A few weeks ago, we shot a video of the baby kicking and moving around, which is super cool. I have also created a poll for guesses on the baby’s sex, delivery date, length, and weight, which you can fill out below. The person with the most right or close answers will get a prize! Our “official” due date is August 6th.
After we recovered from the beach excursion, Kevin and I have been busy working on getting the house ready for our new arrival. However, that doesn’t mean we haven’t found time to enjoy the New York summer.
A few weeks ago our friends Jesse, Jessa and their daughter Eily visited.
Saratoga Springs had a parade to celebrate Flag Day that we all enjoyed. We also got to meet Rory, who is the daughter of our friends Jim and Natasha.
The following weekend I got to enjoy a baby shower with our New York friends. I was whisked off to enjoy my Mother’s Day gift – a pregnancy massage at The Spa Studio in Glens Falls – and Kevin prepped the house for a wonderful afternoon.
We enjoyed delicious food and great conversation. Not the mention the awesome gifts they showered us with. You can see all the wonderful gifts I received in the NY Shower album.
That Sunday, Kevin and I decided to trek to Southern Vermont with the only real goal of scoping out a stroller I found. Along the way we got distracted more than once and had several discussions about moving there permanently. We started by stopping at a Farmer’s Market in Dorset, VT- Kevin enjoyed a chicken and cheese empanada, and I devoured a maple sugar lemonade.
After the market we drove to Manchester where I had to take Kevin to my favorite coffee shop- The Spiral Press Cafe. We enjoyed coffee, lunch and a long browse through the book store that is inside the coffee house. We then ventured on down to Brattleboro, VT only to discover the store I wanted to go to was closed. But all was not lost, we went to several more coffee shops, used book stores and a Record Store called Turn it Up!. Before we left town we decided to grab some dinner, we found an awesome restaurant called the Riverview Cafe with roof top seating that overlooked the Connecticut River, the natural boundary between Vermont and New Hampshire. They source a lot of their food locally, including using King Arthur Flour for their pastas.
After gorging on delicious local food we started home, stopping twice. Once at scenic pull-off where we hiked down to a water control dam and recreational lake, and once at the oldest quarry in the US.
After much reminiscing about our Sunday drives as youth we arrived home very happy with our Vermont excursion.
Later that week we got to work cleaning and organizing the house for our little girl or guy- now only five weeks til Due-Day we figured we should start continue to work on getting things organized. We continued this motivation with few interruptions, I’ll leave you with a few pictures of what we are calling “sanity breaks”. Including a baseball game we attended last week, and a 4th of July Pool Party we enjoyed on Saturday. I am also going to post what I think is an absolutely gorgeous photo we took on the way home the other night, the sun was at the perfect spot for Kevin to snap an amazing shot.
And of course what I know you’ve all been waiting for, the last two weeks of Baby Bump pictures.
We hope you all had a wonderful 4th of July weekend and stay tuned for an interactive blog post in the next couple of days!
If you missed Part I, you can read it here.
On Wednesday, my dad’s college buddy Neil and his wife Linda came down to spend the rest of the week with us. Thursday night, we went to Tommy’s Market and bought some delicious steaks, which Paul and Neil prepared on the grill with Tommy’s steak seasoning.
We also made sushi – shrimp with avocado, shrimp with cucumber, tuna with avocado, and tuna with cucumber. I was the sushi master.
Wednesday, we had gone to the Weeping Radish Brewery, and we came home with some litre bottles, which the guys enjoyed thoroughly.
Everyone was in a a food coma after dinner and didn’t feel like moving around too much.
On Friday morning, Kels and I tried (and failed) to watch the sunrise. There was too much fog.
We did, however, get this cool photo of a spider web.
We kept in good spirits, even though we woke up early and were cold.
On our way home, we stopped in DC for the night. We visited our friends Chris and Mae, and then spent the night again with Jenn. We stopped in Danville on our way home Sunday, and caught up with Autumn, Wes, and their newborn daughter, Ailey.
For the rest of the beach photos, go here.
We took another baby bump photo Sunday night, and again last night, so I will post both of them here.
The week before we left for the beach, I went down to Troy on Thursday morning to take the oral portion of my comprehensive exams, which I passed! Thanks to everyone who sent me words of encouragement. Thursday afternoon I had a meeting with Ron (my advisor) and Jess (his other advisee) at First Choice Caribbean in Troy, which was excellent. I then went home, cut the grass, did some work in the yard, and helped Kelsey pack for the beach. We left on Friday morning at about 10.
It took us about 8 hours to arrive in Silver Spring, MD (outside of Washington, DC), where we spent the night at Jenn’s apartment. Kelsey and Jenn went out for a girls’ night out while I stayed in with Jenn’s son Jayden. He slept while I watched Whale Wars and worked on our website, which now has all of the blog posts dating back to our road trip in 2007.
In the morning, we left early to meet our friend David at La Madeleine in Tyson’s off of the DC Beltway. At about 10, we were on the road again, heading down to the Outer Banks. We rolled in at the house in Duck, NC around 5. So far, we’ve had a very relaxing week of making food, eating food, lounging by the pool, doing puzzles, playing games, going for walks, and witnessing the boys’ noodle battles in the pool.
Monday morning, we took a baby bump photo. The walls in our room at the beach house are roughly the same color as our walls in our bedroom at home, which was kind of cool.
On Tuesday, we kayaked out into the sound to watch the sunset, then went mini golfing at Professor Hacker’s Lost Treasure Golf. (Warning: Their website was created in 1997 and never updated, and looks TERRIBLE.) On Wednesday, Kelsey and Jill went up to the shops at Timbuck II, and I biked up to meet them for lunch. It was 12.5 miles, and it took me about 37 minutes. On the way back, I was fighting a 20mph headwind, and it took me about an hour. I have nicely sunburned arms now.
I’ll leave you with a few photos from the first part of the week. All of the photos for vacation are available here.
We’ll post again when we get home with more pictures from the trip.
Kevin finished his written exams a week ago, and is expecting his feedback today. He will be taking his oral exams at 10AM on Thursday, and then (hopefully) he will be done. We leave for the beach on Friday, which will be a much deserved vacation for both of us.
Since getting back from New Hampshire, I have adjusted to working at the New York office for Maine Drilling and Blasting. Work stole me during the day on Kevin’s birthday, but later that night we went to the drive-in movie theater with some of Kevin’s friends to see Iron Man 2. It was one last outing before Kevin had to buckle down on his exams on that Monday.
We have had fun grilling out using Beefalo meat from Lick Springs Beefalo at our local farmer’s market. We also bought a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) share from Kilpatrick Family Farm, which grows organic produce. The CSA involves paying up front for produce for the whole summer and part of the fall, and we get 6-8 items per week at the market, depending on what is in season. It helps small local farms with their up-front costs, and lets the farms share some of the risk of bad crop yields with the community.
House Renovations
Kevin’s parents (Paul and Jill) came up a few weekends ago to help us get the house ready for the baby, and for Kevin’s exams. They helped us work on the walk-in closet in the bedroom and on the office / spare bedroom, which really helped Kevin with his exam prep.
Yard Work
When Kevin finished with his exams a week ago, I let him celebrate by doing lots of yard work. The yard needed mowed badly, and some of our flower beds needed weeded and raked out.
We also needed to mulch the beds in the front of the house, which were terribly overgrown with weeds.
Square Foot Gardening
Square Foot Gardening is a method of gardening where you plant crops in square foot plots instead of rows, which improves land use (especially when you don’t have a lot of land to spare, like us) and is supposed to improve crop yield. You use a special mixture of soil, which is equal parts compost, vermiculite, and peat moss. We decided to build a 2×8 square foot garden box, giving us 16 squares to work with.
We used string to visually separate the square feet. In most cases we planted one plant per square foot, such as the tomato plants along the back row on the left. In other areas we were able to plant more than one – such as the sixteen onions per square foot in the two bins at the front left of the right hand box. In all, we planted 4 different tomato plants, eggplant, bell pepper, jalapeno pepper, cucumber, 36 sugar snap peas, 32 sweet onions, 4 zucchini, 1 sweet basil, and 1 peppermint (which was in the pot in the back).
We also planted our two window boxes with two different kinds of flowers – purple petunias and red salvia.
At market yesterday, we bought three hanging baskets and hung them on our front porch. As we were looking through photos from before we bought the house, we realized that we ended up buying the exact same kind and color of plant that the previous owners had!
Baby Update
We went to our last baby appointment before the beach on Friday. With nine weeks to go before the due date, the baby is happy and healthy, as is mom! We had been behind on posting baby bump photos, but here are all of the missing ones from the past few weeks, and today:
Memorial Day
For Memorial Day weekend, we went camping with Jess, one of Kevin’s friends from the department, and some of her family and friends. We camped out Friday night at Hearthstone state campground on Lake George, and went for a four mile hike on Saturday. We made mountain pies, hot dogs, eggs, breakfast potatoes, and grillin’ beans over the fire. It was a much needed escape after the stresses of exams and work, and after not having been out of the house for the weekend for a while. We went to some graduation parties for graduating Masters and PhDs in Kevin’s department Saturday night. We’ll leave you with a photo of us at the end of the hike. Thanks for bearing with us on a long post!
