The Big 25!

I'm 25! It's not a birthday that I've particularly looked forward to, but I still don't feel old, so that's good enough for me! This entire month has been very busy for us, so I really just wanted to relax. That's exactly what we've done! Friday after work, we were planning on going to a comedy club. As soon as we got home, I decided I didn't want to leave. We just stayed in and watched TV. We looked at the schedule for the comedy club and watched some videos from the comedians that are going to be there in the next few weeks. We have a Groupon that expires toward the end of November and decided to either next weekend or the weekend after that. 

Saturday was our designated lazy day for the month. I did cheat a bit and seal the grout before Josh woke up. It's supposed to be a lazy day for US, so I really wasn't that bad. Other than that, it was a great lazy day. The weather was perfect lazy day weather. It was cold and rainy, so I had no desire to remove myself from the comfort of my couch and blanket. We did get a little bit of snow. I've never seen snow before my birthday! It wasn't anything to get excited about. There was no accumulation, just a few flakes for about 30  minutes. We did take Bailey outside in it, but I don't even know if she noticed the difference. She did walk a little differently, but I think that's probably because we put her hoodie on her :-). We watched football and movies for most of the day. I even took a nap! Doing nothing and taking a nap may not sound very exciting, but both are very hard for me to do. Since we got the house, there's ALWAYS something to do. The to-do list never ends. This is why I've made it a goal to take just 1 day out of the month to be lazy and relax. If I don't, I'll work on little projects all weekend and it's Monday before  I notice it. I do almost feel guilty that we didn't finish up some projects, but I think this is important for our sanity. Haha. We ordered Chinese so we wouldn't have to worry about cooking or washing dishes. I did make some crab dip to eat while we watched football, but that took like 5 minutes of my time :-)

Sunday was my actual birthday. I slept in, which isn't an easy thing for me to do. Josh surprised me with breakfast, flowers and a cake :-) We took Bailey to the dog park in the early afternoon. We relaxed a little bit once we got her home, then we left to do some Birthday shopping. I got some new clothes and black boots!

Years ago, I always wanted impractical gifts for my birthday. This is one thing that has definitely changed...and I'm not quite sure exactly when it changed. I literally racked my brain to think of what I wanted for my birthday. Everything I could think of was either a clothing item or something for the house. Those are the most exciting things for me right now. I want a carpet cleaner for Christmas...maybe I am getting old?!? Haha

Bailey's Progress Report

This is probably a bit overdue. Haha. I've decided it's not necessary to do these weekly anymore since Bailey isn't growing as quickly as she was and they're probably starting to get a little repetitive. 

Behavior wise, we have our good days and we have our bad days. Bailey is getting much better at understanding what we want from her. She is also going through a very rebellious stage, so it doesn't always matter if she understands or not. I know we still have several months of this left and it's definitely a challenge. She is testing her limits for sure. She used to be great about doing her tricks. Now, she grunts and huffs before she does them sometimes, and sometimes she'll just refuse to do them. I would say playing dead is probably her least favorite trick. Sometimes she'll run through all the other tricks she knows to see if she can get a treat for doing them without having to play dead. It's cute sometimes, but we never treat her until she does what we ask her to do. 

She's doing really well with potty training. She's consistently ringing her bells still. She didn't have any accidents when we went home a few weeks ago and she didn't have any over the past few weeks when we had visitors. These used to be the hardest times in terms of accidents. Until the other day, I'm not sure when she last had an accident. I'll take the blame for the accident the other day. I was cooking breakfast and she rang her bell twice. I ignored her because it hadn't been too long since Josh took her out. I figured she just wanted to go out and play. Well, I was wrong. She had to pee. Oops.

She's so-so on her walks. We were hoping we wouldn't need her pinch collar any more by now. It's definitely not something we want to always have to use. She usually pulls when I try to walk her without it. When she gets really excited, she doesn't respond to the pinch collar as well as she used to. 

We've slacked on her tricks. We're still working on say your prayers. I personally got really bad for just having her wave a time or two then letting her eat while we had visitors. I don't know why. It takes all of 5 minutes to work on new tricks before her meals. Because of this, we're about where we were a few weeks ago with the trick. She likely would have mastered it by now if we would have been working on it consistently. It's OK though, it's just a trick and she'll get it eventually. :-)

She's done really well with all our visitors. She did get overly excited a bit, but I suppose that can be expected since she's just a puppy and we don't have visitors much. She likes everybody so that's never an issue. We just have to worry about jumping and things of that sort. I don't know what we'll ever do if we have a visitor who hates dogs. She just wouldn't know what to do if someone didn't want to pet her or play with her. She was a bit more hard headed than usual while people were here. I'm not sure if it was just her being more rebellious, if she thought we weren't paying attention, or what it was, but there was definitely a noticeable difference. We had to repeat ourselves more than usual, which is something we try not to do. I think when she notices that we repeat our commands, she just learns that she doesn't have to listen the first time. It's really hard for us to stick to this. It's my first instinct to tell her to sit again if she doesn't listen the first time. We're working on that :-)

This is one night while Anna and John were here. It was past her bedtime and she was so tired. She had to stick around to see what was going on though. 

We decided when we got Bailey that she wouldn't be allowed on furniture. I've put her in bed a few times with me when Josh stayed up late to play games or on his basketball nights. He was OK with that. I actually think she prefers to sleep beside our bed, she always acts a little nervous when she gets on our bed, but she eventually gets settled and goes to sleep. I'm not sure if it's because it's so tall or what. Anyway, we have an ottoman that we haven't used since we got it. We started using it for Bailey's training when we started working on "paws up". We talked about it when we first got her and more the other day. We decided she could have the ottoman. She likes to be close to us and we don't always feel like laying on the floor with her, so I think this works out.

I think we're all happy with this arrangement :-) She's not allowed to sit up here while we're eating though (we eat here more than we do at the table).

We were originally not planning on getting a dog until January 2012. It wasn't hard for me to change my mind when we met Bailey, but Josh took some convincing. I wanted a dog for a companion, he wanted a dog for protection. He justified getting her (from a financial standpoint) by getting a dog rather than a security system. We live in a safe area, but Josh has been paranoid since he left home I think. Bailey didn't bark at anything at all when we first got her. Josh used to come home at night from basketball and she wouldn't pay the least bit of attention to him opening the door or even walking up the stairs. For about a month or so, she's been alerting us a lot better. She barks when she hears neighbors too, but hopefully she'll learn to tell the difference.  I'm not sure if she'll ever be able to distinguish the sound of cars coming to our driveway and our neighbors' since they are so close together. She's just a baby so she'll learn what normal sounds are with time. 

She's loving all the leaves. When it's windy and we're on walks, she'll try to chase the leaves. It's so cute. She tries to chase the leaves down the stream near our house too. She's much more comfortable playing in it than she used to be. She used to only drink out of it. Now she will chase sticks and leaves. I thought she would like water a bit more since she has a little bit of lab in here. She definitely hasn't gotten that from the lab. So far I think she just has the coat and the toes of a lab. She definitely has a Pit temperament and energy :-).

Zoo Visit!

This post is super late. My family came to visit a few weekends ago. They've been up several times since we've moved into the house, but they've always helped us work on projects. This time, we wanted to do something fun with them. We decided to take them to the National Zoo. 

The last time we went it was ridiculously hot and humid. It wasn't a great day to walk around and a lot of the animals were inside. This time, the weather was perfect for a day at the zoo! 

 Natalia, Josh and I. She wanted to take a picture on every animal statue at the zoo.

 Panda! We were so close to him! The last time we went they were inside and we didn't get a good look at them.

 Natalia and Daddy on the anteater

So, if you know me, you know I'm terrified of snakes. Natalia talked about seeing the snakes from the time we stepped into the zoo. I told her Uncle Josh could take her in the reptile building. I started thinking about it and I decided if my 4 year old niece was brave enough to go in, I was going to go in too. I actually wasn't that bad. Natalia hated it. She is terrified of crocs and that's what we saw as soon as we got in. Daddy carried her around the whole time. I was just going to walk through and look at the turtles and frogs. I didn't have any interest in the snakes. Josh told me I should look and see what all the poisonous ones looked like. I told him it didn't matter if they were poisonous or not, I would treat them all the same. Haha. I humored him anyway. It actually wasn't that bad.

Anaconda! I have no idea how big this thing was, but it was huge. Not like in the movie obviously, but still huge. There was a lady just outside his exhibit holding the skin of a dead anaconda. I touched it! 

 Diamondback. This one was a little more scary because they actually live where Josh and I are from. We obviously won't have to worry about running into an anaconda anywhere, but I grew up playing in woods of Southeastern NC...plus he was doing the creepy snake tongue thing. Ick!

 This is a ginormous iguana. We saw a few wile iguanas while we were on our honeymoon, but they were probably the size of this guy's nose. He's shedding his skin in this picture, it actually looked pretty gross.

 I forgot what kind of turtle this is, but he's huge!

 Beautiful tiger!

He kept roaring! It was really cool. You can only hear it once in this video, but it's still pretty cool!

Daddy, Josh and I. Natalia took this picture. Not bad for a 4 year old :-)

Staycation!

This past week, we had lots of friends/family come visit! Anna and John, who are our best friends (plus John is Josh's cousin) came from Miami on Wednesday and stayed until Monday. Chris came from Raleigh on Saturday and stayed until Thursday, and Kallie came from SC on Saturday and stayed until Tuesday. Josh and I took some much needed vacation while they were in town. 

Josh, Anna and John picked me up from work on Wednesday, then went out for dinner and drinks. We got a delicious crab pizza from Joe Squared then we went out for drinks at Howl at the Moon. It was fun just catching up. Thursday we went to get burgers and we drove up to Hydes, MD to go on a tour at Boordy Vineyards. The place was absolutely gorgeous and the tour was really good. The wines tasted great too!

 The guys at happy hour

 
The whole group!

The hubby and I <3

Friday we wanted to relax a bit. Anna and I got a long overdue massage. I haven't had a massage since the couples massage we got on our honeymoon and I've wanted another one since then. It was great, but after only 3 days back at work, I already feel like I need another one! I think I'll try  to get one once a year :-) They're too expensive to get much more often than that. Josh and John went to play disc golf. They had fun, but Josh lost his phone :-/.

Saturday we drove down to Charlottesville to see the NC State/UVA game. We got there early to meet up with more friends and tailgate before the game. The weather was great, the tailgating was great, AND we won! The campus is absolutely beautiful and I couldn't believe how amazing the views from the stadium were.


Bailey was so tired on the way to Kyle's in the morning.


But she was too curious to go to sleep!

 The girls

 The guys

 The hubs and I...with part of the amazing view!

 The Martins!

Oops...how did we get down there?

Sunday, we all went to a pumpkin farm. We went on a hay ride, walked through what was supposed to be a corn maze (it was really just a path through corn) and picked out pumpkins we were planning to carve later that night. I was super excited because Josh and I have actually never carved a pumpkin together. I can't believe it's taken us over 10 years to carve a pumpkin! We got home and could not find our pumpkin carving kit! We finally just gave up and decided to hang out since it was Anna and John's last night.

 The hubs and I with our first pumpkin!

Silly guys :-) Love them!

Anna and John were flying out of Reagan, so we drove down to the National Harbor for lunch. We went to Cadillac Ranch. The food was really good and it seems like it would be a really fun place in the evenings. The service wasn't impressive though. After that, we walked around the Gaylord Hotel. It's absolutely gorgeous inside. It's like a little indoor town. I wish we would have had more time to look around, but we had to get on the road! It's a good thing we did, because traffic was horrible. We'll definitely be going back in the future. On the way home from the airport, we stopped to pick up pumpkin carving kits. Chris and Kallie both had bought pumpkins and we wanted them to be able to carve them before they left. I wish we would have taken pictures when we were carving or at least with our pumpkins when we were finished. I was so tired, I didn't even think of taking pictures until yesterday! We cleaned the seeds so we could roast them. I made some cinnamon/sugar ones (surprisingly, I wasn't impressed with these) and some Old Bay seeds (these were delicious).

Tuesday morning, Josh got up to take Kallie to Dulles. I stayed home to pick up around the house a little bit and start planning for the day. Chris wanted to go to a winery while he was here, so we needed to pick one out. Boordy is on the Piedmont Wine Trail, so I wanted to pick another winery on the same trail. It wasn't that hard to choose since most of them do tours from Wednesday-Sunday. We chose Fiore Winery. Now we've seen 2 of the 8 wineries on this wine trail! This one was WAY smaller than Boordy. The buildings were not as pretty as our first tour, but the views were gorgeous! I really enjoyed both tours. On the way home, we stopped at G&M. They have delicious crab cakes! The prices are about the same as a lot of the other crab cakes you'll find around here, but the size actually makes these worth it! As always, it was delicious...and I had leftovers for lunch. I had to work the next day, so I went to bed early while they guys played Halo.

Josh and Hutch!

The hubby and I in front of some grape vines. Look at that view!

Wednesday was a tough day back at work for me. I was really bummed that 1) some of our friends had gone home and 2) that Josh and Chris were still home. Josh and Chris came and picked me up from work. We went to McCormick & Schmick's for happy hour. They have an amazing happy hour menu! This was another early night for me since I had to be at work again. Chris left Thursday afternoon before I got home :-/

All in all, this was a great vacation...even if we didn't really travel. It was great to have some familiar faces around for a while and to get to show them around a little. It's tough getting back into the routine. Luckily, we'll meet up again in a month over Thanksgiving weekend! 

To Do...Painted Rug?

Rugs are one item I've always struggled with a bit. I can never find a rug I love for a price I can come to terms with. I refuse to spend $200+ for a rug. I'm going to walk on it, my dog's hair is going to get on it, I'm going to spill things on it, etc. Not only that, I change my mind about these types of things more than I would like to admit. I would hate to buy a rug for several hundred dollars just to dislike it in a year. 

So...I've decided I want to paint one. 

I can't do it just yet. We have WAY too many projects going on right now. We're re-doing floors, we have paint for 4 rooms that still need painting, we have several pieces of unfinished furniture that need to be painted, we have old furniture that needs to be re-painted. On top of that we have a few minor repairs that we need to make and we still have hardly anything on the walls. I already have supplies for about 3 other projects I haven't even started. These are much smaller projects than painting a rug of course, but projects nonetheless. 

I also need to decide on the pattern I want. 

I love Chevron...but Josh doesn't like it, so maybe I'll paint one of those for my craft room that I don't use. 

I also like Moroccan prints...

Like this one.

And this one.

Maybe I'll keep it simple and go with stripes. Who knows?

My living room floor has been bare for months now. I'm ready to have some color on it. If I find a great deal on a rug I love, I'll go ahead and buy it. At this rate, I don't think I'll get around to painting one for the next year...and that's way too long. I'll definitely be painting one for another room in the house though!

Family Pictures!

I've been wanting to get family pictures taken for a while now. A while back, there was a Living Social deal for 5 photo sheets and a low resolution CD at Picture People for $25. I couldn't resist that! Well, we finally got them taken. The location is at the mall near the town we used to live in. I was a bit nervous about taking Bailey into the mall, but we knew we wanted her in the pictures with us...so we took a chance. She was SO well behaved. I thought she might bark at some of the things that may be strange to her, like the carousel...but she didn't! There was a service dog in training that barked at something and she didn't even bark back then. 

She was very excited the whole time. She loves to people watch so she didn't even mind sitting still to wait our turn. She was a little nervous once we got into the room we took our pictures in. The floors were different than what she's used to so she slipped a little and her nails made a funny noise. She didn't like that AT ALL. The backgrounds are mechanical so they make noise when they are changed. She got really scared of those and she sprinkled on my leg a little bit when we were trying to pose. Once she finally warmed up to the place and quit sprinkling she was great. I'm a horrible mommy and I forgot to bring treats AND toys. I felt bad because she was being so good. She even sat still while Josh and I took a some pictures by ourselves. I could tell she wanted to come sit beside us SO bad, but she was a very patient little pup :-) Everyone there was so nice and of course Bailey loved everyone.

We had to get the same pose for all of the sheets. The ones we took with Bailey were good, but my favorites were with just Josh and I. I just liked the background better. We wanted pictures of all 3 of us to put in the house, so we chose one with Bailey in it too. We were really close to paying extra to get some of just Josh and I, but he didn't love any of them. We were also interested in upgrading to a high resolution CD so we could get all the prints we wanted, but it was $150...and again, we didn't LOVE any of the pictures. Overall ti was a great experience. I'm really glad we did this. I wish we would had them done when Bailey was a little younger, but at least we got them done before she turned 1. Time flies by so quickly and I want to make sure we document our lives before we have kids, so we can all look back together. I always enjoyed seeing pictures of my family before I came along, so it will be fun to be able to show our kids how we all looked as a family in the early years of our marriage :-)

Here are a few of my favorites.

This is the one we picked for our prints, but now I like the first one better. I still like this one though :-)

Pumpkin Pancakes

I mentioned that we bought some extra pumpkin to add to our Pumpkin Ale. We didn't want to add the whole can, so we had some leftover. I've been trying to figure out how to use the leftovers. I decided I would try Pumpkin Pancakes. It was also the first day of October, so it was perfect!

Ingredients

- 1 Cup Pancake Mix

- 3-4 Tablespoons Pumpkin Pie Mix

- 1/2 Cup Cinnamon Chips

- Water

 Don't worry if you don't have cinnamon chips. They will still be yummy. I have been looking for these FOREVER. I finally found them and didn't know exactly what to use them for. I couldn't resist putting them in here!

Just prepare the pancake mix per package directions. Add the pumpkin and cinnamon chips. Stir in and cook.

I also happened to have some Cinnamon butter. I put that and some syrup on these...DELICIOUS!

Pumpkin Ale

We brewed our Pumpkin Ale! I'm really excited about it and I can't wait to taste it. We didn't use a kit this time. The homebrew store we go to has TONS of recipes, so we just used one of those. They are super helpful there. We obviously didn't know where anything was so one of the employees helped us gather everything. They have an entire room just for grains. I think that was my favorite part of the trip. The smell reminded me of horse feeding time with my dad :-) The ingredients for this beer were a bit more expensive than when we used the kit. That's OK though, hopefully it will be worth it!

The pumpkin and grain.

The bottom bag is the pumpkin, the top bag is the grain. These had to steep for 55 minutes.

Boiling with the hops, we had to do this for 55 more minutes.

I quit taking pictures at this point. Haha. 

Next we had to add some pumpkin pie spice and let that steep for a few more minutes. Then we had to let it cool, add it to the carboy and add the yeast. We let it ferment for a while then we had to test it to see if it was finished fermenting. This is when we find out when we can bottle and what the alcohol content is. We checked it last Sunday and it wasn't quite finished fermenting. At this point, we tasted it as well. We decided it wasn't pumpkin-y enough, so we got some more pumpkin and pumpkin pie spice to add. It is ready to bottle now. We are planning to get around to doing that today :-) We'll be able to drink it about 2 weeks after that. 

We have also been able to taste our first beer now. It turned out really well!