Dr. Leininger!

The last few weeks have been a little crazy around here in our apartment because Tommy has been cramming and working frantically to finish his thesis. His defense was scheduled for this Tuesday, and he had to get a final draft ready for his committee to read at least a week beforehand. Once he finished that, he had to get the actual presentation for his defense ready. He felt pretty good about it and was just ready to be DONE with this project he's been working on for over a year now. He had his defense in the afternoon on Tuesday and he passed! (Obviously and unsurprisingly!)

It's developed into a tradition in his department for people to prank people's desks when they defend their thesis, so they come back to the office and find their desk completely changed. Tommy's officemates decorated his desk with trees and a Texas theme, since he'd told them we were sad about leaving the trees in North Carolina to go to Texas. 

Before Tommy actually did his defense, I sneaked into the office and brought balloons and a cake to add to the decoration of his office. I found one of his officemates and got her to help me hide them and she brought them out when he was finished. I wasn't able to actually be there for the defense (it was during Dane and Indie's naptime) but Dane and I came up as soon as Indie had gotten picked up in the afternoon. 

One of the previous pranks to a different student was that they replaced his desk with this child's play desk, and it's been sitting in the office for the last 1.5 years ever since. Dane found it and loved coloring on it. We might just take it home with us even though it is pink and purple--it's the perfect size for him and he loves having little chairs to sit on.

After we cleaned up Tommy's office a little, we went to get a celebratory dinner at Bullock's BBQ, just north of Duke campus in Durham. We'd never been there but it's always one of those NC BBQ places people list as one of the best and most authentic places you have to go to! Dane did really pretty well at the restaurant (he's not usually very good) and we really enjoyed our barbecue and sides. I have to confess--I finally, finally actually like hushpuppies. I hope that we can find some in Texas too.

AND, it's also a tradition for the advisor of the student to host a celebration get-together at a restaurant or bar for people in the program to congratulate the successful new PhD. Tommy's adviser, Alan, had another student defend her thesis the day after Tommy's, so Tommy and Maria had a joint celebration at Geer St. Gardens, a restaurant in north Durham. There were a ton of people there and we had a good time talking to everyone. 

Dane was BEYOND nice--he sat in the high chair and ate french fries for about an hour. His little friend Benjamin came and sat next to him, but they basically ignored each other except for trying to steal each other's food.

Tommy and his adviser, Alan Gelfand. I've only met him a few times, but he has been such a great adviser for Tommy--helpful in getting him to graduate on time and very understanding about Tommy taking time to spend with me and Dane when needed.

All in all, we are SO SO happy that it all went so well. It's unbelievable that Tommy is really and truly done. (He still has work to do to turn his thesis into several papers that he and his adviser are hoping to get published, but we know he will be able to graduate!) It has gone so well and we just need to get more realistic about the fact that we are moving so soon. I can't wrap my mind around it--but we are so close to being done!

tommy's baby books

you know how every person has a box of stuff at their house? stuff like old elementary school projects and school pictures and soccer medals and ninth grade awards for perfect attendance? well, on saturday, we got two giant packages in the mail from tommy's family. and they contained two huge binders, filled with every single item of memorabilia tommy has collected over his lifetime. tommy's amazing sister melissa has been in charge of consolidating each child's box of stuff into a book, ordered chronologically and with each piece of paper in its own individual page protector. these books are an AMAZING feat of organization and an adorable collection of things that tommy's mom saved over his lifetime. like this:

i know it's a blurry cell phone picture, but oh my gosh how cute.

we spent two and a half hours last night for family night going over each and every page of these books, admiring the cute pictures tommy drew two decades ago and reading the christmas cards tommy's parents wrote every year and the valentines his siblings gave him each valentine's day. 

there were several things that made us laugh so hard we cried, like the valentine his younger sister kristen wrote to him when she was probably six or seven: "sorry i was being mean to you earlier. i hope mom likes your valentine! love, kristen." or the other valentine from his little brother kurt when HE was around that age: "you're a good brother. maybe if you were better at tennis you could beat me. precious, kurt." or the paragraph in the letter that tommy wrote to his grandparents when he was around twelve: "The Halls, a family in our ward, adopted a baby from China. Kristen was talking about it with my mom today, because my mom didn't see the baby. Then Kristen asked if we could adopt a baby from China. As if my mom didn't have enough else to do." (hahahaha! i'm still laughing!) 

it was so fun for me to read through these books and get a little glimpse of what tommy was like before i met him. i remember when we were dating thinking that it was kind of weird yet really good that i hadn't known tommy in high school--that i didn't know what his high school persona was. not that it actually matters, but it's funny to talk about and know what people used to be like. well, tommy was basically just how you would have thought: 

• star student: no, really, he was his high school valedictorian and there were more awards in the high school portion of his book than i'd ever seen. also, he participated in tons of academic extracurriculars that i'd never even heard of. 
• cute brother: after his younger sister callie was born, tommy's mom said that tommy was the only one who could take care of her when she was in one of her "moods." 
• super nice guy: every girls choice dance, he was asked by about five girls, and two different times he went with girls with special needs who had massive crushes on him.

i loved looking through these books with him, although i did conclude that if i had known him in high school i would have totally been intimidated. (seriously! there were so many awards! for so many things!) but there you go. a big thank you to melissa for making and sending us those books! 

5

today is a big day in the leininger household. for several reasons, both having to do with the number 5.

first, it is the 5-year anniversary of my first date with tommy. five years ago, we went and ate pupusas together. and the coincidences were just piling up, too good to be true. i knew that this actuarial science major who ate pupusas and was the fourth of nine kids was destined to be in our family. (well, it just took another year and a half to REALLY convince me.) i vividly remember sitting across from tommy at the el salvador restaurant on center street, him wearing a LAPD t-shirt, me thinking how cute he was.

5 years ago. 5. 5. 5.

wow.

tonight we are going to celebrate this milestone by going to eat pupusas again. . . . but this time with our baby in tow.

again, wow.

also, dane is 5 months old today. i know, it's ridiculous. tell me how ridiculous it is.

okay, here are some pictures. from TODAY! as current as they can be.

his favorite new trick: eating his feet. it's impossible to change his diaper and give him baths right now because he just wants to be scrunched up in a little ball eating himself.

i finally put together his exersaucer yesterday and he's a big fan. he hasn't really gotten the whole "standing" thing yet, but he really likes the toys and being able to be upright and playing.

the day of love

how could you not be in love with a little boy who loves YOU so much that he starts panting when he sees you, who gives you the world's biggest grin when you save him from their naps, who tries to eat every part of you whenever you're holding him, who sometimes can't finish eating because he makes eye contact with you and then just keeps smiling and laughing because he remembers that you're there? all he wants, all he needs to make him happy is ME (and his daddy). what else do you need in life?

and how could you not be in love with a man who wakes up early to clean the house without you knowing, who comes home from a long day at school hoping for a chance to play with his baby and who always wants to be the one to rock him to sleep, who buys you flowers the week before valentine's day so they'll be cheaper, who will watch cheesy movies with you whenever you want (even when you still won't watch the dark knight rises with him), who will sometimes call you "lovergirl" when he texts you during the day?

these two guys are promising to give me a rockin' valentine's day celebration tomorrow. even though we don't actually have anything planned--every day with them is a day of love.

and also, happy 55th anniversary to my wonderful Myres grandparents today! we love you!

a question

why is it, whenever i mention that tommy made dinner (which he does pretty often), people are shocked and amazed and say things like "he is so sweet to cook for you!"?

i mean, i agree--it is sweet of him. i appreciate it 100%. but let's just look at this logically, people. he's just as good of a cook as i am, so there's no reason to be surprised that he can make anything. (people have said things like "wow, tommy made this? i'd better be careful...") and of course, when i make dinner, nobody says, "that's so sweet of you to cook dinner for tommy!" even when i take out the trash, nobody thinks THAT'S especially amazing of me or anything. and if i weren't here, he'd be making his own food anyway, right?

it's not some kind of power play; it's not even like he's doing it to be especially sweet to me. it's just what has to happen in our house if we ever want to eat with everything that's going on (DANE). like tommy has said, it's a partnership. i guess i'm just grateful to be married to someone who thinks it's equally his job to get the food on the table as much as it is mine.

text text text

of all the texts i send, maybe half of them are to tommy. possibly two-thirds. my texting inbox is almost full, and i have 277 texts from him sitting in there as i speak (type).

i remember the first time i texted tommy. it was in early, early 2008--right at the beginning of winter semester. sarah and i were switching out of an unsatisfactory religion class and remembered him telling us how excited he was about his professor for d&c, so i sent him a text asking who his professor was.

we'd never gone on a date; we'd never really talked or flirted or anything at this point. it still felt pretty bold to text this cute guy without ever having him text me first, but i felt pretty safe because i really just wanted to get a recommendation on a professor.

and it took him about three hours to respond. which is AGES in texting time! i felt almost foolish responding to his text.

but i asked him another question, maybe about what time his class was, and it took him another three hours to respond.

that's how our texting conversations always went in the beginning--he took FOREVER to get back to me, which is exactly the opposite of how texting is supposed to go.

we figured it all out and sarah and i actually added tommy's same class. and a few weeks later we went on our first date. and the rest is history!

later, after we were actually dating, and he responded to my text messages in a much more timely manner, i found out that he would use a "delayed-response" setting in his phone to send texts. he'd get a text message and respond, but he'd set it so that it wouldn't be sent for two or three hours, so that he didn't seem too eager and so that he did seem really busy (and important).

i'm sorry, but that still cracks me up. what a smooth operator he was (and still is, as a matter of fact).

3rd anniversary celebration

last week, on wednesday, we celebrated our THIRD wedding anniversary. 

and by celebrated, i mean that tommy drove from mobile, alabama to durham with dallin, and i flew from LAX to RDU with a several-hour long delay that meant i didn't get in until 1:30 am the next day. 

so we didn't really celebrate on the actual day. or even see each other. 

but tommy did buy me some beautiful flowers. (and i didn't get him anything... as usual, i am the worst.)

okay, but knowing that our actual anniversary was going to be spent apart, we DID celebrate a few weeks ago before leaving california. we spent our last free weekend in solvang and santa barbara, just 1-2 hours north of santa monica. we booked a night at a cute little bed and breakfast in solvang (not two nights--we were too cheap!) on friday and spent saturday wandering around the two cities. 

solvang is inland a ways, back in the santa inez valley (which is BEAUTIFUL) and is a cute little danish town in the middle of spanish country. tommy was very pleased to get a good danish meal of flaeskesteg (pronounced fleskastie) and meatballs, and we visited several bakeries to stock up on danish pastries all morning long. 

santa barbara isn't too far away, and we just walked around the downtown area for a while. then we rode on the harbor's little water taxi for about half an hour and spent some time relaxing on the beach. it was so nice!

other than the horrendous traffic we got stuck on both going there and back, it was a perfect little getaway to celebrate three years of happily married bliss. because of course, it has been that.

and it was also kind of a baby-moon (within a summer that was basically just a long baby-moon) to celebrate the end of our child-free existence. no more bed and breakfasts or solitary weekend trips for us for quite a while...

because ready or not, here he comes! 

a real young women's gem

yesterday, i went home to do some laundry, have a dermatologist appointment, and hang out with the fam. while i was there, i pulled down the remaining four boxes of stuff that i had left at my house from their spot at the top of the garage and started to sort through them. these boxes were filled with all sorts of memorabilia: high school yearbooks and photo albums, my letters for my non-existent letterman's jacket, my baby dolls from eons ago, my (very, very numerous) soccer trophies and medals, AP US history notes (apparently i couldn't bear to throw them away when i packed the boxes five years ago), young women's binders and laminated quotes, random postcards and decks of cards and keychains from costa rica and canada and niagara falls, and all sorts of forgotten gems that i greatly enjoyed seeing and remembering.

and then i threw most of it away. we condensed the four boxes into two, took pictures of the to-be-trashed, and called it a good day's work. the two boxes will hopefully squeeze into our car for the road trip back to north carolina and the yearbooks and photo albums will go onto our bookshelves and everything will be where it belongs.

as i was going through my beehives binder, though, i found something that i had thought had been lost. it was dated 10/13/02 (almost an entire decade ago!), written in my own fourteen-year-old handwriting (original spelling and capitalization has been preserved), and was titled

Qualities I Want My Future Eternal Companion to Have:

• loves the Lord, Jesus, and the gospel
• believes in the gospel; testimony
• believes in me; has faith in me
• intelligent
• interesting to talk to
• fun to be around and hang out with
• return missionary
• trustworthy and honest
• loves me
• will love our kids
• understanding
• respects me
• not overspending/frugal with money
• good sense of humor/funny
• good temper
• physically fit
• patient
• won't rule over me, will let me be his partner
• lets me make my own decisions
• humble
• not criticizing or complaining
• hardworking and ambitious
• loves art and music/cultural
• knows me well enough to order my dinner for me
• is my BEST FRIEND
• I LOVE HIM
• he protects me
• courteous and polite

first of all, don't think too highly of my fourteen-year-old self: i'm pretty sure the accompanying YW's lesson was about how the first thing on your list should be that your future husband has a testimony and that you shouldn't have things like "tall" and "handsome" on your list (because i'm pretty sure this was a revised, after-lesson version and "tall" and "handsome" were prominent features on the original one with a testimony as more of an afterthought instead of item number 1).

and, not that i had TOO high of expectations as a brand new miamaid or anything . . . but i don't know if tommy could really order my dinner for me reliably. he said he could probably do it 50% of the time. 

otherwise, i think it's pretty much spot-on. 

FUN weekend FUN

we were eating dinner with my cousin andrew on thursday when he mentioned that this friday was a first friday celebration in venice. i know they have those in raleigh, a sort of art walk thing, but apparently here in venice they're all about the food trucks that line up along the street--there were probably 20 or 30 options to choose from. so we decided to go and see what it was all about. we were looking for the ever-popular grilled cheese truck (which always has an hour-long line and is beloved by many), but it apparently wasn't there, so we settled for some other food. 

the sidewalks were CRAZY crowded. you could tell which trucks were the most popular by how bad the crowds were around the truck.

we got the pota-tornado, with a giant sausage in the middle. there was an entire food truck dedicated JUST to these tornado potatoes. definitely seemed like such a boy thing.

andrew insisted that we needed a picture in front of the medical marijuana dispensary. please ignore my swollen face--i am six months pregnant.

we also bought some giant nachos and we were pretty much filled up. we ended the night by visiting diddy riese and getting some more ice cream sandwiches. all in all a VERY successful night, i would say.

and then today, saturday, we were determined to hit up some other la sites. first up was the original LA farmer's market, which has apparently been going since 1934. it did not seem like a farmer's market to me, since it had BUILDINGS instead of just canopies and clearly the people working there were not farmers selling their produce, but i'm not complaining. it was still great. AND we broke out our fancy new DSLR for this trip, so admire the quality of these pictures! TA-DA!

we were awestruck and amazed by the genius of these band-aid strips. mustache-shaped band-aids? SPAM BAND-AIDS!? there were about 10 other awesome kinds that we ogled and tried to think of reasons to buy. we ended up buying some as early christmas presents for siblings because they were so awesome.

and last but not least, we finally went on our bike ride down the bike path that goes for some-twenty-odd miles along the beaches up here. we went about seven miles each way, stopping to relax on the beach for a while in the middle. it was FUN and definitely something i wanted to do this summer--and probably a good thing we didn't wait any longer or else i would not have been enjoying it as much.

we walked our bikes a good ways on our way back down the venice boardwalk, which was INSANE, crowded, marijuana-smelling, and super classy. i couldn't believe how long it went AND how many cannabis dispensaries there were. go venice! stay classy.

  

and finally you all know what we've been up to all this time! and there are some great baby bump pictures in there to satisfy all you curious people. 

good-bye, june!

i can't believe june is over. i can't believe our summer is close to half over. i can't believe 2012 IS half over. TIME IS MOVING SO FAST.

this week, tommy went gallivanting across the world to japan for the week (he went to a statistics conference there) and i went to irvine. yes, our trips were pretty much the same in coolness. he went to shrines; i went to church. he went to japanese gardens in japan; i went to a japanese garden at the huntington library in pasadena. he saw monkeys; i hung out with my little brother and cousin who acted like monkeys. it was pretty much the same. he's just landed at the airport and is on his way back AS I TYPE THIS. yes, i am very excited to see him.

the only useful thing i did this week was working on the quilt i'm making for baby boy. i shouldn't spoil the surprise for all of you avid readers, since it's not officially done, but i'm too proud of it to NOT share. CHECK IT OUT! I AM THE QUEEN BEE QUILTER OF THE WORLD! (seriously, i am so excited about it. maybe i've found my calling in life.)

the most awesome thing about the quilt is that i made SO MANY MISTAKES and you can't see any of them once you sew the thing up! so no worries. it's definitely a beginner's quilt. 

i'll post some more pictures of the week later. the world traveler is almost home! 

tommy eats at restaurants!

actually, we both ate at these restaurants yesterday. but we only took pictures of tommy at each one, so it looks like he was there by himself, haha. but that's okay, because the main reason we went to both of these restaurants was because of their names and their connections to tommy. 

exhibit a:

the moweses told us about duke's--they said it was delicious, amazing, situated right on the water (literally, RIGHT on the water) in malibu, and they especially recommended the hula pie, which was this little beauty in the picture below: macademia nut ice cream disguised as a pie with a lot of hot fudge sauce. we were sold at the hula pie, but when we heard it was called duke's, we thought we might as well go and show our support for tommy's school. we went there at lunch time and just ordered the dessert (we were on our way to go on a hike and had a picnic and DIDN'T want to spend $20 per plate). the waiter loved us.

as we left, tommy accidentally gave the parking attendant a $20 and told him to keep the change. then he realized what he'd done and went back and exchanged it for the $5 he originally intended to give him. my hero! so the parking attendant guy loved us too--we got out of there in a hurry.

exhibit b:

we went on our hike, and then thought we might as well finish off an excellent day with an original tommy's burger, complete with chili. no explanations needed as to why we decided to go here.

tommy had a good food day all by himself.