Atlanta

Last year during Fall Break Rob was deep in the throes of the Human Capital Case Competition that made his "week off" even busier than he was normally. This year, he really did have a break so we took advantage of it!

We started it off by heading down to Atlanta for a MBA job fair. Grace stayed with our awesome friends the Munks, so Rob, Ruby and I had a (fairly) quiet trip. As soon as we got to Atlanta we headed to Ikea {cue choirs of angels singing}. Oh man have I missed that store. We ate delicious Swedish meatballs and meandered the aisles for a good three hours before we were exhausted. We found some good stuff, but didn't bust the budget (woohoo! Rob was a little concerned).

We stayed downtown at the Hyatt Regency, which was beautiful. It has a 23-story atrium running up the middle of it and glass elevators so you can see everything as you plummet toward ground level. Ruby was not such a fan. Every time we rode the elevator, she would cling to me for dear life. I felt kinda bad for her but secretly liked the snuggles :)

For most of the trip Ruby and I were on our own while Rob meeted and greeted about a million employers. Rob did a great job and had 4 interviews that weekend and more good contacts come out of it too. Hooray!

I don't have any pictures to show except for these of Ruby in the hotel as I played with my camera:


All in all it was a fun and sucessful trip. I'd love to go back to Atlanta and see more sights when Rob isn't so tied up with meetings!

Recently

We've been:

...painting...

...car washing...

...dressing up...

...making forts...

...feeling the love from afar...

Grace got a package from Auntie Emily full of awesome stuff.

Ruby even got in on the Auntie-love action...

The Blanket Do

This is Ruby's favorite blanket. She drags it around and loves it, so our friend Chelsea gave her a hip way to wear it. Whaddya think? Stylin' eh?

A Few Family Pics

Since we had the camera all set up for our anniversary shot, and it was hard to keep the girls out of the picture, we decided to take a few family shots as well and they didn't turn out too badly for being taken with a timer.

5

Wednesday we celebrated our 5th anniversary. We had such a fun night! We started out with dinner at an Italian restaurant downtown called Amerigo. The best part was that we had a Groupon, so we had to spend the whole $50 amount of the voucher or we would lose it. It was really fun to go nuts and order appetizers, desserts and something other than water! Needless to say, we brought most of our entrees home with us along with the dessert because we were too full by the end of dinner :)

After dinner we headed to the free Capitol Records Street Party where Alan Jackson was playing. Who could resist a free Alan Jackson concert?! (Love Nashville!) Thanks to Capitol for putting it on our anniversary! It was so fun to go to a concert with Rob and enjoy a night under the stars. That's Alan on the jumbotron and on the stage in the background. He was awesome!

I can't think of a more fun date to celebrate the 5 most wonderful years of my life with the most amazing husband a girl could ask for!

Ruby tried on Grace's princess hat the other day, if a little elfin

The Artist

Rob had a meeting on campus the other day and I was feeling a tad frazzled, so Rob offered to take Grace to school with him. (Isn't he awesome?) Grace sat in the corner and drew some pictures. I was really impressed with her drawings. They are all from her imagination with no prompting. Here are a just a few of them, see if you can guess what they are...

For this one there are little lines all the way around the face that are hard to see. With that hint you should definitely be able to get it... :)

A tiger (or lion)

A Pumpkin (Jack-O-Lantern)

A Jellyfish

Mommy and Gracie and a Dinosaur. See it?

Imagine this one without the added stripes by the mouth and the "beard" (she added those after she got home) but do notice the legs :)


Did you guess it was Baby Ruby Putting On Her Jammies? No? Well, I'm sure you got the Baby Ruby part at least...






Mommy and Gracie
(she added the beard on me after she got home...do you think that's a hint of some sort?) :)

Grace loves to do anything artistic, be it singing, dancing or drawing and we love seeing what she comes up with!

Joy School

I am sitting here at 11 am typing this blog post in complete silence except for the clicking of computer keys. Can you tell I'm a little excited for some morning silence? Grace started Joy School this morning! (And Ruby is sleeping - in fact probably sleeping the best morning sleep ever because there's no 3 year old outside her door making lots of noise.) She was so excited to go to school like Daddy. There are 6 kids in our group and every week we rotate the teaching amongst the mothers. I am a little nervous to teach, but excited to learn how to be a better teacher. I think it's Grace's dream come true to have kids to play with for sure at least 2 days a week at school. She sure is a social girl! She even got to bring her Baby Tiana for show and tell today. I am so proud of my big girl!

Cuteness

My cute, clean girl and her hot daddy

Road Trip!: Destin, FL

We had one week between the end of Rob's internship in Louisville and the start of his second (and final!!!!) year of MBA school, so we decided to do a little camping at the beach. Sounds beautiful right? Well, it was in Florida, so wrong! Ha! Despite warnings (thanks, Erin!) we decided to head to beautiful Destin for a few days. It was a pretty long trip down, around 9 hours, but the girls were awesome in the car. Grace watched Tangled over and over and over again. The whole way. It was really cute, because sometimes she'd sing along to the songs (she had headphones on so we got to listen to our own thing). We stopped at Cracker Barrel for lunch. We're becoming more Southern by the minute. Aunt Leslie, if you're reading - I think of you every time we go to Cracker Barrel :)

We got down to Destin. Beautiful white sandy beaches and blue water. Heaven! Until, that is, you step out of your air conditioned car. So it was hot, but nothing we didn't think we could handle, but that could have been because there was a storm blowing in, which apparently happens every day there. That, and it was after 6, so the sun was setting - that helped too. After the storm blew through, it got hot again and we didn't really sleep. The next morning I ran to Wal Mart to get us an extension cord and a fan so we could survive the next night in the tent (gotta love hookups!). We headed down to the beach, but it was windy (more storms) and the red warning flag was up for dangerous surf. By the time we headed back to camp for lunch, they had closed the beach due to all the storms running all the nasties out to sea. Bummer! This is apparently only the 3rd time in 6 years this has happened. What terrible timing! We were dying on land though, so we headed out in the air conditioned car to find some cooler entertainment. That led us to Gator Beach (which is really a pond under a tourist trap restaurant that has over 100 gators).



We fed the gators:

Just kidding! We love you Ruby!


But we really did feed the gators:




And rode the gators:

And Rob even acted nutty enough that he was chosen to get to hold a gator!


We were planning on staying three nights, but with the beach being closed, we cancelled the third night and headed back the next day (after a much better sleep, thankyouverymuch fan!). That night we had a crazy storm that lightning and thundered in our tent (almost!) and rained so hard and blew. It was pretty crazy to be that close to nature during a storm like that!

The ride home was looooooong again, but the girls were amazing for have done it two days before! Not the best camping trip, but one that we'll look back on and laugh about. What an adventure!