MacKenzie photos

Watching Dad rip up Grammy's deck is hard work.

MacKenzie loves to navigate.

MacKenzie only got a few toys out...

A day to appreciate

Today would have been my brother Brian's 37th birthday. He passed away in June 2011, but I still thought of him today. He wasn't big on birthdays from what I remember and that's OK. I looked at his Facebook page a few times today and clicked through his photos. I just let myself be sad and miss him. I hope all of us who loved him took the time today to remember him.

I also was reminded today how much we take for granted. I've been a bit guilty of whining that right now with trying to sell the house (the most annoying thing I've experienced, I swear) and finding Jackson a job is the worst time of my life. Honestly, it has been more stressful than I wish I let it be. Just when I got really down on myself I got the sad news that a family friend was diagnosed with cancer today. We'll certainly be praying for and thinking of that family. The news hit me hard because here I was feeling bad for myself about pretty petty things when someone else got actual tough news today. I decided to take a step back and just appreciate what is going well.

NO NEWS

WE HAVE NO NEWS. NONE. NOT A SINGLE PIECE OF NEWS.

I've been getting a lot of questions on how things are going for us in the quest to sell the house and find Jackson a new gig. The answer is SLOW. We've negotiated two offers on the house that ended just too low. We're still on the market. Sigh. Jackson has had a lot of interviews it feels like but nothing is moving quickly. Since we do not know where we are headed the house selling has not been a huge deal yet.

I'm trying not to stress and to rely on God's plan. This is not easy for a planner like me. I think to make up for this I have started to schedule nearly everything else in my life. I'm seriously using my calendar more than ever. It is kind of scary.

We started a new Bible study this week at our new church. We have homework! I was shocked. I kind of like it, though. I hope we get some good tools to continue building our lives together. The most news we have to share right now is how much we're loving our new church home. It is seriously a great place for us and we could not be more excited to have found it. Yep, that was me finding a bright side.

PB & Pilates

Recently I've been going to reformer pilates (a photo of what I try to do is above) classes with some regularity. I love it. 

I also attend Pure Barre classes with my friend Amber. The other night at PB they had date night. We brought our husbands and laughed at them trying to do barre work. It was really fun. We grabbed Mexican food after class as a reward. We really enjoyed meeting Amber's husband who hails from Costa Rica and proved to be a very interesting person with whom to dine.

I've really enjoyed changing up my workouts. I've still been working with a trainer and trying to run. Jackson is having a ton of luck losing weight. I'm not. I'm going to a doctor to see if there is something else going on with my body that is blocking me from losing like I deserve to, darn it!

If anyone wants gift ideas for me just remember PB and Reforming Indy because I'm obsessed with both! :)

BMW Championship

We were fortunate enough to borrow Susie and her neighbor Bob's volunteer passes to the BMW Championship at Crooked Stick in Carmel. This means that we went for FREE and got perks. This is the second time we have been spoiled at a PGA tour event. I think it may the first strike of luck we've had in ages.

We got a TON of rain last night and the course was a bit of a muddy mess this morning when we headed out. The sun was not out and it was down right chilly. We planted ourselves at the driving range to watch the players warmup and hoped to warmup ourselves!

We were right along the fence because we had gotten there kind of early. We had a great view of all the different golfers coming out to practice.

Sergio Garcia is the guy in the purple

Phil Mickleson is the white shirt with blue cap.

Ricky Fowler is in the purple pants and shirt. Yes, he honestly wore that.

Ian Poulter (a favorite of the Petefish family) is in the gray plaid pants. We think he was Ricky Fowler's inspiration as shown above.

Bill Haas- he quickly became one of our favorite players because he was so friendly

Vijay Singh (the current leader) and his personal trainer- that little spark plug of a man in the black shorts

Bill Haas again. I told you we loved him.

TIGER WOODS (in the pink shirt with gray vest)

T-I-G-E-R W-O-O-D-S

 I gambled and took quite a few photos of Tiger warming up. His security team (note: NO OTHER GOLFER HAD A SECURITY TEAM PRESENT) kept coming around and yelling at people for taking photos. If you get caught twice, you're out! Since we were on borrowed volunteer passes, we did not want to get in trouble. I was able to pull myself together and put away my camera before Tiger's posse admonished me. I will say that while he seemed friendly to the other players and smiled at me (honestly, he did. We watched him practice on the putting green, too, and he looked over so I smiled and he smiled AT ME!!! I know it was me because there were no other smilers around me- just older dudes and Jackson who hates Tiger.) his security team made him seem like a real jerk. I was sad. They even yelled at a deaf man who had to be signed to so that he knew that he couldn't take photos. It was terribly mean!

The afternoon brought sunny skies and beautiful golf weather. The course looked really pretty from our spot on the 8th hole.

I skipped ahead with the photo above, I guess. After we watched the players practice before their rounds and hit the volunteer tent up for snacks (we had no shame in pretending to be Susie and Bob the volunteers- LOL), we parked ourselves on the 8th hole because there were not many people on that hole yet. We watched all of the groups come through and had a great view of their play for that entire hole. It was a really fun day. We're kind of hoping Phil Mickleson wins this thing because he was nicer than Tiger.

Missing?

 Is there something LARGE missing in this photo?

I came home from the gym last night and found the garage door in our YARD!

Jackson was not impressed.

We have no idea why the garage door acted up. We do know that Jackson will never touch it again. He tried to "fix" the door when it wouldn't close and it fell on him. Yep. That was AFTER I'd said, "call a repairman," so he got right at no sympathy. $150, a lot of noise and a few "I told you so" comments and we're back to whole.

I wanted to throw in a photo of MacKenzie looking adorable for good measure. :)

Gone coastal

The B&B's mascot: Pippen. I loved Pipps. We had a nice breakfast with some German tourists and then headed out to drive down the coast.

We stopped in Portsmouth, NH at a Starbucks to wait out the rain. It didn't work and the rain kept going. My white chocolate mocha was still pretty great, though. We then continued down the coast to find a post office to mail back the jams we packaged. Across the street from the post office we found was this awesome looking home. Doesn't it look like something out of a history book? We loved it!

We took our time and stopped off at a lot of the beach entrances along our route.  

 Even though it was a rainy and kind of chilly day the beaches were still pretty.

Jackson could not resist climbing on the wet rocks.

And then he almost fell. Yep. "I told you not to climb on those!"

 There were even some people crazy enough to go surfing. You cannot tell from this photo but there was certainly some surfing to be done. The ocean was angry! We also drove through Exeter, NH home of Phillips Exeter Academy. It is one of the top 5 boarding schools in the nation. Mark Zuckerberg aka Mr. Facebook went there. It was the most gorgeous campus. I didn't get any photos, but it was amazing. I was pretty jealous of the students there.

When we finally go to Manchester, NH where our flight would eventually depart from and found ourselves with a few hours to spare. After finding Jackson a place to pee, ("Do NOT speak to me until I've urinated" was actually said) we explored downtown Manchester. It was nothing to write home about. We did find, however, one of the best restaurants ever. It is called "Baked Downtown Cafe & Bakery" and it was amazing. Amazing.

I had a "gobbler" which was a panini with shaved turkey breast, STUFFING and a side of gravy. I also had broccoli cheddar soup. It was the best sandwich ever. It was Thanksgiving on bread. Amazing.

Jackson even got dessert. Sure, I helped him eat this peanut butter cupcake. It was too good to be enjoyed by only one person.

 One of my favorite blogs was turned into a book so we stopped on the way to the airport and picked it up. I'm glad we did because our flights ended up being delayed by weather and I had plenty of time to read.

How we spent to majority of the evening. Waiting.

Delayed flights are seriously the worst. It makes me hate traveling. I know. That's shocking. We didn't get to bed until after 3 a.m. and I was supposed to work in the morning. I ended up going in to work after lunch because we are too busy there for me to miss a whole day and I need the job so they did not want to see me with less than 3 hours of sleep. ;)

All in all it was a fun vacation. I'm excited that Vermont is now checked off my list of places to visit and that we're down to 2 more Ivy League schools to visit. We'll have to come up with new goals soon! EEK!