Recap from DSM

We're back after the shortest trip ever. The wedding was held on the rooftop of the Iowa Historical Building in downtown Des Moines. It started out windy, but didn't rain, so all-in-all the weather was fine. I wish I could comment on the ceremony, but as soon as the officiant started talking, Aidan got fussy and I had to take him inside to nurse. By the time he was done eating the ceremony was over. Everyone told me it was nice. :) Aidan stayed at the reception until about 7:15pm, then I took him over to Jessica's house where she and Hilary were kind enough to watch him. I texted them around 10pm to make sure everything was going fine and they replied that he was still awake. Uh Oh...I knew that meant he was probably overtired and, at the very least, fussy (at the very worst, screaming his head off). When I picked him up he had just fallen asleep and sure enough, he had shown Jess and Hilary how strong his lungs are. Jess described it as "ear piercing". Yikes. Thank you Jess and Hilary for giving Kyle and I some adult time, it was much appreciated. Watching a baby is always good birth control.

I had every intention of taking lots of pictures, but ended up getting back to the hotel around midnight and realized I hadn't even taken one. Oops. So I laid Aidan on the bed and snapped a few photos of him in his wedding attire before giving him a bath and putting him to bed. He slept until 8am, ate, and went back to sleep until 11am. He was one tired little boy.

Don't know what to read? Try this list

I found this post on Soupy's blog today (after she got it from someone else) and it caught my eye since I was just thinking about what book(s) I should read next. (I'm currently reading Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert) Kyle's mom got us each gift cards to Barnes and Noble and as I was standing there trying to figure out what to buy, I realized that I've been living in a bubble for the past 3-4 months and had NO idea what was popular/recommended right now. This gives me some ideas as far as the classics go.

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. "

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible --some
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte---(tried to read it in college and just didn't get into it)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare---(I've only read Romeo and Juliet, but I'm counting it)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (LOVED it, counldn't put it down, was sad when it ended b/c I just wanted to keep reading it forever)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (I read it several times when I was younger)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (so SAD!)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom---got it from the library when I was pregnant, was too busy reading pregnancy books, and had to return it before I got around to reading it...it's on my list
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Anything on here that is classic lit. I read in my high school lit. classes. So in all (counting the Harry Potter books as 7) I've read 33 out of the top 100. Maybe not the greatest, but not too shabby either

Des Moines, Here We Come

We're headed down to Des Moines today for a wedding. It's going to be a quick trip...check into the hotel, get ready, wedding at 6pm, reception afterwards, and then back home tomorrow morning. My college roommates, Jess and Hilary, are going to watch Aidan for a while during the reception. That means Kyle and I get to have a few drinks and socialize with adults. YAY!!! We haven't seen most of these friends since last September, so it will be nice to catch up...and it's never dull when you get a room full of fraternity brothers together. There's always a funny story to be told the next day. :)

Jumperoo, we love you

I put together Aidan's jumperoo this week, hoping that it would amuse him. He love, love, LOVES it. Even though he's a long baby, his legs still don't touch the floor so I have to put a pillow on the floor underneath him. Safety hazard? Perhaps, but he doesn't seem to mind. I'm sure once he's a little bit bigger he will be bouncing like crazy in this thing. Thank you Grandma Finn for this wonderful gift!!! Right now he likes hitting all the different toys on it and listening to the sounds they make. Maybe mommy can start getting more stuff done around the house now. His bouncy seat and swing just weren't cutting it anymore.

We have a roller!

Where are you rain??? I know most people in the Midwest are hoping it never rains again, but my poor flower beds that I planted last week are in desperate need of some natural water. How am I going to get beautiful flowers if all of my plants die? :(

Aidan, Roxie, and I have enjoyed being outside with all this gorgeous weather we've been having the past week. We go for at least 1 walk a day. Today was SUPER humid and I was sweating before our house was even out of sight. I'd like to take people's advice and go early in the morning or after the sun starts to go down, but Aidan is always sleeping at those times...just doesn't work for us.

Updates on Aidan's milestones: he rolled over from his back to his tummy, and then somehow got himself onto his back again. Unfortunately mommy was folding and putting away laundry (yuk!) so I missed the whole thing. I'm sure it will start happening regularly pretty soon, so I'll get to watch him do it over and over. Kyle thinks we have a baby with super-human strength that will be an awesome athlete. I'm just glad Aidan is doing things around the time he's supposed to.

12 weeks old!!

We can hardly believe it, but Aidan is 12 weeks old today! April was lost somewhere in a haze of sleepless nights, May flew by, and now it's the end of June already and Aidan has been here for 3 months! He has experienced a lot of "firsts": smiling, "talking", using his legs to scoot himself around, and his most recent (as of last Friday) rolling over from his back to his tummy...making mommy and daddy very nervous when he's in his crib.

I went in to check on him the other night after 10 minutes of "crying it out" and he was on his tummy with his face jammed against his crib bumper. I had put him to bed on his back in the middle of the crib. He didn't seem too fazed by the whole thing and was actually asleep, but I was a little freaked out. Needless to say I now have the urge to check on him every 10 minutes when he is sleeping. He is all boy though and is constantly on the move, so I guess I'll have to accept the fact that he's probably not going to stay in one spot anymore, sleeping or awake.

We're gearing up for a trip down to Des Moines this weekend for a college friend's wedding. Thankfully we're driving down Saturday and coming back Sunday, so the amount of baggage needed shouldn't be near as much as the 5 day trip to IL required.