Girls' weekend

After several month of planning, this past weekend some of my oldest friends and I had a UNC mini-reunion!  My junior year roommate from Granville, Laura, was gracious enough to volunteer the use of her family's amazing beach house near Beaufort.  She, Sara, Erika, Shelly and I met up in Goldsboro and caravanned down for a long-overdue weekend of relaxation.

I think the dolphins we saw in the sound right after we arrived were a good omen for a wonderful weekend.  The weather was lovely, and the company could not have been better.  We all had such a great time -- reminiscing, laughing, and catching up.

The plan is for us to hopefully do this again semi-annually, if not annually.  Certainly not once a decade!  That's just far too long between visits, and as Laura said, we'd all be in menopause the next time we got together! 

Quarantined.

Jon wound up taking Ella to the doctor on Friday afternoon (I had to work, so I couldn't go). As suspected, she's dealing with her first cold. She doesn't have any secondary infections, so that's a good thing. She got sent home with a prescription for some cough medicine, which I suspect tastes good, as she has no problems taking it, and the doctor told us we could give her infant Tylenol as well if she was particularly fussy.

She's been a little trooper. Jon said she was great for the doc (although she didn't like him digging around in her ears too much), and even though you can tell she doesn't feel good, she's still smiling and generally agreeable. She does get a bit sad and whiny at night before bed, and that's kind of tough. I just keep telling myself, "It's building her immune system!" But she's eating well, which is good, and she has been sleeping well at night too. Hopefully, she'll be over this in no time.

I'm dealing with pretty much the same strain of ick that she's got, and I can sympathize with the kid.

Sadly, we're going to miss Gracie's first birthday party tomorrow. I feel bad... I really wanted to go. But I don't want to infect anyone, especially the other babies, with this mess. So we bowed out. I told Sara to post lots of pics on her blog :)

Welcome, Griffin!

Jon just called to let me know that our friends Kim and Jeff had their baby today! Kim wasn't due until Thanksgiving, so no one was expecting it quite this early, but little Griffin decided he wasn't going to wait any longer :)

Congrats, Kim and Jeff...we can't wait to meet him!

Baby showers!

I would have posted about this earlier, but a nasty head cold has beat me down. Summertime colds suck... summertime colds when you're 36 weeks pregnant suck even more.

Anyway, I had 2 baby showers last week! The first one was last Tuesday, given by the folks on my team at work. I knew they were going to throw one for me, but they really went above and beyond...it was really nice. We got lots of good loot and some Amex gift cheques as well. Can't gripe about that!

The second one was on Saturday...a big ol' shindig thrown by my aunts. We decided it would be easier to do one all-encompassing shower for both friends and family, so we had everyone over to my parents' house for a very casual BBQ. Jon and I were both SHOCKED at the amount of stuff people got us. Amazing. We have some seriously generous people in our lives...we're very lucky :) Here are a few photos from the event:





And here is the cake made by the incredibly talented Sara...it matches the bedding we picked out, and she did it all freehand!



From what I can tell, the baby is still head up, so no change there as of yet, anyway.