The Kavanaugh Report

I know Morgan already wrote one of these posts but I figured I would too. It has been a incredibly busy and exciting year. Looking over everything we've done, its no wonder this year feels like its come and gone in a flash. To recap: January : I started my last semester of law school. Morgan and I went on a staycation in Stillwater, MN. February : We went to Cable, WI with my family to watch the Birkebinder Ski race. March: I took the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam. I turned in my Minnesota Bar Exam Application. Morgan and I toured Target Field for the first time. April: I went to my very last law school class. May : I celebrated my 25th birthday. I started and finished my last set of law school exams. I graduated from law school. I went to my first Twins game at Target Field. Morgan and I went to an Army marriage retreat. June : Morgan and I moved into a new house. July : Morgan and I traveled to Phillips, WI for the 4th of July. I took and failed my s

Morgan and I had a wonderful, albeit quick, Christmas! This was the first year that we didn't have 10 or more full days off at Christmas. Usually we finish up finals a few days before Christmas and start back to school in January. This year, Morgan only had we only had the 24th - 26th off, and I only had the 23rd - 28th off. And while this didn't keep us from having a great Christmas, it did make Christmas seem a little more rushed, although its probably what everyone else already experiences. Even though it was quick, we kept to our usual Christmas traditions. We always spend Christmas Eve with Morgan's side of the family, and Christmas Day with my side. Morgan and I are extremely lucky that both our families live in Eau Claire and we are able to celebrate the holiday with each of them. It just happens to work out that Morgan's family celebrates Christmas Eve, and my family celebrates Christmas Day. This is my favorite ornament at my parents' house. All of my

WOW! Another month over! Time is really starting to fly. I'm now officially 28 weeks (and 1 day today since I'm getting a late start on blogging) or 7 months! I have a feeling the next couple months will go a lot slower than the past month, now that the holidays are pretty much over and anticipation for Henry's arrival is at an all time high. But either way, I'm extremely excited to have made it to my final trimester.  28 Weeks! And yes this is taken with our new camera! Over the last month, I have felt really pretty good. I've had an increase in back pain, but I guess that's expected. I've also started to notice some swelling in my hands and feet when I get warm. It will be interesting to see how long my wedding ring will continue to fit, since over the last week its been a little bit tight by the end of the day. OH...and heartburn. Ugh. Heartburn has come back into my life with some kind of rage. I swear some nights I could literally breathe fire. Sin

After driving in the "third snowiest December in Minnesota" - or whatever it is now - I decided to do a quick run down of some winter driving tips. Now of course there are the classics, like "slow down" and "be more cautious," but I wanted to focus more on some specifics. 1. Don't try to chance it. While it may be a good idea in the summer, not so much now. First of all, is it really worth it? I'd say I've almost rammed into the side of a dozen cars so far this winter. It goes like this: I'm minding my own business driving down the road. A car pulls out from a gas station and looks my way and sees me coming. They hesitate. Then they think they should gun it, even though there are no cars behind me, or any cars coming the other way. They step on the gas only to spin out and come into my lane about half way. I have a heart attack, and slam on my breaks and slide towards them. We both end up coming to a stop. I look at them like, "WTF&quo

Woah. Suddenly its been 10 days since I've blogged. Not sure how that happened. I think I've been suffering from either a case of writers block or nothing blog-worthy has actually happened. Its probably a combination of the two. We really haven't had much going on. I've been enjoying the finals-free December and trying to soak up as much Christmas as possible. Although, somehow I also managed to completely ignore all Christmas shopping to the last possible second, again. In the past, I've always blamed it on school but now I think it just may be a bad habit. So, Morgan and I continued our Mall-of-America-One-Day-Shopping-Extravaganza tradition - we're on year 4 now. Basically, we get up super early in the morning, go out to breakfast, head to the Mall of America, and force ourselves to stay there until ALL of our shopping is complete. We have actually come to kinda like this tradition. We expect ourselves to get kinda crabby by the end, but for the most part j

So about this time of year all the news organizations start running their "Year in Review" pieces. I tend to enjoy them for the most part. It's a nice way to look back, see where we started and the events that were important throughout the year. I always like how some things become so unimportant by the end of the year, but at the time were the big news stories of the day. Here's a link to Yahoo!'s: http://yearinreview.yahoo.com/ . So, I've been doing a lot of pondering lately about this year, so much has happened. It was hard to remember everything. I started out the year by having my spirits crushed by the Vikings. That's all I'm going to say about that. That aside, it was actually an exciting start to the year because it was our last semester of school, ever. At the time, it seemed like such a huge deal because we've always been going to school. Well, for the last 20+ years or so. That semester seems like it was so long ago. It turned out to be

I'm sure you've all heard by now that Minneapolis/St. Paul got a TON of snow over the weekend. Probably, because you can't go anywhere on the internet without seeing that video of the Metrodome's roof caving in (that is a pretty funny video, btw). Well, in case you are one of the two people in the world who haven't heard, or seen the video, I figured I should blog about it. I learned Thursday night that we were supposed to get snow on Friday night and Saturday. I wasn't happy since I was supposed to head to William Mitchell to proctor the LSAT on Saturday morning. I figured it would probably be more of an annoyance than anything, well turns out the snow would pretty much shut the city down. By Friday afternoon, it became clear that the storm was going to be pretty big. I was forced to bail on proctoring, because I knew I shouldn't, and couldn't, run around the city at 6 1/2 months pregnant in a foot of blowing snow (it didn't matter anyway the LS

99 days until Henry's due date! That is all. :-)

I knew I had a 50/50 shot at these cookies turning out. I've heard the horrors of baking with candy. But I decided to go ahead with them anyway, because they were just so pretty... BIG. MISTAKE. A few days ago I decided that I would bake some cookies for a holiday party I'm going to for work this week. So I got out my Martha Stewart Cookies Cookbook and picked two recipes. The first was a traditional cookie called "Old Fashioned Sugar Cookie" (and they by the way turned out so delicious that I hope I still have some left by the party tomorrow - once again damn you Martha, I did not need to eat so many of those). The second was the "Stained-glass Christmas Tree" (shown above). I immediately fell in love; again look at how pretty they are! So yesterday afternoon I started making these beautiful cookies. I made the dough just fine; it was nothing special just your standard cut-out cookie. While the dough was in the fridge hardening up, I smashed a bunch of

We attempted to take our Christmas Card picture tonight. We did eventually get a good picture. I just thought these were some funny outtakes. Enjoy. Hehe. Morgan's face pretty much sums up how we both felt after about 15 failed pictures. The dogs were not into it. Neither was I.

Our Tree! I love Christmas time! Its even better when we don't have finals to worry about (see Morgan's last post). One of my favorite parts of Christmas is decorating the tree. Morgan and I put up our third tree together this weekend, and I think its our best one yet! Every year we have gone to the parking lot of an Ace Hardware to pick it out. The trees there are all bound up, so you kinda have to just guess which tree will work best. Thankfully we have been really lucky and picked great trees. Better yet, they always last and are really cheap! Morgan and I decided last year that we had to start making our own holiday traditions that we could pass along to our children as our family grew. The first one we "created" was drinking a sugar-Coke (the Coke is made with real sugar and not corn syrup - they are hard to find but are totally worth it) while decorating the Christmas tree. So this year I can proudly say we continued our tradition, and enjoyed a sugar-Coke

Final exams! Wow, it feels really strange not to be super stressed out at this time of year. Nicole and I literally had the same feeling on December 1st: I should be stressed out right now. I had a moment of panic the other morning at work because I haven't been studying at all, for anything. I snapped out of it. But I have always had some sort of school during this time of year. The last three years being the worst of them all. I feel terrible for everyone I know studying for exams right now. We drove past the Mitchell library the other day, and saw that the library was packed out with people studying. Finals in law school was the worst, only because so much pressure is put on them because in most classes 100% of your grade depends on the final exam. At least in undergrad, there were assignments, quizzes and participation points during the semester, so the final exam wasn't such a huge deal. In any event, the only thing worse than final exams was studying for the bar because s

We are finally back from our week-long road trip across the Midwest. It was a long journey, and not particularly relaxing, but we had a great time! For those of you who don't know, we went on a 1,429 mile road trip over Thanksgiving. We went to see Morgan's brother graduate from boot-camp in Missouri, and then to Chicago for my family's Thanksgiving. It was pretty interesting with a pregnant woman and two dogs! Here is a recap of our trip: Minnesota to Ottumwa, Iowa: Our trip to Ottumwa, Iowa was a long trip, about 6 hours. We ended up leaving later in the day on Sunday then we wanted to, since it was super icy here and we needed to wait for the roads to clear. The ride ended up being alright, the roads were just wet but it was super foggy. We made it to our hotel by 8:30 that night, and introduced the dogs to the hotel. Ottumwa, Iowa to Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri: We left early the next morning (Monday) for Missouri to try to beat the big storms that were moving thro

Another month done, I've made it to 24 weeks, or 6 months! Some days it feels like pregnancy is going by super fast, and others I feel like it is taking forever. This past month has been pretty uneventful for me. I've been getting bigger everyday but that's pretty much it. A few things are starting to get harder, like sitting for long periods of time, tying my shoes and zipping up my winter coat, but other than that I feel great. My bellybutton is dangerously close to popping out, which I wasn't expecting this early. Morgan thinks its super funny looking and most days I agree. As far as we know, Henry is still doing really well. My doctor decided to keep my due date where it was, so he is still due March 20, but is just measuring a little big. At our last appointment he had a great heartbeat. He is as active as ever, and has started to develop a fairly predictable sleeping/waking pattern. One thing he doesn't like is to perform for people. Even when is is awake an

So I'm starting to pull together the theme and the main pieces for the nursery. Slowly its all coming together. I haven't actually set anything up yet since the room needs a fresh coat of paint, and we are still missing a few of the main elements (like a changing table or dresser). However, it has been really fun picking out all the different stuff and I thought I would share our progress. This is the bedding set we choose. Its a little brighter than this is real life, but I love it. My favorite part was the mix of circles and stripes, which were visually interesting but still look like they are for a baby. Up-close of the nursery bedding. I liked the nature theme, and I liked that it wasn't just the traditional baby blue. These are wall cards (one for every letter) we purchased to hang around the room. Since we can't paint the room a fun color (since we only rent our house) I thought these were a good way to add color and interest. They are 5" x 7"