In a nutshell

Have you ever been so far behind on something you thought you'd never get caught up? And then you continue to put off said project because you don't know where to start? That's how I feel about the blog. So I'm going to try to get you caught up on what we've been up to the past couple of weeks without writing a gazillion words or boring you to death.

I tend to have a love/hate relationship with computers. It's usually love. But right now it's hate. Here's why:

Two weeks ago we went to St. Louis and Columbia for a long weekend getaway, and I came back (last Monday) to find my hard drive on my main computer had crashed. I had worked on it Wednesday evening before leaving for St. Louis Thursday morning. It was working perfectly fine. I shut it down because I was going to be gone for four days (I usually leave it on all the time), and when I turned it on the following Monday it was just... dead.

Sadness.

Lesson #1 (of 1) people: Use a back-up.
This is the computer I use for work, and fortunately I had all my bookkeeping and business files backed up. What I didn't have backed up was all my music, pictures, videos and documents that I had also saved to this computer. While it would have been a pain to lose the business files, at least those are replaceable. What I can't replace are the thousands of photos I have taken of Lola throughout the first two years of her life. Luckily, I do have some of the pictures in other places... but not all of them. To make a long story short, my hard drive just quit working ("this is not uncommon," said the nice lady at the computer store). So I had to get a new one. In the meantime, the local computer repair store I went to wasn't able to retrieve ANY data from my old hard drive, so it is now on its way to "Geek Squad Central" somewhere in Kentucky (via Best Buy) in *hopes* that some computer whiz in a white coat can extract all or some of my data... for a reasonable price. I'm waiting for my "quote" as I write.

Enough feeling sorry for myself.

A lot of really GREAT things have happened over the past two weeks. As I mentioned earlier, we took a trip to St. Louis and Columbia a couple weeks ago and had a blast. The Blackburns also went, and we all bunked up with the Werners. Here are the four girlies (from left: Keaton, Chaney, Lola, Regan) at the zoo:

After spending a couple nights in St. Louis we headed to Columbia Saturday morning. Matt, Lola and I had lunch at Flat Branch then spent the rest of the afternoon tailgating before the Mizzou-Arizona State game. Lola and Regan enjoyed the tailgate snacks:

We also went to our annual county festival last weekend: Hootin an Hollarin. Lola enjoyed seeing the parade and riding the train (all by herself!):

We finished Lola's new room, and since Monday she has officially moved in and started sleeping in her new bed - a queen-sized bed! We hadn't planned to make the switch Monday night, but right before bedtime she insisted that she wanted to sleep in the "big girl bed," so we said, okaaaay. The first three nights were a little rough (up and down several times throughout the night), but last night she slept all night without getting up one time. So. Awesome. Here are a couple pics from her new room (many more to come, I promise):

And last but not least, I am now 34 weeks pregnant with baby boy Wade:

And that's what we've been up to the past couple of weeks. In a nutshell. More soon!