Meeting Blake!

A few weeks earlier, a family of three!



And then a family of 4 ... meet Blake!



Sharon and I spent the weekend in Richmond, meeting Blake and trying to be helpful around the house while Kiera and Ryan deal with a newborn and a 4 year old (yikes!). So, that meant lots of fun time with new big sister, Natalie...



Natalie had her first dance recital coming up, so she was more than happy to model her costume for us. I love what a little ham she is :)



We officially have the cutest niece and nephew on the planet :) Welcome to the world Blake!

Cali trippin'

I really loved living out in California but after grad school ended, it was right back to the East Coast to be closer to family. So, I love every excuse to get back out to Cali whenever I can.

Fortunately, Brad and I had a couple of great excuses - I had to go moderate a panel at a conference in San Francisco, then my 5 year b-school reunion and then we had a buddy's wedding. Needless to say, it was a crazy - but awesome - weekend.

First, San Fran ... The conference was great, met a lot of really inspiring people and loved being at a conference that I had no responsibility for ... if things went wrong, I didn't know about them and didn't have to troubleshoot - SO nice! Brad came in a day after me and got to be a tourist for a bit while I was busy at the conference.




Then it was off to Palo Alto for my 5 year GSB reunion. It was amazing to catch up with friends and hear what everyone is up to these days. One of my favorite parts of the weekend was a panel where a group of classmates talked about their entrepreneurial ventures, their successes and mistakes and everything in between. It just reminded me of what an amazing community we had at Stanford - really supportive of each other, a safe environment where talking about mistakes is easy to do and just some amazing people doing amazing things. Very cool.




The Class of 2005!


Then to cap off the weekend, we headed down to LA for Liz's wedding! We were really glad we were able to be there to help her celebrate (and see the cutest flower girls and ring bearer ever!).


A great, whirlwind weekend on the Left Coast! Can't wait to get back there again!

Uncle Tom comes to visit

After our fun reunion weekend, we had the pleasure of hosting Brad's Uncle Tom for the weekend. Besides our graduation from Duke, this was the only time that Uncle Tom had been to North Carolina so we wanted to show him around as much as possible.

We spent a lot of the weekend eating :) I used the excuse of having Uncle Tom in town to try out some new restaurants which were all very tasty - Acme in Carrboro, Guglhupf in Durham, Ruth's Chris and a very tasty meal at home one night!

We also spent a day in Raleigh - touring the city, going to the State Farmer's Market, shopping at an import/export store, an estate sale and a random stop at a concrete statue store (who knew that they made so many different concrete statues!) And then another day in Durham seeing the sites. One of our favorite stops (and pretty much the only place we remembered to bring the camera!) was at the Duke gardens. The flowers were in full bloom and it really gorgeous.




It was a great weekend and we loved having Uncle Tom here. Hope that we can convince him to come back again sometime soon!

10 years?!

Can you believe it's been 10 years since Brad and I graduated from college? Time seriously flies by ... we certainly don't feel like we are 10 years post-college. I guess that's a good thing. I'm pretty sure we don't act like we're 10 years out of college either - I think that's a great thing! :)

Anyway, our 10 year Duke reunion was a few weeks ago and we were lucky enough to host Ginny, Geoff, Erika and Shazia at our place for the weekend. It was nice to get a lot of quality time with them throughout the weekend but of course we also participated in some of the reunion events. Here we are at the Friday night "Class of 2000" party - of course, Beirut tables were set up and we certainly weren't going to resist the urge to play!




And what would a trip down memory lane be without burritos at Cosmic Cantina!


Saturday night was the "Gala" for all the classes - a pretty fun event with drinks and a live band, all hosted under a tent outside (fanciest tent I have ever seen - complete with dance floor, chandeliers and fancy port-a-potties!)



It was a great weekend and made us really thankful that we had the opportunity to go to Duke - obviously, we feel pretty fortunate that we met each other there, but also that we made such amazing, lifelong friends! Love you guys!

Our Wild Backyard

Last year I posted a similar post about all the cool things we can photograph in our own backyard. You don't have to look far to find fun stuff to shoot.

Vegetable & Herb Garden

So Erin and I are trying out our green thumb and attempting to grow herbs and vegetables. Hopefully in 2-3 months we will have some results to show but we have actually already harvested oregano from the herb garden. In terms of herbs we have rosemary, oregano, cilantro, dill, basil, and parsley. For vegetables we have green, yellow and red peppers, eggplant, zuchini squash, okra, cayenne pepper, and cubanelle peppers. We have a test going on now between the in ground garden close to the house which gets less sunlight and the moveable wagon which maximizes the sunlight to those vegetables. I think the difference between yield in two sets will be large.