Happy Daddy's Day!

Between the fabled post I'm planning about Universal and our recent trip to Tennessee and Alabama, I should be posting a little bit more AND more frequently than I am. I realize this. 

And yet.

I'm a slow blogger. That's the long and short of it.

So, despite being behind on other posts that need to happen, I wanted to do a little tribute to Father's Day, or Daddy's Day, as Claire calls it. 

To the incomparable dads in our lives: we LOVE you. We RESPECT you. We think you're the very BEST that there ever was. We're so glad you are ours!

Anniversary #4

It's taking me forever to sort through all of our pictures and experiences from Orlando, but it will happen. Just not exactly sure when...

Brad and I celebrated our 4th anniversary last week. Yay, us! We actually were able to do quite a few fun things, just the two of us. Two days before our anniversary, we ventured out for a date to see "Newsies!" I LOVE the movie, so I was extremely excited when I saw it was coming to the DPAC. Thankfully, I discovered it was coming before Christmas last year and asked Santa for tickets. I'm a thinker, I am. The performance was fantastic. The set was so cool, the dancing was phenomenal, and I didn't mind too many of the plot differences between movie and stage production (not too many...but I did mind a few of them, truth be told. Has anyone else seen it? Opinions on the plot changes?).

The part of the evening I wasn't crazy about was childcare. Because we still haven't found a church to call home (I don't want to talk about it...it's the bane of my existence), we don't have a natural pool of people to draw from when it comes to babysitters. This left us resorting to relying on recommendations...which led us to paying $12/hour for a- very sweet- gal to watch our child watch a "VeggieTales" for 45 minutes and then sleep for the next three hours. It was almost physically painful to part with that money. I'm still a little traumatized by it.

My mom came in the next day and enabled us to go out without the sick feeling in our stomachs that we would be paying through the nose for someone reliable to sit with our daughter while she slept (she also played with her quite a lot). THANKS, MOM! We were able to go to Dame's Chicken and Waffles, finally. It's an extremely popular restaurant in town, and we have been wanting to check it out since, um, we moved here. You pretty much need to get a reservation, and we have actually tried to several times- unsuccessfully. Thank you, anniversary (and mom), for providing the opportunity. Y'all. It was SO GOOD. Weird and trendy, yes, but SO GOOD. We cleaned our plates and started talking about when we could return. If you come visit us, we'll make sure to get a reservation a week or two beforehand so that we can take you. Take our advice on this: GET MACARONI AND CHEESE AS YOUR SIDE. Even if you don't usually like it. You'll thank us later.

Playing with rocket exhibit at the museum

At Dame's. Fantastic date.

My dad came into town for the weekend so that he and mom could keep Claire for us while we headed out of town for a wedding. It was fabulous. We drove down to Augusta, Georgia for our friends' wedding. It was our very first Catholic wedding and was a fun- and very different- experience. It was absolutely beautiful! It was also much lengthier than your average protestant wedding (2 hours). We were so glad to get to be a part of the celebrating! We were, however, reminded that we are not late night people. We headed out from the reception at 11:30, and the garter and bouquet tossing had not even happened yet. (Also, I got to sleep in until 9:30 since we were at a hotel sans daughter. 9:30! I did not even know I was still capable of that. Can I get an "Amen," moms of littles??) 

Not sure what was so funny, but something was! Photo credit: Mom.

National Donut Day = free donuts at Krispy Kreme! It is a little unfortunate how close KK is to our house... Also, we learned KK is a North Carolina-based chain. Did you know that? 

I should also mention that Brad was on top of his game and got gorgeous flowers for the anniversary celebrating. Good job, Brad!

And for posterity, a list of things that have happened since our last anniversary:
1. Said our goodbyes to Boston and Boston friends.
2. Moved to Durham, North Carolina (almost 20-hour trip with the world's largest moving truck and an 18-month-old).
3. Brad started his Ph.D. program like a BOSS.
4. Claire started walking! And talking in paragraphs! And turned 2!
5. Duke won the national championship.
6. Brad finished his first year of Ph.D. work like a BOSS.
(plus a lot of other things, fun and not-so-fun)

It's been a great year. I'm looking forward to about 60(ish) more!

Pre-vacation excursion.

A couple of weeks ago, we went on vacation with my family to Universal Studios. That was fantastic, and I do plan to write about it. However, it'll be a long post, so until I get it done, I thought I'd post a little bit about our stop in Savannah, GA.

Brad and I decided to break our trip to Orlando into two days (yes, we drove rather than flew), and we spent the night a little south of Savannah. Ergo, we needed to stop and see some sights in Savannah. Obviously.

Due to the time of day we would be going through Savannah/the lack of a good nap/the fact that it was HOT and HUMID, we decided to spend about an hour looking around and then find a spot to eat a picnic dinner (I'm a big believer in not throwing out food, so I packed whatever was in our fridge into a cooler, and we ate on it all day while traveling). I found this list of free things to do in Savannah, and we picked a couple of things to try out.

We headed down to River Street, parked the car for an hour ($1/hour), and started strolling. It was slow going at first, given that the street was very cobblestone-y, and we didn't realize there was a nice PAVED walkway running parallel. Oops. We picked up a map of the historic district at a very conveniently located visitors desk (that was next to a bathroom!) and made a plan to check out a few of the historic parks located close to one another. Now, we went up (from the river to the main streets) the hard way, but we learned a better way to go down: right next to the Hyatt, there is a public elevator. MUCH better option than pushing a stroller uphill on cobblestone streets. Bless us.

We found a Black Dog shop on River Street. It's a New England thing, so it made us wistful and nostalgic. At least it made me those things.

This is what most of the streets looked like down by the river. Rough on the feet and the stroller, guys.

The Savannah Cotton Exchange and the Free Mason meeting hall. Also, the first Free Mason guild of Savannah was started by Bostonians.

The gate surrounding the shrubbery in the picture above had a different famous silhouette on each section. This is Jefferson. Looks just like a nickel.

Spanish moss everywhere.

The Savannah College of Art and Design is sprawling. Just everywhere. This is the prettiest of the buildings, by far.

Check out those fishy drains!

I had no idea that the Wesleys were all entrenched in Savannah's history.

I told Claire to come over for a picture, and this is what I got...

The Secret Garden, I think.

We hung out for a while in the War Memorial park. It was really beautiful and thoughtfully designed.

There were quite a lot of these quaint little bridges. If you look, you can see another tourist to the left of the greenery arch. She was rather annoyed that we were on the bridge, spoiling her picture. I wasn't crazy about her being in MY picture. Hmph.

Within just a few blocks, we were able to wander through several of the parks listed on the Historic District map. We probably would have enjoyed doing more, but again, it was HOT. Sweltering, even.

After roaming around for a while, we headed back to our air conditioned car and headed to Forsyth Park to eat supper. It was a gorgeous park. If we lived in Savannah, I'm pretty sure that Brad would go there everyday to study. And run. And eat. Basically, he would live there. 

Maybe on future trips to Florida we will be able to explore more, but we thoroughly enjoyed our short little excursion in Historic Savannah. It was a beautiful place to see...and let our toddler run out some energy. :)