My Sweet Penny...

 Sweet little Penny Baby...

...sweet cozy Penny Babs...

 ...sweet snuggly daddy-loving baby girl...

 ...sweet Penny with the adorable face that gets her whatever she wants...

...swee- um, well. Ahem. Get 'em, girl.

Grumpy Gills & Money Woes

Sometimes, I think Andrew has a sixth sense.  Or maybe his laziness is coincidental.  I'll explain:

Andrew is heading out of town for a work trip for a few (8) days and he said last week sometime that he probably should have a few new shirts and pants for the trip.  So, of course, I turned that into "Let's go shopping this weekend."  Our Saturday was booked up with Family Day for his work and dinner/fire/baseball game night with the Carpenters.  Sunday morning, Andrew went golfing with a work buddy, so I made sure to be showered and ready when he got home so we could do a little shopping... oh, boy was I ready to get some $16 Old Navy jeans!

So, when he gets home from golfing, this was our conversation:

A:  "Look at you!  All showered and dressed!"  (Ok, so maybe I'm known for not changing out of my pajamas on Sundays.)
C:  "Yeah!  I'm ready to do some shopping."
A:  "Umm... what?"
C:  "Shopping.  For the things you need for your trip.  And for my $16 jeans."
A:  "Umm... well, I kind of just wanted to hang out, take a nap and watch the baseball game."
C:  (pouting)
A:  "And we really should be watching our money."
C:  (pouting)
A:  "But if you really want to go, we can."
C:  (pouting)
A:  "Chelsea [watch it- full first name means trouble], would you like to go shopping?"
C:  "No."
(Andrew gives up, goes to the couch.  I head into the garage to take out some agression by stripping paint off an old coffee table, pretty sure I was grumbling something along the lines of, "What a waste of a shower.")

Well, as it turns out, it's a good thing Andrew was feeling particularly lazy yesterday.  We just found out that our mortgage company miscalculated the amount needed in our escrow account for taxes, and our mortgage just went up $200 for the next 12-24 months.  (They tried to up it $300, but Andrew talked them down somehow.)

The most annoying part is, earlier this year we got a nice and cushy check because they OVER-estimated the amount we would need.  And they lowered our payment by $80 a month.  And we never even thought of saving that money for something like this.  Instead we used it on things we needed for the house. 

So, lesson learned: if the mortgage company sends you a check, save it.  Because most likely they will take it back times two.

Sara, Sara, Sara...

Amazing.  Fantastic.  SUPER talented.  Beautiful.  Hilarious. 
Sara, I want to be you.

We had an amazing time at the concert last night.  I felt like I had my mouth hanging open in shock the whole time because that girl can SING.  She sounds better live than she does on her albums.  Who does that, really?  A few songs in, she came out from behind the piano to play the guitar and sing, and I'm pretty sure Andrew fell in love with her 12,714 times.

We drank ice cold Blue Moons and Sweetwater and ate popcorn up in the balcony during the opening acts: Holly Conlan and Greg Laswell... and watched the crowd in front of the stage get bigger and bigger. 

There were 4 or 5 guys (with 1 or 2 girls) right up next to center stage near Sara's piano, and they were hysterically excited.  I'm talking hands-in-the-air, squealing-and-whooping, close-to-tears hysterical.  Sara LOVED it... she was messing with them the whole concert.  First thing this morning, I went on Youtube... lo and behold, those crazy fans had already posted some videos:





We didn't want it to be over.  I wonder if Andrew will take a quick drive up to Nashville tonight so we can see her again.

Uh oh, uh oh, uh oh, uh oh...

Andrew and I are going to see Sara Bareilles tonight.  At the Variety Playhouse in Atlanta. 
It's sold out. 
It should be spectacular. 
And I am pretty freaking excited. 
Found myself giggling into my strawberry milk a few times this morning.

And if you're wondering why my post title is full of "uh oh", just watch this:

I think if Andrew gets one more uh oh text from me, he might find a new date to the event.

Um, Hello? Anybody out there?

Man, it has been a while.  A pathetically long while.  But I'm ready to refresh this bloggy up and get things shaking again.  You see, I went about this all wrong the first time... tried to create picture-perfect posts and ended up with generic updates on our little family.  Where's the fun in that?  Then, a couple of months ago, I realized that my inspiration for blogging stemmed from my craptastic ability to retain memories.  So I reacted on that in the literal sense with a blog called Chelsea Remembers.  This immediately set some very limiting precedents: each post/paragraph began with "I want to remember...", each post was very structured and committed to the memory discussed, and while the memories were about our little family, it still wasn't an actual look into what our life is.  Needless to say, I hopped off that train about three posts in.  (I may republish those posts here later... because I DO want to remember.  You hear that, Brain?!)

Anyway, in a nutshell:  I'm back to blogging.  This will be a lot less structured, and whole lot more real.  If you don't like dogs, I'm sorry for you.  Because 98.3% of the photos I take are of our two Ray pups (the other 1.7% is a mix of scenery, camera experimenting, and us).  They are our babies, and everything they do is either funny or amazing.  (What can I say?  It's our first taste of parenting!)  Life is a journey and I'm ready to document it just a smidge better than we were before.

That was some nutshell.  It was a coconut shell.

Oh, and I'm really bad at endings.  And I'm pretty lazy.  But Andrew picks his nose a lot, Copper prefers toilet water, Penny has bad gas and Kitty Bug loves to smell morning breath.  Such is life at the Ray house.

December Nights and a Ray Pup Birthday

I am loving December nights at House of Rays. Andrew has been getting home a couple hours before me, so he turns on the Christmas lights and pulls out something for dinner. When I get home, he and the pups are snuggled up in the living room waiting for me. We'll put on a movie and veg out, or Andrew will play some video games and I'll work on some Christmas crafts, or we'll go Pup-Wild and play with the kids! More often than not, he'll have a fire going and little Penny baby loves snuggling up next to that warm fire.

Andrew and our tree




Penny gettin' her brother... Copper loves sleeping on the tree skirt

On December 4th, our little Copper Budd turned 1 year old! He's not a puppy anymore... he's a big kid! We are so lucky to have such a sweet, loving, entertaining and fun pup! I love coming home to a Budd-hug every night. And, even though he weighs about 60 lbs, he still curls up on my lap like when he was a puppy.


Copper, 3 months old, his first day home!

Happy Birthday, Copper Budd!

Thanksgiving and Black Friday... working in retail.

Well, when you work in retail, the holiday season is a very very VERY busy time of year. I work for the General Manager at The Shoppes at River Crossing in Macon (Beautiful outdoor mall! Great Shopping! Seriously, I'm not being biased!), and when the holidays roll around, the retail world goes MAD! In a good way, but mad nonetheless. So when the work day gets crazier, extracurricular activities (blogging for example) kind of go by the wayside. Black Friday (and Saturday in the retail world) are 2 of the craziest days of the holiday season. And up until last year (the first holiday season I worked at a mall), I never set foot outside of the house (well, the neighborhood). Growing up, we spent the Friday after Thanksgiving decking the halls at my parents house. The Christmas music would be blaring, the front door wide open as we decorated the front porch, my sister singing at the top of her lungs, brothers dragging boxes down from the attic, Ma supervising, Pa stringing lights on the outside trees... ah, memories. But, as I mentioned in a previous post, times and traditions are a-changin'... and as our families have grown, our careers have changed.

I wish I had pictures from Thanksgiving break... but I did a Blogger no-no and forgot to bring my camera home for the holiday. I was lucky enough to get Wednesday off work, so Andrew and I headed to my parents house on Tuesday night. On Wednesday, I spent the entire day with my sister. We hung out and played with the pups, took a trip to Hobby Lobby, met lil' bro for lunch at Shannon's favorite restaurant- Las Palmas, braved Wal-Mart (madness!), and headed home to sew up some Christmas bandanas for our precious pups. That was my favorite time of the day... we were all in the kitchen. Ma was working on her adorable homemade advent calendars, Pa was baking his delicious cheesecake specialty, and Shan and I were sewing bandanas and acting a fool! It was a good time, folks! Wednesday night, Andrew came by to pick me up to go to his parents house. As I was loading up our bag in the trunk, a huge black truck came swinging into the cul-de-sac... the window rolled down and a sweet little voice said, "Excuse me..." Yes, there was more to that sentence but I can't remember what it was because I was too busy staring slack-jawed at my AUNT DI & UNCLE MARTY!!! They had the week off, and decided to just start heading South (from Cicero, New York) and see how far they got for Thanksgiving. What a surprise!

Soon after greeting our amazing surprise guests, Andrew and I headed to his parents house to load everyone up in the car and head out to see The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Andrew and I randomly watched Twilight earlier this year, then I decided I had to read the book because there was no way it could possibly be as bad as the movie (I was right- the book is waaaay better!)... which led to me reading all 4 books in less than a week, and then Andrew read them, and then his sister Anna and his mom read them, and then Mara read them. Now we are all fans and decided that we would wait until we were all together to go see New Moon. We had a GREAT time! Unfortunately, I was sitting next to Anna and therefore left with a bruised arm. She was sooooo into it. We enjoyed the rest of the night with his parents, and then did our typical Thanksgiving day... first half with his family, second half with mine. We had a great time, but Thanksgiving always leaves us wishing we had more time in the day to spend with each of our families.

We had to drive home Thanksgiving night, and made it back to Macon at about midnight. Andrew and the pups hung out in the living room for the night, and I got a few hours of sleep before waking up dark and early to get to work by 4:00am. We had a very successful day at the mall, which made the lack of sleep worth it; but by the time I got home at 6pm (all the while knowing I had to be back in the office at 7am on a Saturday!), I was DONE. Pooped. Exhausted. Andrew made my looooong day end on a perfect note when he sat me directly on the couch next to the warm fire, placed the warmed-up leftovers from my parents' house on the tray table and put on a movie. About 30 minutes after I got home, I snuggled up with the pups (see below) and passed out... after a couple of days with their Wilbur-Cuz, they were pooped, too! Andrew said they had been sleeping all day, and they ended up staying in the house and sleeping most of the weekend.