Day 157, July 25th

Monday, was sort of a continuation of Sunday, nothing fancy at our house.  After Piyo and iron pumping, we got into lazy mode.  When we were at Sunflower yesterday, we bought these iced teas because they were a dollar, and we love iced tea.  So for dinner Ryan grilled up some burgers, I made the drinks, and we vegged out.  The tea was delicious, and I will keep an eye out for deals on these bad boys again! 

Day 156, July 24th

We got the hospital I think a little after 12 a.m., so I thought, yay, this could be Sunday's blog!! 
Rachel was happily drugged up, a last minute change in planning, that I couldn't agree with more, and her room was full of friends and family.  At about 1 a.m. they kicked us out so that she could get to work and welcome Asher to the world.  Eric and Rachel had yet to pick out a middle name, so her mom, sister, Kendra and I brainstormed some pretty impressive names for the little guy, that for whatever reason, they didn't pick any of!! 
We spent our time in the waiting room, talking about the baby, tough mudder, and probably lots of other things I don't remember from lack of sleep.  
At 3:30 a.m. the nurse came to get us to see little Asher and parents!  He was just the most precious little baby I ever did see! Seemed so alert for just being born, but I suppose this is my first experience seeing a brand new baby so what frame of reference do I really have?! 
They passed Asher around for the family to hold, and I quietly prayed no one would ask me if I wanted to hold him, and thankfully they didn't.  I have a real fear of little babies, I'll take them at 6 months, but before that, they seem too fragile for me.  I kept having visions of dropping him, then just looking with stunned face at Rachel to tell her sorry I dropped your new baby!!! 
We left shortly after, and headed back home to finally get some sleep...you know, because I did so much work waiting for that baby!!! 
I woke up around 10, still tired, but obviously not enough to sleep, got up, ate some breakfast and waited for Ryan to wake up, which didn't happen until almost 1!! He woke up, I fell back asleep, and finally around 4:30 we pulled ourselves off the couch and headed to the Sheraton to pick up my car, and run to the grocery store to get some food.
We had caprese paninis which is quickly becoming my favorite quick dinner idea, and watched The Shawshank Redemption.  
After Asher's birth, our Sunday really peaked, nothing too exciting for the rest of our day!  It is still hard to believe that Rachel has a baby!! At 11 years old if you would have said in 16 years you'll be in your first year of marriage and Rachel will have a baby, I would have said...me and Rachel?! Have you met us?! We'll be spinsters for life, in a tiny house, with hundreds of cats!! 

Day 155, July 23rd

On Saturday morning Tommy came over get Ryan and they hit the golf course to spend some lovely cousin time together.  

I told Ryan to take a picture since whenever we are separate, the blogs are always about what I do...let's get to know what Ryan does when I'm not around!! 
While the boys were getting their golf on, I headed south to Sheraton Wild Horse Pass for a weekend with the girls to say bon voyage to Michelle before she heads to NYU! We spent the day in the pool, with some very badly behaved children, then headed upstairs to get ready for our 5 star dining experience.  We all got dolled up and headed to dinner.  
We went to Kai, inside Wild Horse Pass, one of only a couple 5 star restaurants in Arizona.  I think we were all a bit nervous for the experience only because we were informed, 8 people was considered an event, and for that, a minimum of $2000 had to be spent.  Don't forget I work for a non profit.  And although all my friends are successful young professionals, that number did not sit well with any of us.  Luckily, they split our group into 4 and 4, and we had a wonderful dinner.  Seriously amazing...I feel like I never want to eat at anything less than 5 stars again! After dinner, we headed out to the casino at Wild Horse Pass, which isn't the same as Sheraton Wild Horse Pass (confusing).  As we headed over, I got a text from Rachel saying that she was at the hospital and was having that baby of hers!  I bid farewell to the gals, headed back to the room to pack and change, and Ryan, like a Knight and Shining Amour, came to pick me up and drive us to the hospital.  Not the ending of the night I expected, but quite an exciting one!!

Day 154, July 22nd

Friday night was a pretty snooze fest evening for Ryan and I.  I had a pretty busy weekend planned for Michelle's going away party, so we wanted to just lay low Friday night, and actually get to see each other.

As I was cheaply printing our wedding photos, I came across a nice little promotion to make one photo book and get 2 more for free!! Are you kidding?! That is amazing! So I jumped on that obviously.  Friday, the books were delivered finally to the house! Just in time for my mom's birthday, which she actually isn't even in town for anyway! We looked at the photos and wept about our beautiful day...we didn't really cry, but I wish we did.  I feel like I could have gotten some lovely ahhhhhhh's out of the readers.

Day 153, July 21st

I'm proud to live in South Phoenix, SoPho as us hip locals call it.  I like how close we are to different parts of town, and hello, we're right across from South Mountain, no complaints there.  My only complaint of SoPho is that we don't have great restaurants around here.  Ihop, Applebee's and Filiberto's are our best options.  Why do city planners think since it's near the ghetto we only want to eat at chain restaurants?!!  Give us good food! 
Anyway, so one of the good options we do have is this adorable little pizza place, Amano.  It's this seriously adorable little place that is tiny and has delicious food.
Mary and I met there on Thursday to catch up on life, and see each other's beautiful faces.  She was finally back from her Wisconsin/Michigan trip, so I had to hear about all the fun she had without me! 
We had a fun night, and made the decision that game night needed to be brought back to life!! When we lived together we had game night every Wednesday night, I mean, you wouldn't even think about doing anything else on a Wednesday.  Then Mary had to take a class one semester on a Wednesday, Mike found trivia more fun then board games, and sadly our game nights came to an end.  But now, we will bring them back...and they will be amazing! 

Day 152, July 20th

On Wednesday night, Ryan played baseball and spent my evening in the kitchen.
We were doing a potluck at work on Thursday, and I was volunteered for the dessert.  I felt so much pressure to do a good job so all my co-workers would be so impressed with my skills.
I made up personal marbled cheese cakes and I think they turned out pretty darn good.  Ryan came home when I was finishing up, and helped swirled in the chocolate, such a professional he is.
The ladies at work said it was good...they could have lied, but that's okay, at least my ego is feeling good!! 

Day 151, July 19th

After work on Tuesday, we went home, changed, and then headed to the North end of the valley for dinner with Brandon and Heather, and Cindy and Keith.  Brandon suggested this place, Upper Crust and so that is where we dined.
The food was good, but pretty sure our waiter was not feeling us. He took orders with an iPhone, great concept, but not really the smartest, as typing is a lot slower than writing.  And when Cindy thought he was literally just texting and not paying attention to us, as soon as something was said, and we all laughed, he put the phone down and wrote down the rest of our orders.  I think he was pretty annoyed with us from there on out.
He didn't find my question, upon ordering my fourth glass of wine, if I could just get the bottle price humorous in the least bit.  His loss, if he would have played along, I would have tipped him better! 
It was a fun night with friends, despite the not so fun waiter...also note his photo skills aren't that great! Hope we'll be able to do it again soon! 

Day 150, July 18th

Monday, back to the usual...I did Piyo with Mary while Ryan pumped iron, and then we headed home to cook up some dinner.  We had porkchops in the fridge that we needed to grill up, so that's what we did! 
We had a nice dinner, and then we snuggled up and watch some Big Love.
Really nothing beyond that, but we did have quite a weekend, so you can't hate!

Day 149, July 17th

Sunday, early morning, Ryan headed out to play baseball and I packed up and cleaned the hotel room.  I was getting ready to walk over to the baseball field, when the door sung open and there was Ryan!! Only an hour and a half into the game, I was shocked to see him back, and felt guilty for my slow moving which prevented me from getting to the game.
He said he was on the way to pitching a no hitter when the umpire, in his delicate words, "screwed him." So once he no longer had that fantastic opportunity, he called it quits, and hit the road...and then so did we.
After showering and hydrating, we hit the road back south.  Stopped in Cottonwood for lunch at this adorable little place,  Crema, we ordered lunch, then sat outside.  It wasn't as hot as Phoenix, but I wouldn't say it was cool by any means, and Ryan ordered a soup for his side.  As we waited for lunch, I was saying how I just can't eat certain food when it's not cold, to which Ryan replied, 
"Oh I can't have soup when it's hot out." 
"Soooooo... then why did you just order soup as your side?"
"Oh did I? I didn't know!"
More often than not, this is how our conversations go! :)
After lunch, and soup, we headed down to Phoenix.  Ryan and I are both Arizona natives, although, some times, I think Ryan growing up in Cave Creek doesn't really count as a native, as he did miss a lot of what Phoenix has to offer...he had never been to Durants!! But I always thought since he lived up north, at least the northern stuff was taken care of, but alas he missed that boat too!!
So on our way down, we stopped at Rock Springs, to pick up a delicious pie!

When we got home, Ryan took a cat nap with Max...haha, and we spent the evening chilaxin! Wonderful weekend in the books!

Day 148, July 16th

We woke up Saturday morning and hit the road for Sedona.  Ryan was playing for another team Sunday morning, helping them out with his mad skills, so we made a lovely little weekend of it.  I was a bit worried to head up to Sedona this weekend as my friend Rachel was ready to have her little baby any day now, and I was afraid to miss it, but Ryan was fine with me leaving him in Sedona and returning once baby was born.  Fortunately this didn't happen, and we just enjoyed the weekend.  
When we got to town, we stopped for lunch and hit the little Sedona shops.  I have only been to Sedona once, a few years ago with my friends, and we really spent most of our time at Slide Rock, so it was nice to see all the stuff I hadn't seen yet.
After shopping and wine tasting, we headed to Chapel of the Holy Cross, you know, the church in the rocks...it was really pretty, tiny, but pretty.  Oh, back to the wine tasting, so the two guys were trying to get us to buy a lot of wine, and commenting on how big Ryan's arms were, saying he could easily carry at least 20 bottles out of there.  The other wine man then said, probably how he hooked you little lady, and that's when the most amazing thing ever happened...our wine man said, well she has pretty great arms too!! Oh my heavens, what a compliment! He could have been trying to get me to buy more wine, but pretty sure ever since he said that, I creepily check out my guns every chance I get!! 
Anyway, back to the church...it was really beautiful, and had amazing views! That would be an amazing church to go to every week, that's for sure!
I'm not really a huge, "hey! can you take our picture" kind of gal, so we don't have tons of photos together, except for the ones that I could creepily set up the self timer! Oh I also forgot to pack my hairspray, so my bangs were not cooperating, so I had to pin them back, which shows off how ginormous my forehead is...sorry if that's all you can focus on! 


We headed back to our hotel, checked in, and then we headed back out to hike.  

We hiked a little trail close to where we were staying and it was quite a lovely hike, much prettier than our usual South Mountain views.
After the hike, we got all prettied up, and headed to dinner.  
We sat on the patio as the weather was a bit nicer than Phoenix, and we were enjoying a lovely evening under the stars when I looked over to the ledge and saw a tarantula!! Seriously, call me stupid, but I had no idea that these bad boys lived in America, let alone Arizona!! Ryan of course ran for the hills, and left me there, but luckily there seemed to be a lot of tarantula experts around, so we got a lesson, and then he took the little fella off to a secluded area.
It was quite an exciting end to a pretty great day! 

Day 147, July 15th

Friday night Ryan had a baseball game so I spent my Friday night, cleaning the house and packing, since we were headed to Sedona in the morning...for more baseball!!
Because of all the dope online photo deals, I have been a photo printing fool!! After work I went to the best store around, Hobby Lobby, and bought some cute frames for the house.  After the house was to its proper sparkle, I started to put together our stair shelf.  
We've had the shelf for months and we had stuff on it, but I always had great expectations for what it could be! After a bit of TLC, I got the shelf looking stellar and stood at the bottom of the stairs admiring the work done.  Gus and Max joined me, and we thought what a job well done!!
Once the shelf was beautiful, I started packing, and that's when the Ryster came home! He showered and started packing as well.  We went to bed ready to wake up and hit the open road in the morn.

Day 146, July 14th

Thursday, after work, Ryan headed home and I headed to San Felipe's at Tempe Marketplace to celebrate Michelle's birthday! In a few short weeks Michelle is off to New York for Grad School, so we have to get in as much Michelle time as possible. 
We had a nice dinner, and Elise brought her newly famous cake pops for us to enjoy for a birthday treat, and we had a good night chatting it up and celebrating.
Michelle and some of the other gals then headed to line up for the midnight showing of Harry Potter, she asked all of us to go, but not only have I not seen any Harry Potter movies, I'm pretty sure there is no way I would be able to stay awake to watch the movie, and then also work a full day of work on Friday!!  So being the old married ladies, Amy and I headed home, as the youngins lined up for the big event! Another fun night with friends in the bag!

Day 145, July 13th

On Wednesday, I was super pumped to get home and head to the grocery store to do some saving.  I had a pretty good hold on things to get at the store, and there were some seriously amazing deals going on.  
Ryan and I went to the gym, and then we went over to Fry's to try and save more than 50%.  Any other time we've gone, it's been hard with Ryan because there is always some random item that he has to have, and of course it's not on sale, and I don't have a coupon for it! This time, he was on my page, we didn't stray.  I was super concerned about the Vitamin Water coupons, they would be free if all coupons could be used.  So we got our cart all filled up, picked the nicest looking cashier and went to work.  I seriously was like those people on Extreme Couponing, shaking and nervous my adding wouldn't work out.  And finally as we scanned the last coupon...$30.56, a savings of 68%! Holy B, amazeballs!! The cashier told me I did good with my coupons, and all in all it was an exciting night!! 

Day 144, July 12th

Lots of the same for Tuesday. Ryan got home early to watch the All Star game, seriously, rough job he has!! :)

The All Star game was not as interesting as the Home Run Derby, so I really didn't do much paying attention to that nonsense, but Ryan relaxed and enjoyed his Tuesday.
For some strange reason, a few months back we started getting RedBook magazine in the mail, and no, not addressed to me, but to Ryan.  No idea why he's getting it, or why the universe thinks he's interested in looking two sizes slimmer, but it is happening. I read the magazine as the game played, then all of a sudden, there is Ryan, partaking in RedBook's great insight!  
I know he wants the readers to think he's a sports maniac, but the latter picture shows more of Ryan's true side.

Day 143, July 11th

Monday after work I finally got some photos printed after seriously like 4 years, to fill these frames Ryan's mom got me for Christmas, no, not Christmas in July, literally Christmas. I have been scouring the web for cheap and or free prints to print our engagement, wedding and honeymoon photos, and slowly but surely I'm getting there!

So we ate dinner, watched the Home Run Derby, which was really exciting actually. I mean the photos in frames, and getting our room put together was what I was planning on doing while Ryan watched baseball, but suddenly there I was on the couch, watching baseball!! Wonders never cease.

So after the Derby was over, and the photos were in the frames, we finally hung them up in our room, and finished our unfinished wall in our bedroom. It was so nice to finally get the wall all prettied up, it's been sort of lame since I moved in! 

Day 142, July 10th

On Sunday afternoon, after we recouped from our late evening, we headed up north to celebrate Ryan's parent's anniversary in the church.   We had a good time with everyone, I feel like it had been a long time since we were all together! We had good food, that Paul cooked, which I felt bad for since we were technically there celebrating him, and had a nice afternoon with the whole family and friends.  We headed back back home for the evening and watched some Big Love.  It's weird because we started watching Big Love long ago, and then we had to wait for season 4 to come out so then we got super caught up in Six Feet Under.  Both good shows, but it was an odd transition out of Six Feet for sure! And that ended our very busy weekend!!

Day 141, July 9th

The All Star game was in town, and since Ryan is Mr. Baseball, of course we went. Although, I'm really into that sort of stuff so I wanted to go too. I mean why wouldn't you want to go to these things when they are in town?! Phoenix is dope, I mean we get lots of cool stuff that rolls through, need to take advantage of these moments! 
Now off my soapbox...we made a lovely day of it, we parked our car and took the lightrail to Tempe to have brunch at Cafe Boa, which was so amazing, if you haven't experienced it, you should!  After our bellies were full we jumped back on the rail and headed downtown.  
We went to the Fan Fest and saw and did lots of fun stuff.  We do need kids (not anytime soon) so that we can do the fun obstacle stuff without looking like weird adults trying to take down kids! 
After our afternoon of fun, we got back on our trusty lightrail and headed home.

We rested for a bit once we were home, then got pretty and hit the town for Heath's birthday dinner at Pappadeaux.  Quite a drive, but a great night celebrating with friends. We went back to Heath and Amy's and stayed far late into the night, or early into the morning, but had a great time.  I am looking forward to our Europe trip the guys planned over the bottle wine they shared. It was a great day with our wonderful city and friends!! 

Day 140, July 8th

On Friday, Ryan was asked to play baseball for another team, so I spent the evening in with the furchildren.
I cooked up some dinner, poured a glass of wine, and spent some of the night reading, and then watching a Dateline about Casey Anthony and another murder story.
I can't say it was an interesting evening, but it was nice to just relax on the couch on a Friday night.  I like getting older so things like that are acceptable! 

Day 139, July 7th

So, after my mad cleaning yesterday on the front, I was determined to clean our patio Thursday after work.  So when Ryan got home from work I told him he better join me in the evening of fun! :) 
After we made our little patio sparkle we grilled up some dinner and decided to enjoy our dinner on our newly cleaned patio! 
We had a lovely evening, enjoy dinner and each other's company!

Day 138, July 6th

Ryan had a baseball game on Wednesday so I went to Zumba at the gym and then headed out to run some errands.  I was off to Sunflower Market to take advantage of Double Ad Wednesday and on my way drove past Home Depot.  Weeks ago, maybe even a month ago, we bought a cute pot at Home Goods that we had yet to fill, so I stopped at the Depot and picked up a few flowers. After I went to the grocery store I headed home.  As I started to plant to flowers, I couldn't help but notice how seriously gross our house was from the great Haboob and so once I planted the flowers I got to work on cleaning.  Finally finished around 10 or so, which is crazy if you know that we don't even have a front "yard" to clean! Ryan came home shortly after, and we hit the hay.  Wild Wednesday!! 

Day 137, July 5th

Today was one of those days, I thought, oh goodness we are going to have yet another picture of our dinner, and tonight's dinner isn't that exciting!! Chicken over salad...snoozefest! My poor blog readers!
Then sweet Mother Nature stepped in and helped us out!! Ryan was outside grilling while I tried once again to get into this season of SYTYCD, he came inside and asked if I wanted to see something gross.  Yes, Ryan, that's exactly what I want to do!!
But somehow he convinced me to come out, and saw the crazy dust rising over the mountain. We are both Phoenix natives, and have seen some crazy dust storms, but never something like this.  From this point it only took like 5 minutes to come over the mountain and engulf our place!

Once the storm was full on we headed back inside to eat dinner.  Of course turned on the news, like any Phoenician does when the weather isn't sunny and clear and hung out with our children. Our patio door and window were shaking like crazy, and I was pretty confident they were going to burst through!! We ate dinner sitting on the floor in case that did happen, hoping that would prevent all the glass cutting our faces open!  The storm passed, not before covering our house in dirt, and we went on with our night.  The famous Haboob of 2011.  It's weird...literally never heard of a haboob, but they make it seem like it's a common happening in the PHX.  Either way, not a fan, it took days to clean all the dirt!!