Bryant Boat #2

Since arriving in our new home of Las Vegas, another change that's taken place is we graduated a step up from our tiny boat to a slightly less tiny boat!  This one's a genuine 14-footer with a huge mast and a jib and benches to sit on and a little cubbyhole for gear!  We're in the big times now.

We were very pleasantly surprised when we got to Vegas to find that there are lots of opportunities to do very un-Vegas-like activities (because while the Strip is fun...it would get kinda boring, right?).  Lake Mead Recreation Area is just outside the city and it an absolutely gorgeous, gigantic lake perfect for sailing.  We've taken advantage of it was many weekends as possible!

(Also a great advantage to Las Vegas:  the fact that we're in a sweltering desert, so even now, in November, the high temp was 75 degrees today!)

Although my currently-39-weeks-pregnant self can't maneuver around the boat anymore, we sailed regularly until the end of September, and can't wait until spring to get back out on the water.

(Fact:  we're really bad at naming things.  We've yet to name this sailboat, as well as our unborn child!)

Bridesmaids Dress Collection: Julia

Months and months ago, I hinted at this bridesmaid dress collection I made for a wedding in May.  So happy to be catching up over here and revealing it now!

Julia had a specific vision in mind for her bridesmaid dresses that would use a cotton print she had already fallen in love with.  We designed the rest of the dress around using that print for both the waistband and a band around the bottom.  The neutral grey of the main fabric allowed the print to be the star of the proverbial show, and I love how flattering the cut of this dress ended up looking on each and every girl.

It looks like it was such a happy, happy day, and what an honor to play a very small part in those memories!

A Man in Uniform

One of the biggest changes to our lives in the last couple months (there have been soooo many!) is that we're now officially an Air Force family!  This summer, Scott completed officer training, the final step before his official assignment began in August.  He was gone all of July at training in Alabama (yeah, the deep south smack dab in the middle of summer...how fun does that sound?!) and I picked him up at the end of the month as an Air Force Captain.

[And during that month, I gained a huge, HUGE amount of respect for all the spouses of deployed military - wow.  I had one month without him and he was still in the country; I cannot even come close to imagining what it would be like to go through a year of deployment with your spouse halfway across the world!]

Here he is, being all officer-y:

There were a few ceremonies the families got to attend during graduation, several of which involved lots of marching.  Look at my man there, leader of the second element from the left!

Looking good:

Taking the oath:

Celebration time!

Proud wife and proud parents:

With his roommate for the month and now a close friend of ours:

Overjoyed to have him back by my (our!) side:

Baby Monsoon

Completely unintended 3 month blogging break now coming to an end!

Although I always knew I would feel completely, totally supported and loved by our family and friends throughout this pregnancy, I never expected to be thrown a shower of any kind.  At the beginning of my second trimester, we moved across the country to Las Vegas where we didn't know a single soul, far from our loved ones, so logistically, having a shower would just never work out!  [And that's okay!  It's what we signed up for when we became a military family and technology always makes those distances shrink!].

However, we have been overwhelmed and blessed over and over again by the creative and surprising ways that the people we love have found to celebrate us and our growing family!  Not only have we been thrown one shower, but three - it's raining, storming, monsooning baby stuff up in here, y'all!

Shower #1:  Double Surprise from Besties

We went low-key for our annual Girls Trip (#5!) this year.  Of the five of us, two of us are preg (Julie is due just a week apart from me!), so we stayed at a relative's gigantic mansion in Phoenix and lived in the pool for three days.  On our last morning there, Kendra, Rachel, and Jo threw us the most spectacular, precious, and amazing shower that was completely unexpected (I'm still baffled at how they managed to transport all the decorations and presents without either of us realizing!).

Full-on decorations, baby shower games, brunch, the sweetest video message they recorded for us, tons of presents - it was all there, and Julie and I basically felt like mama goddesses.  It was incredibly special and incredibly wonderful.  Thank you, Jo, Rach, & Ken!

Preg buddies.

Three of these bumps are fake...

Shower hostesses/best friends

Shower #2:  Boy/Girl Sailor Shower

When we moved here, we didn't quite know what to expect or what our new military life would be like.  We quickly learned that being in that same boat of uncertainty with everyone else creates really quick, really close friendships!  In a matter of weeks, we found great friends in Scott's co-workers and their spouses, and two of the other wives, Jill and Ruth, threw us a couples baby shower!  These girls went all out with a nautical-themed party, complete with homemade shrimp po'boys, nautical decorations everywhere you looked, sailing flags and anchors and seashells and boats!  It was a really fantastic, casual night - we are so blessed to be part of this group of people.  Thank you, Jill and Ruth!

Nautical everywhere!

Stack of loot.

Tag-teaming the opening of gifts.

Wives' club!  (By the way, in the next month the baby count among us is going to go from 2 to FIVE!)

Baby mama, baby daddy

Shower #3:  Long Distance and Long Term!

As if all that wasn't overwhelming enough, my sister Kelsey also orchestrated a totally ingenious way for us to feel celebrated by all our long-distance loved ones:  She separated a huge list of recipients into 6 groups, and sent out this invitation to all of them, assigning a different week to each:

 

In other words, we're spending the last 6 weeks of this pregnancy get cards and notes and e-mails and gifts in the mail from all different groups of people from our lives!  How much fun is that?!  I'll tell you:  insanely fun.  Almost every day brings something new in the mail and it's a constant, daily reminder of the amount of support and love we have coming to us from all over.  It's at once reassuring and delightful and humbling.  We love it.  Thanks, Sister!

A Dress Made for Waving!

As a former Miss Kansas, my cousin Becki plays a big part in the celebrations of pageant week in Kansas every June.  Undoubtedly, one of her best duties is riding in the parade (how fun would that be?!).  She and I combined our mutual powers this year to design (her) and sew (me) a one-of-a-kind dress for her to wear in the parade!

Since she spends most of the parade waving from the car, she thought it might be fun to have a one-shoulder dress with a fun sleeve.  We scoured the internet together to pick out a fabric, and came up with this amazing aqua jersey from Gorgeous Fabrics (seriously, it's a dream - and there's 7 yards left!).  I loved the end result and the marriage of the design and the print.

And here she is putting that sleeve to work with the wave!  Gorgeous, right?

P.S.  Becki is a talented professional trumpet player - check out her website, if you'd like!

My Inevitable Return

Well, it's been a good two months since I last posted (and if you've been visiting to see if I've updated, I apologize that you have to keep reading about the books I read in April). The last two months have been hectic and life-changing and wonderful, and I'm extremely excited to get back in the normal swing of things and re-start documenting our lives.

From the past few months, here are the days we don't want to forget:

(And if you want the short version:  there's a baby baking in my oven, Scott graduated from dental school, we moved to Las Vegas!)

May 4 & May 6:  We flew home to surprise our parents and let them know their days as just "parents" are numbered...they're bumping up to grandparents soon!  We also got to stop by and surprise lots of other family members with the news.

May 9:  Bleeding on Probing:  The Farewell Show.  It was loud, it was epic, and it ended with Scott smashing his bass guitar into a dozen pieces, so it pretty much couldn't have gone any better.

May 11:  Senior formal, where all the fourth-year dental kids get dressed up and bring their dates and have a final hurrah.  I also made this dress (more on that when I start getting caught up!).

May 23:  A day 4 years in the making.  What absolute joy and pride to watch your husband bestowed with the title of "Doctor" after the all-night studies and the exams and letting him give you fillings.  This guy earned it, big time.

May 30:  Here's the part where we packed up our New York apartment and said good-bye to NYC.  We spent our last night in New York sitting on the roof of our building, watching the sunset behind the George Washington Bridge, eating Magnolia cupcakes.  It could not have been more perfect.

June 1:  We moved to the fabulous LAS VEGAS!  The rumors are true:  the desert is blazing hot.  But it is also a magical place where I got my very first smartphone, so I am now fully entrenched in iPhone culture and I'm all up in Instagram (@valeriesews).

Since getting to LV, we have:

 Practically melted.

 Been pleasantly surprised that Vegas is surrounded by mountains on all sides!

Took our first trip to the Strip as actual Vegas residents...to go to the Apple store.

Took Young America for a spin on Lake Mead.

 

Barely started the task of unpacking.

 

Reached the halfway point of pregnancy.

Sent Scott off for a month of officer training!

Life is getting back to a (new) normal sort of place after all that, and I'm looking forward to sharing in this space again (and also SEWING!).

Book I Read in April

I feel like I hardly ever get a chance to read, so I'm shocking myself with the ability to even keep up with one book a month!

Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan

Serena Frome is a 20-something woman in London in the 1970's (how perfectly does this book cover depict that?!) who goes to work for MI5, which is a British intelligence agency.  She can technically be classified as a "spy," though she would be considered quite a lowly one, and this book focuses mainly on just one of her assignments, which ends up impacting her life significantly.

Reading the back cover of this book, I fully expected it to be this epic spy novel with twists and turns and a couple of shoot outs, but I should have known better having read a few of McEwan's other novels (Atonement, On Chesil Beach).  This story is much quieter, and much more of a story of Serena's life as a regular civilian intersecting with her life as an intelligence agent.  There are events and things that happen to her that end up being not at all as they seem (and one somewhat major revelation/twist), but it's nothing that's going to end the world or cause a terrorist to get away.  This is a story about a woman who is a spy, rather than spy story.

This was one of those books that I couldn't tell if I liked it as I was reading it, but every time I put it down, I continued to think about it.  Because of that, I'm going to call this a solid "like," though not a quite a "love," and I continue to be a fan of McEwan in general (if you haven't read Atonement, I encourage you to do so at your earliest possible convenience).