March for Babies Walk

This morning, I had the pleasure of joining my two friends, Laura and Laura for the March of Dimes' March for Babies Walk. (Side note, I should introduce them Bob Newhart-style: "Hi, I'm Christina. This is my friend, Laura, and this is my other friend, Laura." We won't even go into the number of Laura's, Lauren's and Lori's that I either work with or am friends with...it's approaching a dozen!)

Anyway, we walked the 4 miles together and had a great time doing it! I could have fun reading the phone book with these girls! I can't believe how many people were at the walk, it was really amazing. But we got a little cardio in and between the three of us, we raised over $1000 for a great cause. Put a few professional fundraisers together and we'll get the job done! We had a fantastic day for the walk...it was gorgeous out with some sun, some clouds, and a really nice breeze! Here's a pic from before we started the walk. We were too busy talking to take any more pictures except for one with Sloop (in the middle) and Chester the Cheetah. I want to send a big THANK YOU to everyone who contributed to my fundraiser. I was so excited to surpass my goal!! So...thank you to: Annie, Josh, Ron, Patty, Jeremy, Lisa, Alex, Rhonda, Laura, Wendi, Mark and Mary! Thank You Thank You Thank You!!

After I got home, we pulled out the hammock and I was able to read and nap outside with the dogs and enjoy the breezy sunny weather! Everything is better when the sun is shining!!

Happy Spring!

spring has arrived!

Yay!! We were so excited last weekend when the weather was so gorgeous that we could actually get outside and play! We started a new flower bed on the side of the house (still to be finished) and did lots of outside projects. Josh tilled the garden to get it ready for planting and I power washed the front & side of the house and also the fence that was covered with bird poo. The garden looks great and we're excited to plant some new things this year! The trick is keeping the bunnies out.

Thankfully, we've had no tornado watches or warnings yet but we did get some hail. Usually the sight of hail will have me running toward the closet with my dogs in tow, but this was harmless hail so I let Lukey go outside and play. He couldn't figure out what was going on. (Don't judge his mullet.)

Spring is very welcome in the Wright household!

Shell's pub crawl

Here are a couple pictures from Shell's birthday celebration last weekend. It was such a great time!! I haven't seen people dance like that since our wedding!!

Here is the delicious cake that we had!

I couldn't even begin to put all of the pictures that we got because there are SO many. Josh and I had a really great night and I am pretty sure Shell did too!

Yay for Baseball!!

I wanted to make Opening Day special this year because we are both excited for some warm weather and everything that comes with baseball season...cookouts, working in the yard, gardening, concerts, camping...all of the fun outdoors stuff that we enjoy. So I decided that we were going to get all decked out in our Cubs gear (dogs and all!), eat some peanuts and Cracker Jacks and celebrate a big Cubs W!

Here are two pics:

what a weekend!

We are winding down from a really busy weekend! It's really busy around here this month, but we're having fun.

I started Saturday off by attending the CSR Fashion Show. CSR is one of the departments within the College that I work for and one of the majors within CSR is Apparel Design. These guys are so talented! Upon graduation, they also have an Associate's degree from the Fashion Institute in NYC and they end up doing amazing things in the fashion industry, so it's fun to see their first real "collections." This year, the show was held up in the suites of Ross Ade and it was really fun. It had been forever since I had attended one of the shows...the last time was when Shell was one of the models and that must have been 6 years ago or more! Here are a couple of my favorite of the senior collections. There were about 15 seniors who had entire collections with specific themes. I loved this one:

Lots of ruffles, great skirts and heels...nothing says "Christina" more than that!This line made me smile. It was inspired when the designer was in London last year and saw everyone on the Vespas, which is why everyone has the helmets on. So cute! My favorite line was called Glacia and I would buy the jackets TODAY if I could! Unfortunately my pics didn't turn out, but they all had really tall collars and great folds and detailing. So amazing!!So that was one department and later Saturday night, we were able to celebrate one of the other departments, HTM, by attending the annual Black Tie Dinner! This was Josh's favorite event of the entire year last year and we were so excited to attend again. (Don't judge us for wearing the same thing 2 years in a row!) Here's a quick pic before we headed out for a great evening:I didn't take many pictures of the meal, but I did snap one of dessert. It was delicious! BTD includes a fabulous meal with an abundance of wine and the entire evening showcases the department, which happens to be ranked as the #1 department in the nation! Our students did a fantastic job!

Here is the menu (we wished we'd saved it last year so we were sure to pick it up this year):

I
House-cured gravlax~Roasted pineapple~Pickled jicama~Celery leaf vinaigrette~Wine: Vinho Verde from Twin Vines, Portugal 2007

II
Fennel cream with lavender~Wine: Viognier, Concannon, California 2007
We both **LOVED** this course!

III
Olive-oil poached tenderloin of bison~Pomegranate-Port reduction~White polenta~Swiss chard~Spaghetti Squash~Wine: Syrah/Petite Sirah, Concannon, California 2006
**This was our absolute favorite!! The bison was outstanding!**

IV
Maytag-blue & fig flan~Apricot compote~Wine: Zinfandel, Kunde, California 2005

V
Three-chocolate gateau~Champagne mango and rhubarb coulis~Wine: Moscato d'Oro, Mondavi Family Vineyards, California 2006
*This is fun side note: we went right by (if not TO) the Mondavi vineyard when we were in Napa last year. Pretty neat!)

Here we are after the dinner was over:Each year, there is a special gift. This year, because the speaker owns a restaurant in Seattle called the Skillet, we got a skillet as our gift!! Of course, we had to have a little fun with it...the students do a great job of keeping the wine flowing, so we were feeling a little feisty after the dinner!

Here are J and I playing around. I don't know that I would trust a tipsy girl with a big heavy skillet as much as he did, but no one was hurt thank goodness.Here is Mark giving Wendi a beating! :)
Wendi and I:

And this is a funny pic of Mark and Wendi making fun of my "famous" head tilt. Everyone I know pokes fun of my tilt and I think Josh has even started to do the tilt! I don't even realize that I do it. Last year, during one outing, all of the girls at the table got their own picture trying to perfect the tilt. Pretty funny. Well....Mark is a photographer. You can imagine that he notices the tilt and so does his finely trained wife, so they had to try their hand at a shot with the famous head tilt!What a great evening!! Can't wait till next year!

So that brings us to Sunday morning. I met an alum at work really quickly before heading to the Tippy Connect event, Kicks For Kids. TC is the Young Professionals group in the area and I am on two committees for it. One of them is the Community Involvement Committee and we helped to plan a Kids Soccer tournament which turned out to be pretty fun. We had some of the Entomology students from Purdue come with a tarantula, a millipede, hissing cockroaches and some other fun creatures. (And by fun, I mean CREEPY. I held a millipede and petted the spider and I still kind of feel dirty.) We also had the professional female soccer team there to meet the kids and sign their shirts. The event benefited Big Brothers Big Sisters and we had a great turnout, especially since it was the 1st Annual K4K event. Josh had 5 of his employees there for the Kohl's Cares for Kids program, too. It was fun to be able to do something like this together!

We ended the weekend with dinner at Shell and Dan's along with Abby, Billy and their kids. We hadn't seen the boys since before they went on vacation and I missed them so much. They look so cute all tanned and sunkissed!

Overall, we had a fantastic weekend, though it was tiring! We're looking forward to the warm weather deciding to show up and STAY! We have some projects that we want to do outside so we're hoping that true spring arrives soon!

STOMP

For Shell's birthday, Josh and I surprised her with tickets to STOMP when it came to Purdue last week. The Bickett's and the Benker's joined us. It was so awesome!!!

First, we went to Bruno's for some pizza. MmmmMMmmmMMmm...doughballs!!

Here's Abby and Billy:
Josh and Eric...look at that pizza...oh yum!
Abby, Jenny, Me before heading into the show:
All the girls, Jama (Danny had to work, so Jama was Shell's date), Shell, me, Jenny, Abby:

We didn't get any good pictures at the show or at dinner, so we took some when we got home. We were trying to get both dogs in the shot but it didn't work out too well. Here's one of Super licking my face...it was rainy that day so you can imagine how nervous she was all day long. She was sooooo happy to see us!

STOMP was absolutely amazing. We loved it and highly recommend it! If you have a chance, GO SEE IT!! Here's a little video clip: