wadio & co. coming to visit!

my dad, anita, and my brothers arrive tomorrow! we're really excited to show them around FL :) and then cassie arrives on friday! the house is now clean, the kitchen is organized and more stocked than it usually is for the 2 of us, and cleo has had a bath! speaking of, how could i forget the other visitor: ari! cassie's frenchie will be joining us as well. now that she's older, it should be pretty entertaining to watch her and cleo together :)

so if i take a blogging hiatus - you'll know why! although i'll try to keep up :)

The Personal

by C. Dale Young


Wear the wedding ring on a chain around your neck.
The personal, as in personal life? Say nothing.
This is how I spoke to myself then. These are the things


I used to remind myself daily. Gender neutral.
Only use gender neutral when you must talk
about your beloved. And never speak of love.


It will only invite questions. So much to learn.
Memorize all of it. Know it well enough to recite
it backwards if you must. Every last detail.


The expected heart rate of a newborn? The exact
percentage of fats, protein, and carbohydrates
in Total Parenteral Nutrition? The formulae


for calculating blood volume? Everything.
You have no time for the personal.
And that morning, on my last day in the NICU?


Do I remember it? I do. I still remember it.
And this is what I say to myself now: You must
remember it. Along with the calculations, the hours


and hours of sick babies, you must remember it.
That woman, your teacher, grilled you for 35 minutes,
question after question after question. She did it


in plain sight, in front of all the nurses, the residents,
the interns, the clerks, the other students. She wanted
you to answer incorrectly, wanted to shame you.


Question after question after question, you hid
behind correct facts and information. And when
she tired of the game, of trying to trip you up,


she announced for everyone that you were the best
minority student she had ever had. And you took it.
You wanted to be like a duck, to let it all wash off of you.


But even in that praise, there was venom. Even in praise,
she found a way to shame you, single you out. And you hid
behind correct answers. But now, you must make it personal.

the downtown 'wg'!

nate and i headed downtown on sunday to putz around and take a few pictures -- i was missing my mother on mother's day and needed some kind of activity! just a few:

blogroll!

so i've added some friends and family blogs off to the left ---->

my favorite feature is it shows how recently they've been updated! most recently update will show at the top of the list :) happy blogging!

So apparently, I can blog

So apparently, I can blog from my phone!

blueberry french toast (as promised laura!)

so over easter, i called my mom and asked "what's the best dish you serve for breakfast for a bunch of people?" and she passed this recipe along. i think she got it from a B&B, so that's appropriate ;) everyone enjoyed it and nate requested a second showing for when laura and drew were here to visit :) i was inspired by pioneer woman (a blogger and a woman with seemingly endless talent) to post a few recipes now and then on my blog :) so here we are. (and laura, i'm e-mailing this to you as well!)





1 loaf of french bread cut into 1” cubes

8 oz. cream cheese

1 cup fresh blueberries (can substitute mixed berries! or more berries! or frozen berries!)

10 eggs, beaten

1/3 cup maple syrup

2 cups milk

Blueberry Sauce

1 cup water

1 cup sugar

2 tbl cornstarch

2 cups blueberries

Put ½ of the bread cubes in a 9x13 glass dish coated with pam. Cube cream cheese and place on top of bread. Sprinkle with berries. Cover with remaining bread. Beat eggs, syrup, and milk and pour evenly into dish. Spray the underside of a piece of foil with pam and refrigerate overnight.

Bake covered at 350° for 30 minutes, then 30 minutes uncovered.

Pictures from Mom's trip are up

and just for fun (and since i just discovered microsoft photo story), i made a somewhat boring video of all the pictures. lesson learned? i need to take more pictures with people in them!

the chewies have headed home!

we had a great time visiting with them and hearing all about what they've been up to lately :) hopefully they had a great time at disney, malayna seemed to be a pretty big magic kingdom fan so i think it's safe to say they did ;) their last day here, we went to the u-pick citrus grove to get them some tasty florida citrus :)

what we've been up to

i'm behind on pictures. i know. still need to post pics from my mom's visit and i STILL need to finish my paris pics. but in the meantime, the chewies will be visiting this week (yay!), mario kart was just released for wii, and the weather is beautiful! we've been riding bikes and enjoying eating dinner out on the patio :) soon though, the weather will get HOT HOT HOT and all activity will occur in the air conditioned house, car, movie theater, work, gym, or anywhere out of the sun!

in the meantime, i took a self portrait for one of the message boards i post on, posted here for you :) my mom helped me shop for clothes while she was here - who knew i could wear capri pants?? not me!

linkage :)

so a few cool things.

1. nate and i have started taking our own grocery bags to the store. they're hard to remember, but it does make me feel better about all that plastic! but a really cool company has popped up that sells super stylish bags :) they're really cute! take a look - www.gracen.com.

2. if you're into photoshop... and you know what actions are, phaunt is giving away 30 of her fantastic actions this week! for those of you who aren't familiar with actions, they're like macros in excel, but for photoshop! or if that doesn't make any sense, it's a preset bunch of steps you can use to 'post-process' a photo. for example, make it black & white, brighten it up, put a frame on it, etc. they're super handy!

my mom's back home! :(

my mom headed home yesterday morning -- we had a great visit :) we spent time at the beach, rode bikes, at copious amounts of italian food, and relaxed! i should have take more pictures, but here's one of the three of us (i cut off nate's head!) i'll post the rest on smugmug soon!

canada and sushi (among other things)

we had a great time with laura and drew :) we tried to eat lunch at canada in epcot in honor of drew, but it was all booked up. no worries though, we had a great time eating (and drinking!) our way around the world showcase :)

we also fed them plenty of mexican food, and one night we even made our own sushi at home! i think we did a pretty good job for our first attempt! we were sad to see them go, but we'll be up to visit with them in june :)

a little story involving 4 a.m. and 911

so nate is out of town for like... 24 hours. it always freaks me out when he's gone because i'm just nervous about sleeping in the house alone since i never have to do it anymore. i make cleo sleep ON TOP of the covers (or at least with those big ears sticking out!) so she can hear for me.

so lastnight/this morning i woke up, still dark.. didn't realize why i'd woken up at first but then realized i had heard knocking. or at least i thought i did, so as i'm in the process of deciding if i really heard knocking or not and realizing it's 4 a.m., i see a white light kind of flash across the dining room (at the back of the house), then more knocking on the front door (which by now the dog FINALLY HEARS and starts barking), more white light flashing around the house in various places. then the doorbell, and i'm running around like "holy $&@#&%*!!!" dialing 911 on my cell phone so i can press send if immediately necessary because our land line is having some kind of issue and doesn't work right now. there are little windows on either side of our front door so i kind of peeked out to see who the hell was at the door and i see a cop. whew. so i say "oh thank god" and open the door.

turns out our crazy broken phone dialed 911 (apparently portable phones can do this when there are issues?) and they were responding to the call. so the first thing she asked me was if i dialed 911 and i was thinking... not yet, but i was about to!

the white light was her partner checking the house with a flashlight.

so they came in the house and they were really nice and petted cleo for a few minutes (who is WORTHLESS by the way!) i'm just so glad it was the police at the door...

paris, day one

so i finished editing pics from my first day in paris! (can you imagine how long this would take me if i had been on vacation instead of working and took even MORE pictures???) here are a few of them, but you can check out all of day 1 here. we visited les tuileries garden, the banks of the seine, and notre dame.



my favorite part of the day? i think probably this cool little cafe called la palette. it was full of local parisians having cool coffee shop discussions (or at least... they seemed so in french!), reading literary looking books, all those things you'd expect of a cafe :) i had fun just wandering and looking at storefronts (pastries, cheese, and flowers, oh my!) i also loved all the bookstores- they were everywhere AND there were people in them! we even happened upon the bookstore from "before sunset" which is one of my favorite movies :)


oh and the doors! do you all know about my love of doors? :) well, i have one and the doors in paris are so colorful! i loved it.

what's going on here? apparently mickey gets really dressed up in france!

the ivey B&B

guess who's coming to visit this weekend? laura & drew! we're so excited :) we wrote out a list of things we'd like to show them -- they're always such wonderful nashville hosts and we're really looking forward to having them here :)
after that, my mom will be here!! she hasn't been here since we made all the changes to the house so i'm really excited to show her all that and hopefully we'll get to the beach.
then we have a while without visitors, but in the end of may, my dad, anita, ryan and austin will all be here for a week :) they've never been here so i'm really excited about that too! cassie is hoping to make it down for some part of that week too.

we've been enjoying the FL weather and having a good time :) not looking forward to that summer heat though!!!

bookworm!

i can't stop reading the janet evanovich series about stephanie plum (if you haven't heard of them, you've probably seen them -- one for the money, two for the dough, three to get deadly... etc.)

i'm on book 11 - she'll be releasing book 14 in june! i think nate's going to kill me for not paying any attention to him whatsoever when i'm reading ;) although, he's quite persistent. he's found if he repeats something enough times, eventually i hear him. the other day he repeated that fact 7 or 8 times until i eventually looked up:

"if i say something often enough," he said "eventually, you hear me!"

"is that all you had to tell me?"

"yes."

maybe i'll kill him first ;)

earth hour

today, from 8-9 pm local time turn off all your lights in honor of earth hour. read more here.

easter dinner for fourteen

we had lots of members of nate's family over for dinner on easter- it was fun :) i wouldn't have thought we could seat 14 in the house, but between the house and the patio, it worked out perfectly! we had all kinds of traditional easter favorites and granny even brought some of her homemade candy! i had lots of help with cooking which was needed and appreciated! but i did dress up for the occasion:


nina said my oufit reminded her of this picture!

my new buddy will be in the mail soon!

you can schedule him. to vacuum. how cool is that? i think he'll need a name... sweepy mcsweeperson? hmmm....

Flash Cards by Rita Dove

In math I was the whiz kid, keeper
of oranges and apples. What you don’t understand,
master, my father said; the faster
I answered, the faster they came.

I could see one bud on the teacher’s geranium,
one clear bee sputtering at the wet pane.
The tulip tree always dragged after heavy rain
so I tucked my head as my boots slapped home.

My father put up his feet after work
and relaxed with a highball and The Life of Lincoln.
After supper we drilled and I climbed the dark

before sleep, before a thin voice hissed
numbers as I spun on a wheel. I had to guess.
Ten, I kept saying, I’m only ten.