College Years Photo Book

Speaking of photos, I finally got around to ordering our college years photo book. I put most of this book together over spring break and finished it up in May. 

I picked two of my favorite pictures of campus for the cover.

I scanned our student id cards for the title page.

The book spans almost five years. From our dating days...



to our married-with-a-baby days.



It's divided up by semesters and summer breaks.





Even though we already have separate albums for these events, I also included smaller photos of our semester abroad and our wedding, just for continuity's sake.



The last two pages are devoted to lists of all the courses we took at Pitt.

The book came to $60, which isn't too bad when you consider that it's 120 pages of photos covering five years of lives. I've only ordered books from Blurb and have always been really pleased. We have photo books devoted to growing up {mainly pictures from our rehearsal dinner slideshow}, studying abroad, our wedding, and our college years. From now on, I plan to make yearly albums!

Goodbye, Pittsburgh

We are flying to our new hometown of Seattle this morning!

This year, Pittsburgh really felt like home.  Perhaps it's because we bought a car and finally learned our way around the city. Perhaps it's because everywhere we go, from shopping at Trader Joe's to eating at Chick-fil-A to walking in the park, we see people we know. That's a good feeling and we're sad to leave. 

But we're really excited to begin this new chapter together. A chapter in which we will no longer be poor college students!

Our First Home

This is the last night we'll be sleeping in our first home, where Adam carried me over the threshold and where we brought Claire home from the hospital. 

 This little apartment on the first floor of a very old house has been really good to us over the last two years. When we were engaged, we had a very, very short timeline for apartment hunting. We toured this place first and loved it so much that we didn't look anywhere else!

There were a lot of things we loved about this apartment, like:

- The price. {450 a month! What, what!}

- That it was pretty close to campus while being pretty far away from most of the partying action. 

- Our super nice landlord who was always prompt about fixing things.

- The big, eat-in kitchen.

- The backyard and back porch.

- The dishwasher! 

Despite all the wonderful memories we have here, we're not too bummed about moving on. There were also a lot of things we didn't love about this apartment, like:

- Our noisy upstairs neighbors.

- The old coin-operated washer and dryer in the basement.

- The lack of street parking.

- The impossibly hard to clean radiators.

- That there was only one door {to the bathroom} in the whole place.

- The literally trashy neighborhood. Littering seemed to be everyone's favorite hobby.

For posterity, here are some pictures of our first place, as it looked in March before Claire arrived and her stuff took over every nook and cranny!

Kitchen. 

Living Room.

Bedroom.

Bathroom.

P.S. Just in case you're interested, here's a {admittedly pretty terrible} video tour of the place taken right before we turned in our keys.

Adam's Graduation

We kicked off the graduation festivities with a math department reception on Saturday morning. Adam won an award for being awesome at math!

We had a big family dinner at Gullifty's, a fun restaurant in Squirrel Hill, to celebrate on Saturday evening.  The main graduation ceremony was on Sunday afternoon.  Claire wore her Pitt gear in honor of the occasion.

Since Pitt is such a big school, only PhD students get to walk. After they did their thing, and of course plenty of speeches, the class of 2012 was officially pronounced alumni. This weekend was Claire's first time out of the house, besides church and the doctor, and she couldn't have behaved any better. We are blessed with a baby that really likes her sleep.

Before everyone went their separate ways, we snapped a family photo in the backyard. Since, as I mentioned earlier, half of Adam's siblings will be living abroad next year, this weekend was our last time together for a while. 

Now that Adam's a college grad, he's got the next two months off before he starts work. It has been really, really nice having him at home so far. I actually feel like I can get stuff {besides feeding Claire} done again. I could get used to this!

Adam's Four Years of College

 When Adam finishes a take-home test tomorrow, he will officially be a college graduate! He majored in applied math with minors in physics, computer science, and French.

Counting his AP credits from high school, he finished at Pitt with 177 credits. 

He took ten math classes, seven physics classes, five computer science classes, four graduate-level math classes, three French classes and two literature classes. 

We're so proud of him! Especially for surviving the last half of this semester with a newborn in tow. 

Rednal Benefit

Every February, the priests at the Newman Center throw a fancy dinner to benefit their retreat house, Rednal.



They open their swanky living area to the members of the community and let us students attend as well.





The raffle is always the highlight of the evening. They have a few grand prizes {like a $1,000 gift card to Nordstrom!} and different nationality-themed gift baskets.



Adam won something! We are very unlucky when it comes to drawings like this, so it was pretty exciting.



He won the Middle Eastern gift basket, which included delicacies like sesame fudge. Yay?

March for Life

Every year on the anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade decision, hundreds of thousands of people converge on the nation's capitol to march for life. In our past years at Pitt, we've always had a test or presentation that's prevented us from attending. Yesterday, we finally got to hop on the Newman Center's bus and make our way to DC.





















We attended a rally to hear from the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, and House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor. We marched from the National Mall to the Supreme Court. We ended the day with Mass. We got to be witnesses for life while awaiting the arrival of our little gift of life!

Advent Parties

Parties are fun, don't you think?



Last week, my lovely friend Natasha hosted a cookie exchange. I brought our favorite mint chocolate cookies. They were a little burnt because our oven caught fire while I was making them. How, you ask? Well, let's just say when you're baking Thanksgiving pies and some filling drips down to the bottom of the oven, don't wait several weeks to clean it up.





Over the weekend, the Newman Center had its' annual pre-finals-week celebration. Tim and Abigail {friends and FOCUS missionaries} did an awesome job hosting the party. The highlight of the night is always the white elephant gift exchange.



We brought some goodies from Trader Joe's. Those dark chocolate covered Joe Joe's are like crack, I tell you! I got lucky and ended up with, in my opinion, the best gift of the night, a Chick-fil-A gift card.

We had a lot planned for the last Sunday School of the semester - the traditional St. Nicholas celebration, an advent wreath craft and the nativity play, which we've been rehearsing for the last month. I know that seems like a crazy amount of stuff, but each class session is two hours long. Then our religious education director mysteriously cancelled class with no explanation. I know she must have had a very good reason, but I still can't help feeling annoyed, frustrated and disappointed. All our preparations down the drain!