My AMAZING 25th Birthday!!!! =) 9:36 PM

Just like any other birthday, I made sure to celebrate it multiple times! Happy 25th to me!

The weekend of my birthday, I had a classmate happy hour at the Burrito Bar in Brooklyn, went to dinner with a group of friends in the city to a pizza place with GF pizza, Karen Nelli came to visit, we painted pottery at the "Painted Pot" in Brooklyn, and Matt and I went out to dinner and to the Harry Potter exhibit in Times Square! Check out some pictures here!

I also got some great gifts, including the new Justin Bieber CD from Karen (YES! haha), some awesome Vera Bradley stuff from my family, some fun things from Kim (including Peeps), and a UKULELE from Matt!!!!! Sooo fun! =)

Of course the greatest gift is having friends nearby to celebrate. A great group of friends joined me for my "Amazing Birthday Race" that many of you contributed to as well! Basically the race is a photo scavenger hunt throughout NYC with clues all about the birthday girl! They learned about me via questionnaires that friends and family filled out. It was such a blast! Even in the pouring rain!!!! Here I've shared some pictures from each team! Oh, and for the teams that didn't have me, they got a picture of me on a stick that HAD to be in their pictures! =)

The detour...I wasn't allowed to know about it. Even from my team. Each team had to make me a birthday card with things they had collected along the race. Some VERY creative cards came out of that! They presented them to me at the end of the race, which ended at Chipotle! =)

Also, just like the show, there was a roadblock and a detour. The roadblock, unfortunately, was about my least favorite word in the English language. The "M" word. Any picture we got with our team and something "M" we got 2 points. =)

Take a picture with a Glee CD/DVD, "M" word (rain!), and 25th street (because I'm 25)


Take a picture in the Disney Store with all the princesses, in Little MissMatched looking dizzy, and with a margarita!

Take a picture with a subway musician, get 3 people to do a kickline with you, with a Glee CD/DVD, with "Balto" a dog statue in Central Park (because of Rocket and Finn)

Take a picture of 10 strangers holding hands in front of the LOVE statue in midtown, in Little MissMatched looking dizzy, with someone wearing Sox or Bears gear, and a softball uniform.

My team won by 4 points! We got t-shirts and medals! Woot woot!!!!!



Overall, it was a FANTASTIC birthday! Thank you all for the wonderful birthday wishes and I hope this post finds you well! =)

The Most Magical Place on Earth! =) 6:41 PM

Well, if you've been on any sorts of social networking sites or have heard from us in the last month or so, it's clear that we were headed to Disney World!!!!! It was a BLAST! It went by SUPER fast, we were CRAZY exhausted, and LOVED our time there!!!

Now it's back to the grind...Matt's back at work and I started my final clinical affiliation today! 10. more. weeks. =)

Since I could probably go through a painfully detailed description of our trip, I decided I'll throw a few highlights in here, and provide you with links to the LOTS of pictures I took! =)

Highlights

- Our resort was great. We spent little time there, but it was nice. We had a newly renovated room and the resort was New Orleans themed.
- The weather! Not a drop of rain, limited clouds, and mid-80s allllll week!
- The DEAL! My friend Ashley from high school hooked us UP!
- Being able to hang out with Ashley for the first time in a long time!
- Going to all 4 parks.
- Park Hopper passes - they are awesome. We definitely maximized our stay.
- Celebrating our anniversary! Got some free goodies and a lot of "happy anniversary's!" since I wore the button they gave us.
- The food. Delicious! Matt's pick: Flying Fish Cafe, Karen's Pick: Citricos
- How awesome Disney was about accommodating my food allergies. I did not get sick ONCE because of their care and effort!
- Fast passes. We worked the system and rode as much as we could every day, thanks to the fast pass! (sometimes we even rode things twice!)
- Hanging out with my husband in the most magical place on earth!
- Meeting Minnie and Mickey!
- Goofy and Matt playing rock/paper/scissors over me! Matt won! Phew!
- Chip and Dale re-inacting our wedding ceremony.
- Toy Story Midway Mania at Hollywood Studios.
- The new Pirates of the Carribbean with Jack Sparrow. Good improvement to the ride!
- How bad our jungle cruise tour guide was - it was kind of entertaining. lol.
- The safari at Animal Kingdom...the animals were active and ready to safari! Especially a rhino right next to our vehicle.
- The Everest ride at Animal Kingdom! We rode that sucker twice! It was awesome! and had a yeti!
- Magic Kingdom. Need I say more?
- Electrical Parade...and the other parades...they were all fun.
- Goofy, Pluto, and Stitch having a dance party in Tomorrowland dancing to Black Eyed Peas and Justin Beiber.
- Epcot - had a lot of characters to meet, and delicious food to eat!
- Riding Splash Mountain - being in the front row and getting SOAKED, when we really didn't want to get wet. haha.
- The GF brownies.
- The Margaritas in Mexico in Epcot.
- Peter Pan!
- Finding my family's brick in front of Magic Kingdom
- Capturing the Beast and Belle kissing on camera.

OK I could go on for a long time... Here's just a few of the many highlights from our trip. Enjoy these and the pictures! If you want to see more, check out my facebook album, and/or my picasa album.

Enjoy, and we hope all is well with all of you! =)

Hello 2011! 9:27 PM

2011.

Can you believe it? Another year!

We had a great Christmas here in NYC. Although I had to work, we made the best of it. We woke up and Matt made us eggs and bacon! Then we opened our stocking gifts, and he drove me to work! Holidays are awesome in the city, you can drive with no traffic! I went to work, and Matt and our neighbor Katina picked me up, and we headed near Union Square to eat some delicious Tapas! After dinner we headed home, Matt and I opened gifts, then Katina came over for some homemade brownies afterwards! My favorite gift from Matt was my new barefoot running shoes, among a bunch of other fun things! Matt's favorite gift from me was a blazer. It was a great Christmas, though we missed our families!

We made a pseudo last minute decision to head home to Chicago over New Years to celebrate Christmas with my family. We missed Matt's family but were glad to at least have seen his parents over Thanksgiving.

We arrived Thursday night and left Sunday evening, for a family filled, holiday filled weekend, where I also had the opportunity to see some friends, too! Not to mention that Sunday was our 2nd Anniversary! Happy Anniversary to us! Time sure does fly. We didn't do anything special other than get some delicious dessert from Wildfire! We are going to go on an anniversary trip in February though... =)



'Christmas' was fun! My family tried to reenact Christmas day. It was great. We opened gifts and I got lots of great things! =) Matt also enjoyed his loot, especially his nerf guns! We also went to see the Hart's new house! It's HUGE and they're really making it look great! It was so nice to see them. We miss having them live so close. Our cousins came up for "cousin family Christmas" and we celebrated New Years and yet another Christmas with them!

(my aunt MADE the girls an Alice and a Cinderella dress! Boy did they LOVE them.)

I also had the chance to hang out with some friends who I miss dearly! I even got to see my friend John who has been serving in the Peace Corps for around a year and a half now. He's been in Tonga, and I follow his blog quite closely! He was home for a little while and he brought a present! He gave me a bag of kava root, and a cup made of a coconut! He told me kava was mixed with water and filtered and people in Tonga have a ritual and sit around and drink it with others often. He told me a few things; it'll make you sleepy, your mouth will tingle, it'll look like mud, and it tastes bad. Awesome. haha. I brought it back to NYC expecting all of my neighbors to join in and try it with me. Only one was brave enough...Sameer. We drank it and our mouth did get numb! It did look like mud and it didn't taste tooo bad. =) Thanks John for the experience!




Nothing else is new. Matt and I are just working away! Clinic is going well, but I still find it hard to get used to working...especially in midtown, NYC. haha.

I hope all is well with you and yours and that you enjoy this post. Maybe one of my new years resolutions should be to blog more? We'll see. =)

The coolest advent calendar EVER. 9:09 PM

Well, I dropped the ball again.... here we are in the middle of January! My how time flies!

At the end of November, we received a package from the Harts that turned out to be quite the surprise! Since we wouldn't be home for Christmas this year, they came up with the creative and fun idea that they would send a homemade advent calendar....which I will NEVER forget!

Here are some highlights! We got a bunch of homemade crafts and things including snowflakes, a string of ribbon we ended up using to hang up our Christmas cards on, and poems and drawings written by Zoe. We also got some snacks, like dark chocolate covered almonds, crackers, and hot cocoa! We also got some piano books and things too. Such a thoughtful gift that Matt and I looked forward to opening everyday from Dec 1 - Dec 25.

Thank you guys for such a thoughtful and great gift. It was really great to have being away from everyone for the holidays!!! I'm hoping to blog about the rest of the holidays soon......