I am up too late reading and now blogging

Once again I find myself up way too late.

This time I am reading:

Ironic things about this book:

-This book is about the hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas almost 110 years ago to the day.

-I found this book the other week when I was in Ocean City, MD.

-I learned today this book was left behind by my father-in-law. He told me this book started his interested in hurricanes. He successfully produced media about Hurricane Katrina a few years after he read this book.

-This book was written in 1999 about the nation's deadliest natural disaster.

-Six year later, again almost to the day, Hurricane Katrina trumped Galveston.

-I am supposed to be sleeping right now, resting up for my long road trip with my mom and Jack to Ocracoke Island, NC. My Aunt Joanna and Uncle Mark were kind enough to invite us to join them in their rented beach house.

-Hurricane Earl is rearing his ugly head and we are rerouting our beach trip to Ocean City, MD. Where my grandparents-in-law are kind enough to let us stay in their beach house.

-Isaac's Storm is about the pioneer days of Meteorology.

-A hurricane during hurricane season, who would have predicted? Oh yeah, the weatherman.

The last weekend without Gabe!

I am celebrating today!

This is the last Sunday and last weekend Gabe has to work 2pm-10pm at the newschannel!

This weekend the Hanrahan family came in town from Atlanta.

It was a short visit. They arrived Friday & left before we even woke up today.

I tried to spend as much time as possible with them. (Gabe was the unlucky one who had to work most of the time they were here.)

Luke even volunteered at the non-profit when I was working Saturday Morning. He took inventory of the baby equipment - thanks!

When I got off work, Jack, Luke, Grandma Teri and I walked to Panera for a lovely lunch.

Then at Luke's request we made a stop at the Clocktower thrift store, thrift stores are equivalent to candy stores for Luke.

Later in the day Colin & Luke took a tour of the University where Grandma Teri teaches.

For dinner we all met up at Gabe's Aunt Kathleen's house for her delicious home made pizzas. My eyes teared up with joy when I was driving over there because I realized this will be the last weekend family event I have to attend without Gabe!!!!

Gabe doesn't have to attend my family events without me. Mainly he can never make any family events because of his schedule. I am so happy this change is coming. We can spend more time with friends and family on what is everyones normal weekend!

We sort of knew the change was coming, we thought he would be off weekends some point during the mid-fall. Friday we were surprised to learn it that this will be his last working weekend!

"The La Monica weekend" aka Wednesday and Thursday will always hold great memories for us and we will miss the perks for sure.

Like visiting a vineyard outside of Charlottesville on a Wednesday and having the whole place to ourselves.

It took me a few days to wrap my head around the idea my wish for "normal" weekends had finally come true. I am bummed in general that the summer is coming to an end. I wish we could rewind and have summer weekends together.

Now, I almost can't contain my excitement for my future weekends with my husband. What a better way to start this new schedule then with FOOTBALL SEASON!

HOKIE FOOTBALL & REDSKINS!

This fall I will be taking Gabe to his first Hokie game ever! Which game is TBD...

We were planning on going to the Georgia Tech Thursday night game and coming back in time on Friday for Gabe to get to work at 2.

Now we get to be a normal road warrior family and deal with weekend traffic.

Jack really lived up his last Sunday with mom alone by shortening his two hour nap to thirty minutes.

He woke up when his Grandpa Jay pulled in the driveway.

Jay returned from a work trip to Pakistan last night, he had been missed.

What could be better then hanging out with one Grandpa?

Hanging out with two:

After at least 10 years in NYC my Dad moved to the same town as me shortly after Jack was born. He lives in the "city" part of our town; walking distance to many restaurants and a great park. We had a great dinner and a lot of fun outside this evening.

What will the La Monica family do next weekend...stay tuned!

Have you seen our little green guy?

MISSING:

We live on a busy street.

Gabe's Aunt Donna picked up this little guy for us because when you turn into our driveway there is often someone riding your bumper and ignoring the turn signal you put on at least 1/2 a mile back.

We(and by we I mean Gabe, because trash/recycle duty is his job) even made the effort on trash day to move him away from the curb so he didn't get picked up on mistake.

LAST SEEN: Shortly after Jack's birthday party we noticed he was gone. He was so sweet to let us tie the party balloons around his neck.

The ironic part is that this busy street we live on has not always been busy. Gabe's mom grew up in the house we are living in and remembers the day when the dirt road in front of her(our) house got paved over.

Times have changed, and I miss my little green guy :(

Where we have been

We have been on vacation in Ocean City, Maryland.

Gabe's grandparents, Granny & Bopa, own a beachfront condo.

Here is the view from Friday.

I was reading my book on the wrap around porch.

Jack and Gabe were taking a nap.

This was a quick snapshot taken with photobooth.

Now we are back, it was short & sweet.

Singer/Gilley Wedding

Last month I was lucky enough to attend the wedding of one of my college roommates, Nicole:

This is Me and Nicole celebrating Halloween at TOTS, the bar we both used to work at.

Our dogs were roommates too!

Oliver & Bella, both wearing Virginia Tech gear.

When I moved in with Nicole, her and Gilley (Matthew, I've never called him by his first name) were dating. We had a lot of fun together.

We left early Saturday morning. We were lucky enough to have my family and then Gabe's family watch Jack.

Neither of us had been to Pittsburgh, PA. We learned the geography, who knew three river flowed through Pittsburgh? And Pittsburgh has 446 bridges:

We stayed in the North Shore neighborhood.

Our hotel and the wedding events all occured next to PNC Park, where the Pittsburgh Pirates play.

I was having so much fun, I barely snapped any pictures of the wedding weekend!

Here is one of the church:

St. Augustine

The beautiful bride outside of the church:

And the beautiful reception:

I always knew Nicole loved Gilley a lot. I also knew that Nicole was the best thing to ever happen to Gilley. Now, I am happy knowing they will spend the rest of their lives together!

To finish off our romantic weekend we went to the Andy Warhol Museum:

Pittsburgh was very cool, now we have to plan a trip to Ft. Myers, FL, where the newlyweds live!

Kelly's birthday week!

Kelly always get a birthday weekend, this year her birthday was on a Wednesday, so it turned into a birthday week!

Here is a picture of us 5 years ago for Kelly's 20th birthday:

Me, Kelly, Colleen & Sarah at Benihana's in Bethesda, MD.

Kelly's 22nd Birthday:

Amy, Kaitlin, Kelly, Me & Sarah in Dewey Beach.

This year we went to Sakura on her birthday:

Sarah, Kelly & Katie.

Kelly is the event planner at Cabanas, a great restaurant on Georgetown's Waterfront.

It was the perfect place for her big birthday bash.

A lot of her friends from WVU came in town and we had a giant slumber party at my mom's house. My moms house can sleep seven guests comfortably, we probably had at least eleven guests there last night. Even I got to sleep there! Jack slept over at my in-laws house and I had a fun night out with my friends!

I woke up while everyone was still passed out to go fetch my baby boy and missed the giant brunch they had. I did make it back over later in the day with Jack to hang out with the remaining five guests.

Happy 25th Birthday Kelly! You have been my friend forever, I can remember back to at least your 15th birthday party, it was an all girl pool party at your old house. We have probably never been apart for a birthday ever since.

La Monica weekend 8/3-8/5

As promised, Jack in jean diapers!

Playing with Dad's glasses, always fun:

Bright & happy on Saturday morning (aka Wednesday)

Remember the early days of the lovely highchair...

The highchair comes with this convenient tray that you can take off and in stick in the dishwasher if you like. It is not so convenient anymore, Jack likes to play peek-a-boo with it and dump all of his dinner on the floor.

Where's Jack?

There he is! He squeals in delight during this game.

This makes me tempted to get a dog or a really good dustbuster, my birthday is coming up.

Here I go, blogging about our weekend:

I was lucky enough to go out to dinner with some girlfriends to celebrate Kelly's birthday, I left these two boys behind:

I took these pictures as I was pulling out of the driveway:

A major plus of Gabe working for a 24 hour news channel is that he has non-traditional days off. As a family we were all able to go to Jack's 1 year check up. The stats are in!

Weight: 26 lb. 4 oz. 90%

Height: 31 in. 85%

Head circumference: 19 in. 90 %

Newborn stats:

Weight: 9 lb. 13 oz.

Height: 21 in.

Net gain:

Weight: 16 lb. 7 oz.

Height: 10 in.

Learning to cook can be a slow process, at least for me. Gabe has to work late most nights therefore I am only preparing meals for us two nights a week. The rest of the week I'm on my own and Gabe is eating what he packed for dinner.

When I do cook, Gabe is usually surprised that I can cook a lot better then he thought.

I decided to blog about what I made because thinking back over the past year I know I have cooked a lot of "one hit wonders" aka yummy meals that I have never reproduced.

When I am only cooking meals for two or three, twice a week, I feel like I am constantly running low on groceries because if I buy too much it goes bad.

As I evaluate my refrigerator and pantry I discovered many mushrooms that were left over from the delicious rice pilaf my mom made for Jack's birthday party.

Mushrooms are not me and Gabe's favorite but I knew I couldn't let these mushrooms go to waste.

Gabe and I had a big lunch earlier in the day and I wasn't particularly hungry but I knew we would be eventually. So my next choice was brown rice because I actually for once had the 1 hour and 45 minutes to cook it in my rice cooker/veggie steamer!

Using my rice cooker also reminds me of my crockpot that I have also only used once this year on St. Patrick's Day to make corn beef and cabbage. Of course the challenge with these wonderful appliances is remembering to think about dinner in plenty of time to use them. The advantage is "set it & forget it".

I decided to make a little more rice then what we would consume for dinner. Because Gabe & I like leftovers. I know not everyone does.

3 uncooked cups of brown rice yields 6 cups, so I poured in 3 cups and the 4 1/4 cups of water that the directions of my rice cooker told me to and "set & forget" for 1:45.

Meanwhile we fed the baby boy his dinner, gave him a bath, read him books, put him to bed and did laundry.

This was a late dinner because we had a big lunch and the brown rice takes forever to cook.

Gabe started to snack on some carrots as an appetizer and so i got the idea to use the veggie steamer part of my rice cooker and steamed some carrots. The directions said 15 minutes. I knew I was going to put some of the carrots aside for Jack to eat tomorrow I let them steam for at least another 10 minutes making the carrots softer.

My multi-tasking skills have finally improved. Towards the end of the 1:45 of rice cooking, I cut up the mushrooms and an onion, added olive oil and sauteed over medium-high heat. I added the steamed carrots towards the end. Mushrooms cook a little faster then onions so if I did this recipe again I would start the onions first then add the mushrooms.

Then I just added everything together and I was done! Since we had a big lunch, this was light & simple dinner. Gabe doesn't eat vegetarian meals often but he really liked this one, and we both really liked the mushrooms to our surprise!

I could have used less rice, but this meal was perfect to serve to Jack the next day, Gabe packed it for his dinner at work and I ate it for lunch when I got home for work!

Now it's Friday, Monday for us, back to the grind and continuing the fun!

The big 1st Birthday celebration!

The night before Jack's big day I little him stay up a little later...

Because I knew when he woke up...

He would be one year old!

Thanks Aunt Jackie for the t-shirt and the lego trucks too...

Later we had some family over...

and we had a pizza and ice cream party!

There are a lot of things I learned this year, including how to make a doggy cake...

The chocolate cake was thanks to my mom, and all of the cake gotten eaten at the Big First Birthday Party!!!

It looks like Jack's first birthday cake was a success!

The party was great, thanks to everyone who came!

Cousin Carolynne...

Grandma Teri with her two grandkids...

Me & my birthday boy

After the cake there was an outfit change...

and some sunglasses added for a bit...

Jack & Bowen:

More of the birthday cousins:

and our big cousin Katie Sue!

We were also lucky enough to have the Donabella cousins from Syracuse, NY come in town for the weekend. On Sunday we all went on a nature walk on the Potomac River:

Jack, Me, Christina and Jason:

Chloe, Sarah, Me, Christina, Micaela & Jack:

Chloe, Christina & Jason in the pool later:

Jack getting ready to join, sporting his new swimsuit Salehi gave him:

Jack first birthday was quite the celebration, thanks to everyone who came! Jack is having lots of fun playing with his trucks, balls and toys galore! He got many cute outfits too, including this one from Grandma Teri:

Why was I so worked up about him turning one? He is still the sweetest little angel and now we have a ton more toys to play with!

This is Jack one year ago today, 6 days old:

In his swing...

With Justin:

Oh the many things I have learned this past year, what will next year bring?