Thirty

Happy Birthday to my sweetheart!  I love you!!

Surprise!

Last weekend my friend Lori and I threw a surprise party for our husbands who both turned, and are turning 30 this year!  We picked a date that was in between their birthdays (after Paul's, before Sam's) so it would be a surprise to both of them.  We decided to have a Minute to Win It theme.  Every time I watched the show I thought how fun it would be to  have a party; thankfully Lori had the same thought so we teamed up and threw a joint party!

We invited all our Kellogg friends from the ward (it's so great there are so many of us) and had a great time!  It was really fun, but also very stressful to pull off.  There were so many times I wanted to talk to Sam about what was going on.  Plus getting him to go along with the plans for that day without asking too many questions was tough!  All of the sudden he wanted to be very involved in what was going on, or maybe I just noticed it more when I wanted him to stay out of it!  So no more surprise parties for him; hope he enjoyed it. :)

Game set up.  We had a Team Sam & a Team Paul.  All the supplies needed for each team's games were in the boxes.

Food

Table set up

This was Lori's genius idea.  She made stickers with the guys' pictures on them for each team.  I think it was my favorite part!

A collage of some of the games we played.  They were a blast!

*Lori took all these pictures too.  What am I going to do when she leaves?

He did it!

I guess it's finally time to officially announce to the "world" that Sam was accepted to Kellogg! Yay! We're shocked, humbled, proud (I am), and really really excited. We'll be moving up to Evanston this August and school starts in September. It will be sad to leave beautiful San Diego, but we're definitely ready to take this next step in our lives. Come visit us in Chicago!!

Good News.

As Sam was being discharged from the hospital on Monday, he got a call from someone in the admissions department at Emory University in Atlanta offering him a full scholarship!!! I'm so proud of my awesome hubby!

We're still waiting to hear from some other schools, but Atlanta may be our new home this Fall!

Bad News.

We have had a CRAZY couple weeks around here! It started with the birth of our gorgeous baby boy (more on that later) and continued with Sam ending up in the hospital for some emergency surgery.

Last Thursday I got a call from Sam as I was pulling into the driveway of my grandmother's house (almost 2 hours away) that he was going to the hospital. He had been having troubles with his gallbladder for a couple months and actually had a surgery scheduled to have it removed in the beginning of March. But he had a pretty serious attack and the pain persisted, so he went to have it checked out. He was admitted on Thursday night, had surgery Sunday morning, and FINALLY came home Monday afternoon.

Needless to say it was a long few days! THANK GOODNESS my mom was here until Saturday. He is recovering well and should be back on his feet in a couple days! Silver lining: Sam was planning on taking this week off anyway, but now he can use sick days and save those vacation days!

Our Anniversary

Our anniversary was a couple weeks ago (September 3rd), so Sam and I spent the weekend in Washington DC. We headed down on Saturday for a temple trip with our youth. That night we went to dinner in Alexandria with Sam's sister Meg and his cousin Robert. Of course we had to go to Bertucci's...Sam loves it.


The rest of the weekend was full of sightseeing and seeing family. It's been a long time since I've been to DC, so it was fun to go see the monuments. Sam randomly had a lot of family in town that weekend so we visited and ate with them. We did get to have some alone time for an annivesary dinner in old town Alexandria.

We also got to see one of Sam's old roommates, Eric Carlson, who is a laywer in DC. We went to brunch with him and his fiance! We haven't seen him for two years, so it was great to visit.

Hill Cumorah

Last week Sam and I went to the Hill Cumorah Pageant in Palmyra, NY. We headed up to New York in the morning and stopped in Ithaca on the way--Sam wanted to check out Cornell as a business school possibility. We checked out the campus and the town for a couple hours then headed up to Palmyra.

We got to Palmyra a few hours before the Pageant started so we checked out some of the historical sights. We took the tour at the Smith farm and went to the Sacred Grove. Unfortunately it rained all afternoon, so we didn't get to do as much as we would have liked. Here are some pics from the farm.

The Pageant was great though. I'd never seen it before, so I was pretty excited. It's amazing that they get 700 people together, audition them all in a day and spend a week rehearsing for this huge production. It was very impressive. There were quite a few people from church here in State College that perform in the Pageant, so it was fun to see them up there. I didn't get any good pics from the show, but here's one of Sam and me sitting in the rain.