries basket ended up only costing us $14 - and (quite possibly for the first time ever) they let us pay for dinner! 

Brian and Jen hosted a Crock Pot Pot Luck party last weekend.  There were many interesting conversations, lots of great music, occasional dancing, and drunk people everywhere!  These parties are a lot more fun when I'm sober watching everyone else get silly! 

While we were at Mom and Alan's house last weekend, Chaos decided that the snickerdoodle cookies belong to him! 

Addy has been an extra large bum lately, cue "awwwwww" sound bit. 

I just about died laughing in the grocery store when I picked out the avocado for this weeks "Baby Green" picture, and then put it in the baby seat of the cart.  Seriously, I was beside myself. 

This is the countdown that I keep posted at work!  I accidentally mixed up weeks 16 and 17 (avocado and onion), but seeing as the foods relate to the length of baby, I think it makes sense that an avocado would come after the onion instead of before.  Oh well, I'm probably the only one who noticed my error :) 

 Last night, I decided that I wanted to have cinnamon rolls for dinner.  As the oven heats up, Eric decides he is craving pizza...so we made both!  This is what dinner looks like in the Green household!

Finally, a funny school story!  A few weeks ago, one of our paras was working in a third grade classroom.  The kids were told to cut out pictures of facial expressions and then to write about it in their journal.  The para noticed a kid cutting frantically, stuffing something in his desk, and then looking around the room suspiciously.  She asked him to give it to her and he tried to play dumb and give her the scissors, as she gave him "the look" he pulled the picture out of his desk and handed this gem to her.  Hilarious!

Busy and Relaxing Weekend!

A picture post because I'm too lazy to write it all up!  9-23 Broken door handle, planning at home, Cute addy, heartbeat
9-24 Laundry, dinner, TV
9-25 early church, fun with Steven, FPU

My door handle snapped off in my hand!  What?!

Addy is our "big baby", and she reminds us of it all the time!  She is so darn cute.

The new baby is letting us hear their heartbeat every night before I go to bed.  It's our favorite part of the day!

Eric planned a "Go-Jo's" style night.  We made teriyaki noodles with baby red potatoes, chicken, onions, and carrots.  Delicious!

I love our family!  

We went looking at strollers today (with no luck) and I found this onesie.  I thought Alan might appreciate it :)

Scary Evening, All's Well

This evening was crazy!  There were three major accidents on the three highways surrounding Lawrence, within 30 minutes of one another.  And they all required Life Flight...and there was only one copter!  So they sent the copter to accident #1, redirected it to accident #2, and called out an extra one for accident #3.  Madness!  So then...K-10 was closed both directions at the Eudora exit...from 3:30 until 10:30.  This is because it was a cement truck that turned over in the median and spilled gasoline & cement.

I was one of the last cars that made it to the Eudora exit before they closed down the highway for Life Flight. Eric was an hour late getting home because all of the westbound traffic was rerouted through Eudora at our exit.  It was hell on his hands and legs because the last mile was completely stop and go.

Eric resting with the cats, Addy is not thrilled...look at those ears!

 Overturned cement truck.

 Firefighters using the Jaws of Life to cut the driver out.

We have a couple who have these odd hang gliders with fans attached, and they just fly around.  Today they flew over to check out the accident.

  

After Eric got off work, we drove around to a field right next to the highway to get a look at them cleaning up.  It took them 7 hours!

Mega Update!

We are really enjoying married life and have been finding ourselves going out more often, and spending plenty of time with friends and family.  It's also been a rough couple of weeks for some of our friends - it makes me feel guilty about what we have, but I know everyone has their ups and downs.   

P.S. I don't have pictures, but Eric, Brian, and a group of their friends are running a weekly radio show with awesome music courtesy of Brian, and conversation from all of the boys.  So now he's spending Tuesday nights broadcasting, and I'm hanging out with Jen and the kids!  

 Jack and I on the new Sky Ride at the Kansas City Zoo - it goes over the zebras and giraffes.

This giraffe was too short to reach the trees and too tall to reach the grass without aerobics. 

Our friend Moonshine came to visit for the weekend! 

We went barhopping with Alison and Shawn - we had a pitcher of Woodchuck!  We went to The Pool Room, had pizza at Rudy's, then Kristie joined us at Harbor Lights, and we finished the night at Perkins to visit Tera! 

Yea yea YEA!  We've got Eric's car paid off!!! 

He's obviously excited!

 Eric's car is paid off and we've made $578 of progress on the next debt in line.  I wasn't thrilled at the nominal progress over the past 16 months - so I raised the minimum payment on it!  Now we're saving all of our snowball money for Eric's car upgrade and potential future baby money - and we'll get back on the snowball when both of those goals have been realized.

Addy says "Look!  I know how to use an armrest!" 

We've been going through a heat wave recently - this HVAC van advertises by showing the temperature inside the van, and the heat index outside... 70* in their van, and 116* outside!!! 

Leslie and I spent a day together - Deanna Rose, swimming, and then a treat at Smallcakes.  They have a deal where you get a free cupcake the first and tenth time you check in on FourSquare.  I had cookies and cream, and Leslie had lemon. 

 Tonight we went out to dinner at Outback, that means bread!  We had three loaves between us :)

Again - Eric is sooooo thrilled for his steak!

I really AM so thrilled at having crab legs for dinner (and my tiny fork)!

A New Beginning!

From now on - if you want to know how many days we've been married, you'll have to do the math yourself!  I'm done with "Day ###" posts, woo!

On to the main topic of this post, our anniversary!  Without the help of this blog, I would probably say that we've had a relatively uneventful year.  Ha!  Looking back through all of our blog posts, Eric and I have chosen our top ten moments of the past year.  Enjoy!

10. KU - We listened a lot of games on the radio, watched some on TV, went to two football games and two basketball games.

9. Cooking - We definitely don't cook regularly, but we have branched out this year.  Among other things, we've made smoothies, grilled, made birthday cakes, made use of our halogen oven, and made Oreo truffles, yum!

8. Stuff - Eric and I went a little crazy on new stuff this year... We got a new TV, I got a computer, Eric got an iPod, we transferred to our own cell phone plan (then moved to a new company and got new phones), we got the most glorious heating blankets (while Black Friday shopping), a new camera, bedside tables, a coffee table, and a smaller kitchen table and chairs!  Yikes, so much STUFF!  But we also got rid of TONS of junk - selling, donating, and trashing!

7. Motorcycle - After our August garage sale, Alan bought a motorcycle for Eric to use.  He's since become totally confident and a great rider.  He even got his own helmet this spring, and changed his oil in our parking lot this summer!

6. Travel - We made it to Michigan twice (for Cash's 2nd birthday and Declan's 1st birthday), and to Chicago and Mexico for our honeymoon!  Also, I made the drive to Hays with Ashley to visit her future college.

5. Church - I'm so happy that I/we've started going to church regularly.  Ashley and I were confirmed and Andrew was baptized at St. Thomas, and it's really nice to visit Grammy's tree every week.  

4. Jobs - Eric's new job was a huge success for us time wise, financially, and for Eric's happiness with his work.  My new job is exciting because it means I still HAVE a job, but less exciting becaus I am transferring from Prairie Park to Kennedy Elementary.

3.Spending more time with family and friends - We've done so much this year, including birthdays (Eric's Granny's 99th birthday), Friends of Friends parties, playing with babies, going to game nights, helping Papa move, drinking at Old Chicago, and we've been on 3 camping trips this summer (and already have at least one more planned).

2. Money - We have gotten our act together financially and started impacting others.  This year Mom, Alan, Paul, Deb, Molly, Nate, Papa, Ashley, and Alison all went through Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University.  Eric and I paid off both of our credit cards, my car, and camethiiiiiiisclose to paying off his car too.  We set up a debt thermometer in our living room to keep an eye on our progress.  We did a bunch of pet sitting to make extra money over the holidays, and submitted a video (and made it into the top ten finalists) for Dave's Great Giving Challenge.  Finally, we had VIP seats at Dave Ramsey's LIVE! Total Money Makeover event, and got to meet Dave!

1. Us!  In the past year, we have done so much for us!  The wedding and anniversary were our biggest moments.  But all the small pieces are part of the puzzle too - movies (Harry Potter and others), Netflix, going for walks, bike rides, and rollerblading, golfing, rearranging and decluttering the house, Tuesday & Thursday visits to Buffalo Wild Wings, and our green initiatives of line drying, recycling, no longer using plastic bottled water or soda, reading more books (such as the Hunger Games trilogy), and Eric graduated from JCCC!

Furthermore, we planned a fun little celebration for ourselves.  We both worked today, so the festivities didn't start until after 5pm.  We cleaned up and got ready at Mom & Alan's house, and then took off for the Legend's shopping center.  We started by buying tickets to Hangover 2, and grabbing a drink at Yardhouse until it was time for our movie.  The movie was hysterical - Eric actually had to ask me to stop hitting him because I kept slapping his arm at the funny parts.  After the movie, we retreated back to Yardhouse for dinner.  Our waiter, Justin, was awesome and took great care of us.

Toward the end of dinner, the sky opened up and we knew we would be walking to the car in the rain.  Eric offered to go pick up the car, but I knew I wouldn't melt and running to the car in the warm rain was so much more fun.  Once we got home, we cut into our year old wedding cake top tier...and it was delicious!  Still moist cake and creamy icing, and deliciously almond flavored!  Yum!

Here's to hoping that our future years continue to be as exciting and loving as our first!

Our drinks at the Yardhouse

I had the Belgian Shandy - Strongbow Cider and Leffe Blond, and Eric had a Youngberry Chocolate - Lideman's Framboise and Young's Double Chocolate.

There was a commercial before the movie featuring Cole Aldrich, yea!

There was a lot of cool art at the Yardhouse.

Eric's appetizer was a fancy egg roll.

I had A california roll - a single giant rice patty, topped with chopped cucumber, shredded crab, and orange ball things.  It had seaweed strips rolled around the outside, was topped with large pieces of avocado and crab, then surrounded by wasabi sauce.

Eric's bbq pizza.

My margherita pizza.

Us at dinner - poorly lit and low resolution, nothing could be done to salvage it!

The appetizers and dinners were on the happy menu and 1/2 off, and they took our drinks off the bill for our anniversary.  So our bill should have been around $60, and it was only $24!  We tipped our friend Justin $17 for his excellent service.

Damn, we are a good looking couple!

The beer room at Yardhouse.  Eric's new life goal is to have a keg room and a bar with taps in our future home!

We got soaked running to the car in the rain - but it was so fun to be out in the warm rain, laughing and splashing through puddles.

The cake looked perfect when we cut into it - only a little squished from being vacuum sealed and frozen for the past year!

NOM!  It tasted delicious!  Moist almond cake, and creamy buttercream icing!

So good that we even had seconds.

We also paid $2000 toward Eric's car today - we have climbed 22 inched (aka, paid off $22k in debt!) in the past year!  

AAAAAANNNNNDDDD we finally made it above the couch's armrest!  Hooray!  In one more month we will OWN both of our cars!