i love skyr.

i have an undying love for skyr - iceland's thick, creamy, protein-filled yogurt (15g per container!). do you think i can get honorary icelandic citizenship?
throw in some blackberries and pumpkin flax granola, and my morning is complete.

is there a food from another country you just can't get enough of? i'm just so glad they finally brought skyr to the States!

yay friends.

for good times...for bad times...knowing you can always count on me. fu shure.

so that little bug episode monday night freaked me out much more than it should have. i was on edge all day yesterday thinking about coming home to a wild kingdom. so i went shopping after work instead of going home (and found 2 babybump friendly dresses!), then i got a call from some friends who were in my neighborhood. i hopped on the metro and met up with them and they visited with me for a WHOLE HOUR. maybe they'll never know (or maybe they are reading this now), but they totally saved me last night. sometimes you just need extra people in the house to realize everything is ok.

and bonus, the friends were in my neighborhood because they're looking for a new apartment! keeping all my fingers crossed that it works out. i love it when friends move close by.

things that have made me cry recently.

my hormones are off-the-charts wacko.
my husband is halfway around the world.
this baby is turning my body into a furnace.
i watched the season finale of grey's anatomy late last night.
big flies in my house.
my clothes don't really fit so much anymore.

but the best one: laughing with mark on the phone so hard i cry. at least China lets us talk to each other, even if they are tapping all of our phone calls.

critters.

i was sitting in my house tonight, minding my own biz, when out of nowhere 3 horseflies appeared. i got my magazine and smacked them all gone. then 2 minutes later, 4 more appeared. and then another. and i started feeling like i was in one of my bad dreams.

my nightmare come true - never ending bugs. ew ew ew.

so i got out my vacuum, attached the hose thingy, and sucked those little critters right up. and now they're sitting my vacuum, waiting to be emptied. but i don't dare empty it because hello = they'd come right back and haunt me, right?

am i crazy, or is this normal bug behavior?

honestly, every time TH leaves town, it is like the wild kingdom up in here. i need my bug killer back please. oh and more than that, i need my husband home. i hope this week passes by quickly!!

birthdays. let's eat some cake.

mary got not one, not two, but THREE birthday desserts yesterday. happy birthday to her! jenny and i teamed up to make peach cobbler and a sponge layer cake with chocolate frosting. holy moly, was it a lot of butter and sugar and ridiculousness.

just look at the strata of this cake!our little helper was on hand to eat cake scraps and peach slices.

we ate like royalty. nothing as nice as a sunday evening with family you love, especially when you have food like this to eat!

and finally, here is mary's dog in a diaper. hi chloe!

happy birthday mary! we sure do love you!

happy weekend.

i just got home from my glamorous trip to baltimore (ok not even baltimore, i stayed in the hotel district at Baltimore-Washington airport), and i'm ready to relax this weekend. this is the second weekend in a row TH has been gone, so i have lots of plans to stay busy and happy.

making this wreath

shopping in georgetown

babysitting some cute little kids and starting to knit some baby stuff

making a cake for this girls birthday

and visiting with family

enjoy your weekend! i'm off to ride my bike to the DMV to turn in our license plates. goodbye forever, MINI cooper. sniff sniff.

picture from our trip to turks and caicos in may.

craft night with the gals.

it turns out that my craft parties should really be called "come over and eat some food and talk with your friends" night. which really are the best kinds of parties, right?

besides a couple of yarn balls i wrapped, and a scout patch hannah sewed onto a little scout shirt, there was nary a craft to be seen. and i loved it that way. naomi brought over some little coca colas, christina brought some popsicles, and we all just basked in the fun of girls night.

and bonus: now i have a wreath to make for the front door on my own time while i catch up on a ridiculous TV show. taking suggestions for new shows (people keep telling me battlestar gallactica?).

and double bonus: i have been cooking/baking a TON since TH left town, and i practiced a couple things last night:
cheese straws, thumbprint cookies, and brownie peanut butter cookies. the cheese straws are set to become a regular thing. those little devils were goood.

eating vietnamese in eden.

i'm embarrassed to admit that i have lived all my life in the DC area and have never eaten a meal at the Eden Center in falls church. it's the asian restaurant mecca for the area, and rumored to have the best vietnamese food in the mid-atlantic. i've been there over the years for the occasional bubble tea or bahn mi, but never a sit down meal (i was a little scared).but! last night i conquered my fears and had the most delicious vietnamese food of my adult life. my sweet friend mei li and i had dinner at Viet Huang. we shared a fresh spicy lotus flower salad, drunken noodle tofu, and carmelized fish. after dinner we went next door to Song Que for yogurt bubble tea. i loved the tart yogurt and sucking up those tapioca balls.

i can't wait to go again with friends! anyone up for an adventurous dinner?

cutie baby.

this weekend i couldn't stop thinking about this baby. mark left on friday for a long business trip, but before he left we got a sonogram. folks, this is one cute + funny baby. we saw baby do somersaults, wave hello, and grab its little toes with its teeny fingers. it was so incredible to see and also made us giggle about how much personality baby already has at 19 weeks!

after he left to the airport, i was sitting on our bed, reading my name is asher lev, when i finally finally felt the little baby move inside of me. what a freaky, cool, amazing, odd experience! and to think that it's just the beginning and i'll start to feel it more. the good news is, with seeing the baby, feeling it move, and actually looking pregnant - i finally feel like this is a real thing. and i feel like the world around me is so beautiful and i can't wipe this goofy grin off my face.

breaking news.

we sold the mini cooper! boo hoo, tears of sorrow welling up in both of our eyes. now we are carless for the rest of the summer (hello zipcar!), or until we find a car we really like. we sold the mini to the sweetest girl i think i've ever met. she refused to negotiate the price, even though we started high on purpose, so i dropped it a few hundred because i felt bad. good thing i don't sell cars for a living, i would be out on the streets!

if you are trying to buy a new car, i would definitely recommend selling your old car yourself. it took us about 3 weeks from posting it on craigslist and putting "for sale" signs in the window to sell it. we created a blog, a google phone number, and an email address for our little MINI, so we didn't fear putting the ad on craigslist. in the end, craigslist triumphed. our buyer was the first one to show genuine interest and the first one to drive it, and we felt pretty lucky to have avoided any major headaches of buyers falling through or trying to scam us. we walked away with so much more money than we would have with a trade-in, and our buyer purchased the car for much less than she would have at a dealer. it might take a little more blood, sweat, and tears to sell your car yourself, but it's a much sweeter deal if you have the time. plus then you get to know who is driving your old car around, and that's just a nice thought, ya know, for posterity's sake.

repeat summer.

remember last summer how we were out of town the entire time? well guess who's doing it again?? gosh, the rest of this month is toast, and we are both out of town the last half of July, then a couple more trips for me in august. it makes me sad, it almost feels like summer is already over and it's just beginning. boo hoo.

here are a few things i want to do this summer anyway. you know, those 4 days i'm home:
1. make and eat a pavlova.
2. go on a hike.
3. swim.
4. eat slurpees.
5. kayak/canoe in the potomac.
6. ditch work to go museum-ing and movie-matinee'-ing.
7. go to the beach.

people are nice to pregnant ladies.

i got a free rice bowl at tokyo joe's today. that's what happens when you show up without a wallet, looking tired, sweaty, pale, and pregnant. i am grateful to people who take pity on people having a bad day.
and i really need to learn to carry snacks around with me. i'm starting to be hungry a lot more often, which happens to be coinciding with my expanding belly. how curious.
as sick as i've been during this pregnancy, i feel incredibly lucky every day to be carrying life in my belly. it's such a miracle, and brings entirely new perspective to my relationship with my mother. she had 6 kids and was sick every day for the first 3 months with every. single. child. i have no idea how she did it, but i'm grateful she did. i love having so many brothers and sisters. it's especially cool that we are all still so close as we are having our own children, the cousins are all great friends. it makes me so happy.

oh shootie cutie.

i feel good about today. maybe we sold our car last night, i'll find out today if our schpiel worked. mark is really sad about it, so i'm trying to get him excited about a new car.

we are looking at VW golfs and subaru wagons and he really wants to look at a hyundai. "new car, new car", i say to him and he says to me "why can't we just get an old car like the starving artists that we are" and i say to him "but the baby! reliability! warranty! shiny and new!" and welp, the truth is i don't really care if we get a new car or old car, but they seem to be pretty much the same price once you figure out the financing. and savings on gas if we buy a diesel. so why not buy a new car after alls said and done?

do you think this is the most boring post i've ever written? it must rank high up there.

it's time to eat a bento box for lunch and see my sweetie cutie and try to not talk about cars or babies. i love that we get to have lunch together since our offices are only 3 blocks away from each other.

have a great weekend, lovies! i hope you enjoy every single minute of it. i'm off to denver for a few days next week, and this kicks off our crazy 2 months of travel. here we go!

glasses and cats. not together.

we had an hour tonight where we didn't know what to do. (we need hobbies). so naturally i made him try on all the glasses in our home, which are your favorite? i have my pick. and my not pick, as you'll see.

and also, a cat that lived with us for a week last autumn. just cause sometimes you wanna see a little kitty cat.

new summer music.

i admit, i'm at a bit of a loss for new music this summer. nothing has really spoken to me yet. i've been listening to NPR first listen for the past few weeks, hoping for some inspiration, and maybe i've found some?

Marissa Nadler

BOBBY

The Cults

I don't know, I just feel like this summer I need music that sounds different than...sleigh bells, best coast, or enter random indie brooklyn band here. i want something fun to listen to, but also something kind of ethereal. something to roll down the windows and sing along to, and something to sit around on a hot day with a dripping glass of icy beverage melting in your cup. maybe i'm looking for two kinds of music.

any inspiration? what are you listening to this summer?

sugar lovin.

things i cannot live without.

frozen junior mints.
stale sour patch kids.
strawberries and ice cream.

how about you?

delaplane, virginia.

cute goats and sheep AND funnelcake with strawberries? well, sign me up. we had a great time last weekend in rural virginia petting cute animals and feasting on all sorts of fried sugary things. i love summer fairs.

rested and not ready.

pregnancy has hijacked my body. these days i just wake up sick even though i've treated myself well all weekend and exercised and ate smartly and got plenty of rest (i'm looking at you double 3 hour nap). it's so puzzling to be pregnant.

i really am excited about this baby, but i think i understand the weariness of pregnancy. i felt great all last week and now the past 2 days have rendered me useless.

but onto a different topic. aren't these shoes beautiful?

strawberries.

i've been eating strawberries all week like they're going out of style. i made 8 things of jam, 1 strawberry cake, 1 strawberry shortcake, and have eaten an undefined amount of strawberries off the stem. i'm a pretty happy girl.

we bought a FLAT of strawberries, which is like 16 pints, last weekend at the Delaplane strawberry festival. our house has had the fragrant smell of strawberries for the past week and it's been pure heaven. SIXTEEN PINTS of strawberries is a lot.

last night i made these biscuits, sliced some strawberries, and piled vanilla ice cream and whipped cream high on top. oh gosh, i don't think i've ever enjoyed food so much. (have i told you how thankful i am to be able to eat pretty much anything i want again? those 8 weeks of nausea were miserable.)

i love eating in the summer. next up: peach season!!

(image found here)

front door.

we've been working on making our little apartment a home for about 4 months now, and i finally feel like it's coming together in some ways. hooray for small victories.

one of my favorite parts about our house is the front door. even though it's a basement apartment, we have a little ledge right next to our front door that is now inhabited by a little gnome friend. thanks to P for carrying him home like a baby from eastern market when i was too weak. haha. i like to think he hangs out there all day long causing mischief and playing tricks on our landlords upstairs. we gave him some little flowers to shade him from the hot summer sun.

coming home makes me happy.

16 weeks.

i don't think there's anything wrong with a can of diet coke when you're pregnant. hell, i don't see anything wrong with two cans of diet coke. everything is ok in moderation, right? right.

yet...i haven't quite been able to crack open that diet coke since i got pregnant. i do agree with my midwife and the baby books that it's best to wait till the 2nd trimester (just-to-be-safe) to partake in all that nonsense bad-for-you stuff like caffeine, hair dye, and exercise. so now that i'm in the 2nd, it's time to get a move on! but until i feel comfortable doing so, i'll continue to take sips of my husbands coke at the movie theatre (liquid gold!). cause it doesn't count if it's someone elses, right? like there are no calories in that bite of cake you steal from a friend? or that half a donut someone else brought to the party. i mean, right?

16 weeks