Spinach dip & cheesecake

We had girls' night out the other night at the Cheesecake Cafe -- SO fun! I wasn't going to go, so I called Jen and told her I decided to stay home with Brian that night because the only nights we had had together were spent in the ER lately. But, she convinced me to go, and Brian told me to go, just make sure I rent him a movie and he would be fine. And he was.

So I was off in the nasty weather up to the northside Cheesecake Cafe. I LOVE that restaurant. I think it was designed specifically for women. Anyway, we enjoyed a night of laughter and fun for a few hours. We had spinach dip, which I LOVE, and then I had chicken caesar salad ... mmmmmmm and then to top it off, Oreo cheesecake, of course!

The girls were a blast! I didn't know three of the nine that were there, but it doesn't seem to matter when women get together, we inevitably found things in common. The theme of the night seemed to be babies, since two of us were prego, and everyone else has babies. They were telling some horror stories about pregnancy/birth and I wasn't the least bit scared. It was funny to listen to them, and know that in a few months I'll have stories too.

Anyway, I loved girls night -- we really should do it more often -- hint, hint, Jen and Tammy.

10 reasons why I love my husband so much

10. He knows just how I like my toast made.
9. He knows how to make a bath perfect for me, just the way I like it.
8. He does the laundry without complaining.
7. He is SO cute when he is sleeping and doesn't know I'm watching.
6. He loves me for who I am and just the way I am.
5. On the days I think I look the worst, inevitably he will tell me how beautiful I am.
4. He loves my ever-expanding body and doesn't think I've ever looked better.
3. He has talked to the baby since we very first knew we were pregnant.
2. He cleans the kitchen without me asking.
1. He is him, and that's just how I want him.

How nerdy are YOU?

Thanks to Alyson's testing for verifying I"m not a nerd!

I know the Miami Airport like the back of my hand...

Yup, I do, since we got to spend 13 hours in it.

First of all, I never call about my flights to see if they are on time. Sometimes I check online, but if anything, my flights are late, and I can deal with a few hours at the airport to wait for my flight. I will from now on check on all my flights.

Okay, with that out of the way, here is the story:

We showed up to the airport Sunday morning at 7:00 to get our tickets for our 9:00 flight. The United clerk couldn't seem to find us in the computer. He finally found us by our confirmation numbers and informed us that our flight was changed to 6:00 that morning and we had missed it. So we thought, well, there has to be enough flights going back that we can just jump on the next flight -- WRONG, it was January 1st, one of the busiest days for flying in the year, and apparently EVERYTHING was booked. He told us the only thing he could do was put us on stand-by for a 5:00 p.m. heading to Dallas, and then we would be stand-by from Dallas to Calgary. He told us that was our only option, so we took it. We slept in the airport, ate in the airport, played games in the airport and read in the airport for 10 hours. We headed to the gate in time to catch the flight at 5:00, only to find out that we were not on the top of the stand-by list, like we had been told, and that we wouldn't be making the flight, but conveniently the other four people that made it onto that flight didn't look like they had been sleeping in the airport for the last 10 hours. So I asked the ticket guy what was their priority for picking people for stand-by, since surely we were the first ones on the list. He said it was done by how much people paid for their ticket. Brian's was bought on his mom's airmiles, and mine was paid for, so we were bumped to the bottom because of the airmiles. By the way, by this time I was in complete tears and uttering words that my husband has NEVER heard come out of my mouth -- I don't think he thought I knew some of them.

***** Side note: That does not make any sense. Do you know how many flights had to be purchased in order to get that free one? GRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrr.......*****

So then we headed (I waddled) back to the United counter, only to find out that the 5:00 flight was their last flight of the day, so they closed down. There was not a sole to be found that was paid by United. So we were pretty ticked off. We headed over to the Air Canada counter, because they are in the "Star Alliance" with United, and we wondered if they could help. They were really nice, but were booked and had stand-bys full, so we weren't going anywhere that night. So Air Canada just suggested that we get a hotel or sleep in the airport (NOT LIKELY) and come first thing in the morning and get a flight.

So that's what we did. This pregnant duck, as Brian calls me so fondly with my waddle, was not going to be staying in the airport any longer. I was done! So there is a hotel thing that connects you to all the hotels in the area and you can take a shuttle to the airport. So we called around about prices, and we found one for around $90 (which wasn't the lowest price, but not the highest either). We caught the shuttle to the hotel, and ran to our room as quickly as possible. You see, our hotel was attached to a bar, and the locale around the airport area is much less than desirable. We were just glad to see a bed and a shower and free wireless internet! We never heard the bar, but I'm sure we were both so tired we wouldn't have woken up at anything. So it was about 11 by the time we got to bed and got all the phone calls made to our parents and people that were supposed to be picking us up at the airport. We set the alarm for 4:30 and out of bed we got. We got showered and ready to go and caught the shuttle back to the airport at 5:30. We barely missed the 5:00 shuttle ... grrr...

So we get to the airport, the United counter, and I stand in line, and when I get to the front of the line, the lady, Maxine Mitchell, our savior, asked me what was wrong, what happened! I explained our situation and she managed to get us on a flight that was pretty much boarding at that moment. We boogied through security and made it onto our flight :) Not stand-by! She got both of our flights booked for the exit row -- love the extra leg room! We made it into Calgary at a reasonable time. I was just glad to be home.

Those are two days of my life I can't get back. I was a cranky pregnant lady, and Brian has now started to just call me pranky! Anyway, I have slowly recovered, and I'm doing better, but I didn't think I'd risk flying so soon again, and now I'm headed off to Inuvik for a week on February 6th. That's for my next blog!

Welcome to Miami...

Well, I don't even know where to start, Oh, faithful readers! (ha ha ha ha ha) So we spent Christmas in Miami with the in-laws. We had a lot of fun in Miami -- kinda hard to not have fun, if you ask me. We spent time visiting a lot of Brian's cousins, whom I had never met, so that was really fun to finally meet people that I had only ever heard about. We even went deep sea fishing, which was a big step for the waterphobic person -- ME! I don't like the thought of what is in water that deep, and I certainly didn't like the fact that we could see the bottom of the ocean, then it was getting harder, and then BOOM black. It was kinda creepy. But it was a big enough boat, that I figured I was okay. I guess I forgot about the actual catching of fish part -- something else I've never done. Let's just say I never touched my bait -- Brian or his brother always baited my hook for me. When my brother-in-law said to Brian "So we just stick the hook right between their eyes, right?" I almost hurled then and there. I didn't need to know that. We were obviously using little fish to catch bigger ones. I didn't catch anything. My father-in-law didn't catch anything, but my sister-in-law, who was sick for most of it, caught a few in the few minutes she actually fished! Oh, well. I had a few really big bites that I couldn't hold onto the rod, but by the time Brian came over to help, it was gone :( People caught eel, shark, and mackeral. It was awesome. You could hear some of the big fish when the finally brought them on board, you could hear them flipping out (literally ha ha) and hitting the side of the boat. So that was our deep sea fishing experience. I'll attach a picture from that. In the picture, we didn't catch that big hugo mugo 80-pound fish, it was there when we came back from our fishing.


We also saw a sea turtle too, but he quickly left before I could get a good picture, but I at least got a picture of him.

There were some BEAUTIFUL houses and boats out there. Man, people have money.



We stayed in West Palm Beach, and we were only a 20-minute drive from the ocean. We took family pictures on the beach, and they were really nice. We mostly hung out at the beach.


This was the view on our ride to land after the deep sea fishing -- it was so breathtaking, this picture doesn't do it justice!