So.....

Apparently my idea of "I'll post a pic tomorrow" is a little skewed. Ah well, better late than never!

This weekend was great! Jim finally had the whole weekend off which was a nice bonus. So come Saturday we decided it was time to do something fun and different. Anyone remember the geocaching that enveloped our time in the summer? (See: Our New Hobby...) Well, we decided to dust off the 'ol GPS and head on out. The weather was cold, but not unbearable. We headed about 30 minutes outside of town to pretty much the middle of nowhere! Nothing but fields and well cemeteries! We found 5 geocaches that were located in cemeteries. Those are some of my favorites, just because they are usually relatively easy to find, you don't really have to be too stealthy and on the lookout for people looking at you funny, and I enjoy looking at all the historic markers (most of which were from the 1800's!). Here are a few snapshots from the day:


It was definitely a fun trip and made us realize how much we miss the hobby and look forward to sneaking out again soon when the weather allows! We are looking forward to strapping Baby C into a carrier and taking her out on our many adventures as well.

Speaking of Baby C. She decided to give mama a little scare Saturday. All of my own doing of course. Being that I was so active Saturday hiking around and pretty much constantly on the move, she must of been asleep most of the day because movement was pretty sparse. By the time we got home I immediately went to lay down on couch and eat an ice cream bar to see if I could spark some movement. Got a few kicks here and there, but not enough to ease my worry. Decided to head upstairs and use our home doppler. Found her hearbeat pretty quick as usual and that made me feel better.

Well, lo and behold, since little one was asleep all day, she decided to rock and roll all night long! She didn't keep me awake, but every time I did wake up in the middle of the night to roll over or something, she would just be kicking away. I love every minute of it. She can kick me all she wants :)

So I leave you with a better picture of my new 'do (wearing my cute little bow headband of course) and a few more belly pics (including an elusive bare belly shot!!)

Busy Month: A Visual Guide

So instead of typing out everything that has gone on since the last time i've updated, I thought just a brief visual tour would do the trick!! So here we go..

For our "dating" anniversary we picked up a new game:
It pretty much just monitors your steps for each day. We each have a goal of 6,000 steps which is approximately 3 miles. Over one month later, we have reached our goal every day except for one! It has definitely kept us motivated to stay active. I highly recommend it!
So yes, I have been getting into running more! It is a great workout and fun to get outside and clear your mind during a nice run. I run about 3-5 miles every other day or so (been slacking the last week though).

To help me out on my longer runs, I got this nifty hydration belt. It holds two 10 oz containers of water and has a pouch just big enough to fit my key and cell phone. It straps around my waist and surprisingly isn't bothersome at all. I really have enjoyed having water readily available when I need it and not having to run without my cell phone on me.

July 11th we headed to a graduation party for my church sponsor son.

Down to Hamtramack for some awesome polish food to celebrate my grandma's birthday.

Mmmm.....Dill pickle soup, my favorite!

We headed off to the family cottage the following weekend. The weather was actually quite cold and the bugs were just insane. So we shacked up and watched "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." Interesting movie....it was nice to have a little getaway, even though we were doing the same thing we would probably do at home!

Since the cottage was so buggy, we left early on Sunday and decide to go to the zoo! We hadn't been there in years. I will post pictures as soon as I load them onto the computer!

We decide we would try to do a ton of geocaching for a week. We made it out for two evenings and found 20 or so. Not too bad :)

I met my MIL for lunch one afternoon. We had some great sandwiches and then headed over to the local gourmet grocery store and had some wine samples. You can actually drink wine while you shop....I totally want to go back!

We headed over to a cute local bar for a friend's birthday Friday, July 24th. It was busy and loud, but we had a good time.

Another day of geocaching, however, this time we turned into a road trip. We hit Grand Ledge which was a cool place for the geocaches, then proceeded to Grand Rapids for the bet hot dogs EVER!!

Yesterdog. Seriously. Best. Hotdog. Ever.

MIL birthday was that weekend, so we went over to celebrate on Sunday. Had a wonderful dinner and for dessert and amazing torte.....we got to take home the leftovers too. I'm sure it all went straight to my thighs.

Back to the cottage! This time the weather was great. We did some tubing. No that is not a picture of anyone in particular up there, just something I pulled off the web, lol. We all attempted to stand on the tube whilst moving. It was really hard. My legs were killing me for the next two days. We had a lot of fun and ate a LOT of food. A few favorites....

Grilled Chicken

Avacodoes!

Here we are to today! I spent most of the day trying to work on our landscaping. I was doing a lot of shoveling and moving around of dirt. I am basically trying to reconfigure the whole orientation of the existing landscaping in our front yard. I am still dirty and frankly I'm pooped.

August 22nd, Jim and I are running an 8K (5 mile) race. I really need to get back into my running routine. It's hard when we have been working on the house so much. I don't really have time for both it seems!

We finally picked up curtains and other random things for the house. Hopefully we will whip it into shape before the winter hits. I hope to have the front yard landscaping done and have this house decorated more by then. We plan on painting two of the bathrooms and our "activity room" as we like to call it is turning disney themed room since we have so much disney stuff! It'll be a fun, even though I hate painting.....

Memorial Day Weekend

I just loooovvvveee 3 day weekends. And this weekend was no exception. We really had an awesome time the whole weekend. Friday we hit up St. Mary's of Orchard Lake Polish festival. It's just a glorified high school carnival with really good Polish food! We each got a polish combo platter. It consisted of 3 pierogi, stuffed cabbage roll, polish sausage and sauer kraut. The pierogi are deep fried making them super delicous. We then walked through the carnival and of course had to get an elephant ear with cinnamon and sugar. Yum!

Saturday we got up super early. It was going to be a busy day! I proceeded to get up and bake an amazing loaf of bread. I will post the recipe after this. It was really easy and really really good. Much better than the first bread! I then set up a corned beef in the crock pot to have for dinner. That is one of our favorites, and the crock pot makes it so easy!

We then were interviewed for a Geocaching podcast: Cache-A-Maniacs. We met up with Darryl and Drie while were leaving a geocache in Troy. They contacted us a day or so later asking if we wanted to do an interview for their podcast. We thought it would be fun! They called us up Saturday morning and asked us a handful of geocaching questions. Why not :)

We then loaded up our geo-gear and headed out for the day. Their was a whole series of geocaches scattered around the cities of Troy, Sterling Heights and Warren. They had just been placed early in the week so we were like the third or fourth to find a lot of them. We ran into other geocachers that were out and about and we just had a great time. We found 28 of them which is the most we have found in one trip. Here is the map of the area of the caches. The ones we found are smiley faces. There are still a TON in the area!

Here we are at the final cache. We had to get several codes from the preceding caches to figure out the coordinates for this one. It was known as a "puzzle" cache. We are such dorks!! hehe



There were tons of bugs, so hence the hooded shirts, haha. I'm sure we didn't looked suspicious crawling out the forest in hooded sweatshirts and sunglasses!

Sunday we headed out to the family cottage. We of course had to stop for another geocache. But this one was special. We found our 100th cache!


Yep, we've now got 101 geocaches under our belt. Still a drop in the bucket compared to the seasoned cachers (they have thousands!). But we are working on it!

We spent a lazy afternoon at the cottage enjoying the sunny day, building a campfire and making s'mores. Later in the evening we took a pontoon ride. Monday rolled around and we spent the afternoon again on the boat with Jim's family. Overall, it was a practically perfect weekend!

Frankenmuth!

We took a great trip to Frankemuth about a week and a half ago. It was the World Expo of Beer. We headed up early on Saturday morning and did some geocaching. We got all of the Geocaches we were comfortable with (we do not like going to find them on private property like in someone's backyard!) in the Birch Run area and stopped at Tony's for a huge sandwich (we split). For those who don't know about Tony's....basically their portions are ridiculous. A BLT contains 1 full pound of bacon. A banana split consists of a whole half gallon of ice cream. Seriously! Check it out!

The beer fest was fun as expected. Tons of people watching and lots of good beer. My favorite was a Kuhnhenn Creme Brulee Java Stout. Tasted like a coffee drink kind of. It was very tasty. I was wasted by 5:00 (it started at 3:00). We headed back to the room and had dinner. Then popped our heads back into the festival and decided we had had enough. The place was packed and we were out of tickets anyways.

Sunday morning, we hit up the local catholic church for mass. We then walked around town and of course had to stop at the Cheese Haus for some cheese! We got some awesome Jalapeno Cheddar cheese spread. This stuff was great. The Horseradish cheese spread was also very good, but we passed on that one. We walked through town and found most of the Frakenmuth area geocaches as well. This one was from the Veteran's Memorial right in town. We had never knew this even existed until the geocache!

After a nice morning stroll through the town, it was time for the famous Frankemuth chicken dinner. OH MI GOSH....Best.....chicken....ever. We slipped into a food coma soon after and headed home and vegged out the rest of the day. It was a great weekend!

The Weekend

I decided to keep the exercise posts separated just for the heck of it. So here is everything else from the weekend...

We starting painting our kitchen last week. We are having family over next Saturday for dinner before we head to church for my confirmation. I will be officially Catholic next Saturday night. It's been an interesting journey and a huge learning experience of little religious factoids. It sounds like it is going to be quite an event at the Saturday vigil. I am pretty excited! ANYWAYS....so we have to finish the kitchen by then of course.

So this Saturday was a beautiful day....there was no way we were going to stay indoors and paint!!! Instead, we went out for a day of Geocaching again. We headed to Seven Lakes State Park in Holly. We found every single geocache in the park. It was a beautiful park with great winding, hilly, hiking trails. We spent about 4 or 5 hours there. We then hit up one more geocache on our way home. So we got a total of 9 out of 9! It was defnitely a sucessful trip! So being that we galavanted all day Saturday, Sunday was the day to paint. So we kicked butt and got all the primer done and a full coat of color. I started round 2 of the color but stopped at around 8:30 or so. So today we have a church thing to go to and then we will come back home and paint the rest of it hopefully! I can't wait to have the kitchen back!!! I will post before and after pics when it's offically done.

Our Saturday advenutre

We had quite a day on Saturday! We decided we wanted to spend the day Geocaching. Orginally we had planned to head to an event that was being held on Belle Isle, however, we had some GPS malfunctions and some other issues that we were a bit overwhelmed and decided we would rather just go off on our own and "practice" more.

So following the advice from a seasoned geocacher, we headed towards Lansing to Sleepy Hollow State Park. He had told us that it is best not to find all the ones that are closest to us, since as time goes by, we will probably get lazy and not want to venture out as far to find them.

So we got to the park around 11:00 am. We gathered our things and started out into the trails. No more than 5 minutes and both of us stepped in a soggy puddle and got our feet wet, lol. And of course we didn't pack extra socks! We continued on to the first one which was rated as rather difficult, but figured, hey why not. We looked and looked....nothing. I decided we should head back to the car real quick and dry off our feet. Luckily Jim had some work clothes in the car which included socks. So we changed and head back out. Number 2, nothing. Number 3, nothing! They were all hidden by the same guy, so we were getting rather annoyed with him. But we were still having an awesome time trekking through all the trails! Finally we got to one by a different guy and we foud it! It felt nice to find at least one of them.

By the end of the day we had tied....found 4, didn't find 4. We left the park around 4:00 pm. What a great day! We can't wait to go out and do it again!

Here is where we were:
(Smileys are the ones we found....the one in the middle of the lake and the one to the far right of the group of 3 in a row we didn't look for.)

A day of Geocaching!

We went out and about today geocaching. It was a beautiful day and we really had a lot of fun. People are very clever on where they hide things and what the name them. This is really an interesting and entertaining hobby, and even better, it is practically free! We use our phones built in GPS to do the searching, so we didn't have to buy a GPS unit. We may in the future since it will probably work better and won't drain the phone batteries, but for now since we are still new at this, the phones are working fine. We found 8 of them today. Took us a few hours to find them all, and a few that we stopped and looked for we couldn't find. Always a little disappointing, but just move on to the next one, we figure we can always try them again later. This is going to be a fun summer! Here are today's highlights:

Our New Hobby: Geocaching

So Jim decided to find a new hobby, and little did he know that I would want to participate in it as well. We went on our first "mission" yesterday. Geocaching is like a scavenger hunt. People hide objects in random places. They usually just consist of a log book to sign and maybe some little trinkets or something else fun to look at. There are other types and in goes more in depth, but that's the basics. You use a GPS navigator (we use a program on the iPhone) to find them via there coordinates. There are over 700,000 of these things all over the place. You can find out more info at the website here.

So there are quite a few located near our house. I mean, even in the parking lot of the mall! We looked for about 6 of them, but only found 2. We really weren't sure what we were looking for. So we did some more research and once the weather gets nice again, we will have to go check for them again. Here are the finds from yesterday....yes I am dressed as a fairy, that is what was inside the cache!


Here was find #1, rightfully called "The Fairy Cache"


Find #2 we almost thought was on someone's private property....I must admit, I thought I was gonna get shot (just kiddin')!

We were out in Troy today meeting with a financial adviser and Jim noticed there was a geocache located right behind the building we were in. Lo and behold after a few minutes of searching (in the rain), we found another one. It was tiny! He is holding part of it in his left hand. A tiny log book to sign was rolled up inside (that's what is in his right hand).



I am already addicted and ready to hit the road to find more! This will definitely get us out more this summer!