1.1.11

Happy New Year!  This year I....

- would like to set aside time to unplug.  disconnect.  shut off the laptop.  I'm thinking 10pm every night sounds reasonable.
- will turn 30.  oy.
- am going to see Kenny Chesney at Lambeau. hey-o!
- would like to make myself eat ALL of the Chex Mix.  Not just the chex and breadsticks.  It's such a waste...but the pretzels just aren't that good.
- would like to watch the Man Men DVDs we've had for the past 6 months.
- am going to wear more dresses.  I'm a total pants person.
- want to get a pair of those lululemon yoga pants everyone (oprah) raves about.
- want to do more yoga
- need to be better about drinking a lot of water
- am going to keep up with this blog better than I did in 2010.

12.31.10

It's the end of the year, so might as well do a photo dump post instead of just one picture.  This one deserves lots of images anyway.  So here goes...

Lindsey, Nancy and I hosted what we dubbed a "Fabulous New Year's Eve Baby Shower" for Tim and El.  (Here we are!)



And I must say, it was quite fab. Let me take you around for a tour of some of the highlights of what we had to offer. Most fab I think was the crostini bar. We got this idea from the gals over at Haute Apple Pie. What a fantastic idea it is - you can spend a lot or a little, takes very little preparation, and looks really impressive. I think the tags in front of each item adds to the fabulosity

and check out this tiny little play on grilled cheese and tomato soup!  They were as delicious as they are adorable too...courtesy of the always reliable, Ina Garten and Ree Drummond.  Here is the recipe for the roasted tomato soup (which I have always had available in the freezer since I made it first a couple months ago.  so good.), and here is the cheese puff recipe...but we (Nancy) sort of made them cheese toasts instead of puffs.



And then to not let the baby shower theme get lost among the new year's revelry, I froze some plastic babies in ice, which everyone had fun with once they thawed out.





We also had a baby pool.  Not a completely new idea, but I think it was a good one for a co-ed shower.  We split the days in 2 (am and pm) and sold each spot for $2.  And now we all just wait to collect our winnings!



Here are the guests of honor with some headwear we bought for them at the party store.  There was a plethora of tiny hats available at the party store. It was odd.



And I think this picture pretty much sums up the good times that were had this new year's eve!  On our end, this is the first year in many many years that we actually did something.  We have spent at least the last 3 years with each other, going to dinner and catching a movie.  We always had a great time doing that, but I think this was the most fun new year's eve I have had in a long time...possibly ever.

(as a side, this is the second year in a row that there has been a "fabulous" party thrown by members of our group. Last year, Nancy had a "Fabulous Holiday Party". We are hoping to make this a tradition and have different fabulous parties every year.)

12.25.10

On Christmas, we do a $5 gift/white elephant exchange. My cousin pictured in this photo, brought that beautiful cactus as her gift. My other cousin's husband received it, but before they went home, he sneakily left it in their bathroom. Tee hee hee.

12.19.10

Sunday we spent a few last hours at the waterpark in our building before going our separate ways. We're hoping to make this a tradition - we had such a good time!

12.18.10

Our Saturday at the Wilderness started off with a morning at the waterpark. The Wilderness has 3 separate waterparks and we successfully made it to all of them. We went along the lazy river a bunch of times and hung out by the wave pool most of the time. Jon and I also went down The Hurricane, which actually made me scream really loud.

Later in the day, we went on a carriage ride and to the Tanger outlets for a bit. We finished off the night with a homecooked meal (by Jon and I) and playing Scene It. A full and fun day with the fam.

12.17.10

My family opted to forgo lots of presents for Christmas this year and instead spent a weekend together at the Wilderness Resort in the Dells. It was so nice celebrating Christmas together without having to run all over the state to make it to all of our families' Christmas parties. We all got to the resort at around 6pm on Friday night. We had pizza, exchanged presents and pretty much relaxed for most of the night.

11.26.10

We have another year of Black Friday shopping under our belts! Here we are in line at Menards waiting to buy a Cricut at about 5:45 am. We ended up getting a lot of good stuff there - besides getting 2 Cricuts, we got a ShopVac, some pillows and other doodads. This was right after Todd got injured, by the way. He walked into a cement pole that was about 2 feet high while we were waiting in line around the building in the pitch dark and hit his shin pretty hard. Darn shopping injuries.

11.24.10

I had the night off from class, so I tagged along with Jon to watch his soccer game. I used to play on this team until I got injured earlier this year, leaving my soccer days in the past probably for good. waaaaaaa!

They won this game by a lot...they tend to win every week by a lot. They should probably be in a more competitive league. I think it has a lot to do with Jon's intimidating goalie skills. ;)

11.14.10

Here is the big 1 year old! Here he is at only 1 week old.

Gina and Todd had a frog themed party, complete with a bouncy set up in their garage. Besides the man (boy? baby?) of honor, the other focus of the party was the amazing cake! Gina's friend, who is not a pastry chef, made this awesomeness:

11.13.10

We headed up to Green Bay in the beginning of Nov. for Fisher's 1st birthday party! We got up there Saturday night and got some pizza and made cookies for the party. Cooper put on my boots and attemped to walk around in them also - but mostly just fell every 3 steps.

11.7.10

A little Sunday morning project. He is a robot!

11.6.10

Gina, the boys and my mom and dad came to visit last month. We decided to go to Chuck.E. Cheese for dinner at around 5pm, which was probably a mistake. It was so crowded! It was also a very interesting observation in parenting. Gina pawned her children off on my parents and parked herself at the skee ball for about 15 minutes. Cooper has a nerf dart gun to show for her efforts!

Gina and I had to school my mom on the art of tearing off tickets at Chuck.E.Cheese though. She was just tearing off the amount that had come out of the machine after the game was over...psh! Everyone knows you grip the ticket closest to the machine and pull to get more tickets!

10.31.10

Confession: for the past 5ish years, Halloween was not my favorite holiday. Actually, it was probably my least favorite holiday. I used to work at a place that planned for Halloween celebrations and activities for children for about two months, culminated by a 4 day event. We were also required to work all 4 long days, while dressed in costume. Needless to say, I was pretty much "over" halloween by the time October 25th rolled around.

Finally this year, I turned a corner and decided to embrace the holiday. I even crafted our gnome costumes from top to bottom! Here are a few of my other faves from the party:

and the winner of the costume contest, Ghandi.

10.16.10

Back on Oct. 16th, Wisconsin beat the then, No. 1 Ohio State!!! It was amazing! Jon and his pals were downtown all day long, but I opted to meet up with them right before game time at around 6pm. It was an epic day and night for Badger fans!

Fun fact: I saw a drunken Ohio State fan with blood all over his face from falling (saw that happen too) get arrested as I was waiting in line to get into the Big Ten Pub. Probably put a damper on his trip to Madison for the big game, hey?

10.9.10

I've really let this blog go, haven't I? Yikes. I better pick up the slack if I want to do another 365 project...which I am thinking I might do again in 2011. In the meantime, back in October our nephew Keegan celebrated his 5th birthday...complete with a bouncy house and all his school friends. We were recruited to help keep tabs on all the kids. I'm here to report that only a couple kids emerged from the bouncy house in tears from getting trampled. Pretty good odds, I'd say.

10.7.10

Meghan got THE CALL on a Tuesday that she had 4 tickets to see Oprahhhhhh! Meghan and I were lucky enough to attend a taping a few years ago, but this was still really exciting. I mean, when Oprah calls, you drop everything and go to her...especially because this is her last season, ya know? Following suit, I promptly and without question skipped class on Wednesday night and took the day off on Thursday to go to Chicago. To get to the 9am taping, it was suggested to us to get there at 7am...which meant we had to leave Milwaukee at 4:30am! If you are doing the math, that meant I had to wake up at 3:30am. Basically, I shouldnt have even gone to sleep because I could hardly sleep anyway from being so anxious!

The topic of the show we saw was the 25th anniversary of Love Story. Ali McGraw and Ryan O'Neal were the guests. It was a sweet, heart warming kind of show....and a great experience. Oprah was as fab as you would imagine.

A really cool part of the day happened after the taping though. We wanted our picture taken in front of the Harpo sign and asked some passerbys to take a picture of us. We made a little small talk with them (2 girls about my age and an older man) and it turned out the man worked at Harpo and offered to take us inside for a backstage tour. Ummm, yes please! We got to see some cool things and got to hear some great stories. I'm so glad I got to go one more time before her show ends!

10.2.10

We headed to a wedding in Naperville in the beginning of October. Since we didn't want to drive 3 hours in our formalwear, and couldnt check into our hotel until after the ceremony, we had to find a spot to get ready once we got to town. Right next to the church was a high school where they were conveniently playing a soccer game. It was cold and rainy, but we did what we needed to do and used their public outdoor bathroom there. Pretty classy.

I must give the styling of this wedding props. Everything from the linens, the paper products, the chivari chairs all the way to the elaborate centerpieces were perfectly coordinated. Beautiful!

9.25.10

Last weekend we participated in the highly anticipated Curd Crawl 2010. Lindsay (pictured) organized this event and it is exactly what it sounds like: the concept of a pub crawl, except instead of sampling beers, we sampled the best cheese curds Madison has to offer...except we also took part in our fair share of drinking beer too.

The Crawl started out at Dotty Dumpling's Dowry, followed by State Street Brats, The Plaza, and The Old Fashioned and finished up at The Great Dane. We consumed a lot of curds, my friends. We picked up a few other random crawlers with us along the way as well...who happened to be from Ellsworth, WI, which is the cheese curd capital of Wisconsin. What are the chances, people!? It was kismet!

Lindsay made official ballots and we all took the judging quite seriously. Plus points went to those places that offered multiple dipping sauces, good appearance, gooeyness, etc. Dotty's offered no dipping sauces and actually charged for a side of ranch. cheap! 0 points for sauces there! By the time we got to the Great Dane, we could only choke down 1 curd per person, but we all were troopers and got it done. At the end of the night we took a poll on our favorite curds of the day and I think the majority said Old Fashioned. Prior to the crawl, I would have definitely said my favorites were from there as well, but The Plaza totally won me over and they might have scooted its way to the #1 spot. Overwhelming worst curd went to Brats. They were starchy and hardly even melty. You have been warned.

9.18.10

We headed to our first Badger tailgate of the year a few weeks ago. The weather was perfect. I mistakenly brought a fleece with me that was unneeded for most of the day. I think I ended up wearing it around my waist, early 90s style for a while. We had a fantastic day - hoping to make it to at least 1 more tailgate before the season ends!

In unrelated news, my hair is a little unruly in this picture. Don't worry, I remedied that situation this week and got a much needed cut and color.

9.12.10

That was getting kind of annoying seeing my feet everytime you visited this blog, eh? Gross. My pal, Heath, did the Ironman again this year, so I went down to the lakeshore path to hopefully see him and cheer him on. I planned it out pretty well this year and tracked him online all day. I successfully saw him around 3pm during his first loop. We walked together for about a mile while he felt like he needed a break...perfect timing on my part, even though I was prepared to run with him too. When he was ready to run again, I wished him luck and bid him adieu...and then met my friend, Lindsey, to watch the runners on State Street.

Fun fact: we saw a blind athlete! Whhhaaa? He was connected by a buddy band type system with another person. We were confused how he would have been able to do the bike though. Is it a tandem? Couldnt be a sidecar situation because he would have to do the pedaling. If it is a tandem bike, does their partner pedal at all? If so, that would seem a tad unfair. Either way, when he came running down State Street the entire crowd rose to their feet and roared with applause. It was amazing...and inspiring...and for about 30 seconds I thought, maybe I could be an Ironman. And then those 30 seconds were over and I came back to reality.