Beeeeach!

We had a grand old time this past week(I started this on 5/12) with our ultimate vacation roadtrip. First stop was Baltimore, MD to the last Crabfeastimus at the Niehoff residence. The food and company was superb. We had a great time with all our friendlies. We slept over and the next morning Ruby took her first steps (May 5) in Kate's room. Luce and I saw it but poor Daddy missed it. She was so proud of herself.

Then we hopped in the car and drove 5 hours to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. We just had to hit up a BBQ place so we went to Crooks Corner. It did not disappoint. My pulled pork sammy was off the heezy.

And we stayed here, the Carolina Inn. This place was quite fancy. Trey stayed here when he interviewed at UNC and he sent me all these cool pics of his room and I was totally jealous. When we were making plans for this trip I just so happened to find a deal on Groupon for the same place! Score! I love finding good deals.

Here is our sleeping quarters. Nice right? I'm in love with the beds.

So yeah, it was rainy and we were tired so after dinner we just went to the hotel room and relaxed.
The next day we woke up and hit the road once again to finish the other leg of our road trip. It wasn't quite as long as the first day but it still felt pretty long. :)
When we finally got there we were so happy. We got into our room, dropped off all our stuff, and headed out to the beach. Lucy loved jumping in the waves with Daddy.

 It was pretty windy and Ruby still hadn't made up her mind about the beach yet.

 Lucy admiring the huge waves.

 Lucy's favorite part was the pools. There was an outdoor pool...

 right here.

 And here is the other pool with a cool pirate ship.

 This just shows how close we were to the beach. It was perfect.

 Love me some palm trees.

There was an indoor pool area, which is where Lucy wanted to spend most of her time. There was a lazy river, a "cold pool", and a "hot pool" aka hot tub. She loved strapping on her floaty contraption and going from one pool to the other. She had so much fun and even made a few little friends while swimming.
Our room was sweet! It had a little balcony with a nice view of the ocean and the girls had a separate little room so we could put them to bed, turn on their white noise machine, and close their door and then we could watch a movie in our room/the front room. It really was perfect.

 A nice view of the beach from our balcony.

 And the pools.

 Ahhh! I miss it already.

 This was the 2nd day when Ruby decided she liked the beach. She was crawling all over me and having herself a grand old time.

 She thought it was fun to try on Daddy's glasses.

 Selfies. Us and our awesome beach hair.

 Lucy after she destroyed her awesome sandcastle.

 More daddy daughter time. So sweet.

 Me and Rube hanging out on the beach, snacking on some lil crunchies. Those things are her fave.

 We tried Rube out in the indoor pool and she was not impressed. She held her hands up like Trey is demonstrating the whole time, until I snapped the picture of course. :)

 She preferred land. I sure love that little face.

 This was our last day and the weather was perfect. The girls had fun digging in the sand.

 Playing wif Daddy

 And Lucy got a real nice tan in the shade. :)

 Oh and one of Lucy's favorite things to do at the beach was chase the birds. She never did catch one. She thought it was great fun.

 So our last night we had a bit of a scare. At 3:30am the morning we were going to leave, we hear this pounding on our door. Trey went to go see what was up and there was someone going around to all the rooms letting people know there was a fire an we needed to evacuate. Once we woke up we heard the sirens going off. Apparently they had been going off for like 20 minutes and none of us heard them. I think we had the white noise machine cranked up so loud that we couldn't hear it. So we grabbed the sleeping babes and headed all the way downstairs (we were on the 8th floor) to the parking lot where all the other hotel guests were, along with tons of firetrucks and police. Yikes! Luckily it was just a little fire in one of the utility rooms on the first floor so it wasn't too big of a deal. But if it was a big one, we probably would have been stuck up there and who knows what would have happened. Scary! So that was quite an eventful last night. We woke up a few hours later, packed up our stuff, said one last good bye to the beach and started on the long journey back home.

 12 hours later we made it home, alive and exhausted physically and emotionally. We got stuck in traffic in the DC area and I thought we might not make it. But I'm glad to say we did and we stopped at Café Rio for dinner, which made the whole thing a little more bearable.
We heart Myrtle Beach!!! We'll definitely be visiting there again.

Ruby is ONE!

One. I can't believe it. That was the quickest 12 months EVER. I guess it's been quite an eventful year. My wee babe changed into a big babe so fast. She had her 12 month check up yesterday which was quite unpleasant for poor Rubes. She had 3 immunizations and then they had to draw some blood too. She was covered in bandaids.
Here are her stats:

• Weight: 21 lbs. 3 oz. (71%)
• Height: 31 inches (96%)

She's our tall lady. And she's pretty solid weighing in at 21 lbs. Her eyes are still big and so blue. Everyone says she looks so much like Lucy but I think she has her own look and definitely her own personality. It's been interesting to see how different our two girls as Ruby's is starting to show more and more.

I love this age. She is constantly making me laugh by all the cute and silly things she does. It's like a cuteness overload all the time. She always has a big goofy grin on her face.

Her teeth make me laugh. They are big suckers and are pretty crooked. It makes her smile that much better. It makes me wonder how her permanent teeth will come in.
She is such a pleasant little girl as she's always been. She's more laid back than big sissy and is just happy to be along for the ride. Ruby loooooves her Lucy. It's so fun to watch them interact, especially at bathtime. I love to see how much they love each other. I can't think of anything better as a parent.
She loves to babble. She'll call us "mama" and "dada" and says "hey" and recently she learned "weeee!" Lucy has a bunch of Littlest Pet Shop animals and a little house to put them in and Ruby loves to get into it. Lucy was outside playing with friends so Ruby and I played with a little swing inside the little house. I put one of the animals in it and pushed it and said "weee!" several times and then Ruby joined in and started pushing it and saying "weeeeeee!" Trey and I were dying.

 

Ruby is a walker! She can take about 10 steps in a row and then she falls down. She's still learning the whole balance thing but she gets better at it every day. With the practicing of her new found skill has come a few ouchies. She took a spill down a few of our stairs the other day and has a nice carpet burn above her right eye. We felt so bad. That girl is fast! The first thing we're buying when we get into our new house is gates.

Favorite foods these days are bananas, avocados, quinoa, grapes, apples, meatballs. She's not a picky eater at all, I love it! She'll eat whatever we make for dinner. She's totally over baby food. She still loves the baby cheetos and yogurt melts. We're still attempting the transition to cow's milk. She totally gagged the first time we fed it to her but we've kept giving her sips throughout the day and she's finally warming up to it. She still doesn't love it though. We did find out that she prefers a straw over a sippy cup. Funny huh!

We love her funny laugh, high fives, big kisses she gives all the time, sense of adventure, curiosity, silliness, love of music, dancing, big smiles, chubby thighs, rosy cheeks, friendliness, and her zest for life. Her happiness is contagious. We feel so lucky that we were blessed with such a sweet little person. She brings us so much joy.

Here are some pics from her birthday. We went to Fuddruckers for dinner and then came home and she had some fun with her first cupcake experience. It was fun to have my parents here to celebrate with us.

 A collage of the play-by-play

She was so stoked by the whole experience. Rube got a butterfly shirt, some bath toys, a sippy cup, and a car seat for her birfday gifts. She got a cute little camping chair and some monies from her grandparents.

Happy Birthday Ru Babe aka "Wirby"!

We bought a house!!

I keep pinching myself to make sure this is for real! I can't believe we have a house! Well, almost. :) We should close within the next week or two. We are soooo excited to have our very own house and not share walls anymore. Apartment living has been good to us and definitely has it's perks but we are ready for the challenge of being homeowners. It should be a fun learning experience. So here's the new digs...

We are in love. It's funny because at first I thought it was cute but I had another house that I was still in love with. But as we toured the inside it really grew on me. Plus it had air conditioning (the other house didn't) which was huge for us. We also loved the big yard.

So here's the story of how our trip went and how we ended up finding our perfect house in 2 and a half days. It's kind of a miracle how it all came together for us so quickly.
We left Lucy with our friends the McAllisters and we took the Rubster the help us house hunt. It was a good 5-hour drive which went by surprisingly fast. Ruby was such a good girly. It was nice to be able to sit by her so I could entertain and give her food. We rolled into Cleveland at 12:30pm and met up with our realtor MaryLou. She started taking us around to houses that were on the low end of what our budget was. I should have taken pictures of how bad they were. The first few were super dirty and run down. They were major fixer uppers. Yeah, no thank you. We decided to re-evaluate our budget and figured out we could afford a higher price range than we originally thought. We gave her the new range and it totally changed the game. We found houses in much better shape and more like what we were looking for. We found 2 that were possibilities but one needed quite a bit of work, a little more than we were looking to do. The other one was beautiful on the outside and the first and second and third floors were awesome. But the basement had exposed pipes that were hanging super low and it didn't have a/c and the heating system was steam which we're not real familiar with. But we felt like that was the one to beat. The next day we looked in University Heights. Day one we just limited ourselves to Shaker Heights because a lot of people we have talked to live there and love it. We decided to try the next suburb over which was closer to the hospital and a shopping center. We found some cute houses that could work but for some reason we just kept going back to that other house. We looked through a ton of houses, including Dominique Moceanu's (crazy right?), and as we were trying to decide what to do as our 2nd day was winding down, MaryLou remembered there was one more house that had only been on the market for a few days that we could try to get in. It was totally last minute and we said, sure why not. She called the other agent who had listed the property, who happened to be at her same office (Howard Hanna), and she was able to get in. Trey fell in love with it the moment he saw it but I needed more convincing. We went inside and saw this...

Living room - love the beautiful wood floors



The dining room - love the curved archway

 French doors in living room

 

Playroom! This room screams 70s so we'll probably get some new curtains to cute it up in there. Possibly paint the wood paneling too. I love how bright this room is and that it has carpet for the kiddies to play around on.

 Kitchen with breakfast nook. So cute!

We don't love the cabinets so we might paint them to go better with all the white appliances.

 And around the corner you'll find...

The tiny half bathroom and mini triangle sink. Totally one of my favorite parts of this house.

 Then you turn the corner and it takes you to the stairs which leads you to this...

Yeah. Wow. We will be putting carpet over the vinyl flooring and painting all that knotty pine white. It should brighten things right up in there.

Bathroom on 2nd floor

The wall tile will be painted because let's be honest, it's kind of hideous. I like the floor tile though. :)

 Bedroom #1

 Bedroom #2

 Bedroom #3 - The master

 All of the doorknobs look like this! Another one of my favorite features.

 3rd floor bedroom aka "the guest room". Check out the hobbit windows!

 And it comes with a bathroom. And carpet. Yum.

 Awesome cat claw tub!

We were pretty excited as we were getting ready to leave. Just as we were leaving another couple was walking in to look at the place. Trey and I chatted about it and decided to start the paper work to put an offer on the house. We got it all finished by 5pm and decided we would send it over the next morning after we slept on it and talked some more to make sure that we for sure wanted to do it.
We went back to the place we were staying and all the anesthesia residents and their families put together a little get together for us, which was so so nice! We were telling everyone about this house and how we'd put the offer on it tomorrow and at about 9pm MaryLou called me and said "You are not going to believe this. Right after you left the office someone put an offer on the house." Whaaaaat? It was totally that couple that we passed as we were leaving! They must have worked fast. So basically we had a bidding war going on, which is not what we wanted at all. We were totally bummed and thought there was no way we could win. We both had a horrible nights sleep and were trying to decide what we were going to do. The next day we decided we loved the house enough that we wanted to fight for it so Trey talked to the guy handling our mortgage and they figured out what we could afford and so we offered that and with a little help from our realtor we ended up winning!!! Success! And that's how you find your perfect first house in 2 and a half days, Banbury style.

We are itching to get in there! 2 more weeks! And I'm itching to get my hands on that hideous basement. That will definitely be the first project. Then painting the bathroom tile and a bunch of furniture we got on craigslist.