How much spaghetti does it take to feed a cross country team?

On Friday night, Kody and I had the cross country team over to our apartment for a spaghetti dinner. What we expected to be a somewhat crazy night turned out to be a little more eventful than planned:

7 cans of meat spaghetti sauce
8 boxes of spaghetti - Both courtesy of Ultra Foods 12/$10 sale!
3 loaves of bread
2 boxes of brownies
Lots of Gatorade, pink lemonade, water and pop



Everyone arrived around 6:30 p.m. and at about 7 p.m. we had a very friendly visit from two police cars, a fire truck and ambulance. Kod and I may have badly burnt a loaf of bread causing our smoke alarm to go off in our apartment and then go off in the entire apartment building!




Fire truck behind the tree!



One positive thing: we got to meet all our neighbors when they headed outside because of the alarm!

Our 20 guests had a memorable night and many spent it on our porch because our apartment was so smoky!

Cooking?

Typical dinner Katie makes when Kody is home:
- chicken and broccoli casserole
- steak on the grill
- enchiladas
- hamburgers
- pork chops
- grilled chicken

Typical dinner Katie makes when Kody is gone:
Sunday: Pop Tarts
Monday: Steak 'n Shake
Tuesday: frozen pizza
Wednesday: dinner with Liz and Jordan, courtesy of Jordan's mom
Thursday: Ramen and cereal
Friday: leftover spaghetti
Saturday: Kody is home! Homemade pizza!

OOOlympics!

And a little of "Katie's Commentary" along with the Olympics. For those of you who don't know, I'm a huge fan of the Olympics. It used to be my dream in life to go as a gymnast ... now the dream is just to go - Chicago 2016 anyone? But really, I would love to attend an Olympic Games and so I've been thoroughly enjoying this 2008 experience. While Kody has been out of town for most of the Games, I've gotten to spend my lonely evenings in front of the television at my homegroup/Bible study leaders' house (We don't have cable). They've said I need to just show up anytime, shouldn't call ahead or knock and just come in. I'm still a little wary of that, but I think I might try it tonight when I go over to watch the Beam finals! Go Shawn! However, I already know the results, thanks to the Internet.





I missed the team prelims (flying home from Omaha) and the team finals (Kody arrived back from Tennesse), but my homegroup leaders taped them both for me. So last Thursday Kod and I enjoyed five hours of gymnastics while we watched Nastia dominate the All-Around finals. Kod was awesome for putting up with me and I think secretly he enjoyed watching the gymnastics. I'm a huge fan of Nastia and was so glad when she won the AA because everyone was counting her out, like she had no chance over Shawn Johnson. Overall I've been a little disappointed in some of the scoring/judging (vault finals with Alicia Sacramone), but Nastia and Shawn have done awesome!

Anyways, I've been keeping very busy in front of the TV while Kody has been gone, and my mom and I have enjoyed keeping tabs on the results together.

Three months in and already apart too many times

We've only been married for less than three months and we're already doing the long-distance thing! I thought that was over after I went to D.C., but I guess not. While we've had an awesome summer together settling into married life, our busy schedules haven taken us away from Bourbonnais:

Katie's Adventures:
I flew to Oklahoma City for one of my best friend's weddings - Jessica Hulsey:



I even got to ride on the plane with her the day after the wedding as seen above!

Highlight: Stayed in Edmond, OK where Shannon Miller is from and got to see Shannon Miller's sign!
Lowlight: Not seeing the Shannon Miller statue they have - that'll just have to be next time



Kod's Adventures:
And Kod ventured with six other cross country guys into the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. He only brought a SMALL backpack, one set of clothes, not enough food and no tent or sleeping bag. I married a crazy man! But he survived and loved it! He was able to use some of his Bear Grylls skills he learned to build sleeping shelters and survive on basically nothing. He did say that next time he'd probably bring a little more though.





And finally ...
While he was gone, I visited the parents in Omaha and celebrated my dad's birthday! I'm not sure how old he is, but with his new back and new-found ability to golf, he sure seemed a lot younger than his 50-something age! My dad hasn't been able to golf for about four years because of his back, but he just had a surgery which has helped immensely! Kod, Jonathan and I got him a gift certificate for a driving range for his birthday, so to practice we made our own driving range in the backyard with wiffle balls to see how his back would hold up! I think it did pretty well considering the grin on my dad's face after we finished!

It's summer!

Well, it's not really the middle of summer anymore...but here's a little recap of our first summer together! (We didn't do a good job of taking pictures)

- Honeymoon in Hawaii!!





- Moved into our new apartment in June
- Katie started working at Russell Publications in Peotone, IL (check out her bylines here!)
- Kod worked for Olivet for a few weeks
- Celebrated the Fourth of July by watching the Kankakee Community College fireworks show (where we got engaged last year)...they were DEFINITELY not as exciting as I remembered, but maybe I was a little distracted last year
- Mom and Dad Carr came and stayed in our apartment with us: They got locked out of our apartment from about 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. while we slept soundly in our bedroom! :(
- Mom and Dad Nichols visited for the weekend: We went to the Chicago Bears Training Camp at Olivet, took a 20 mile bike ride, and Kod and I made dinner for them!
- We visited Kacey and Bethany (Kod's brother and his wife) in Marianna, Ark. where they're living for two years while Kacey does Teach for America: Stayed in their huge house, played with Spanky their dog, played lots of games and experienced southern hospitality. The picture is us on our eight hour drive home.



Now Kod is off to cross country camp, which really means school will be starting very soon!

Our new home!

A very messy apartment!

Our first meal with our new table!


Bathroom!

The start of our new life together!

There are a few pictures from the celebration!

Welcome!

Welcome to our blog! Inspired by other newlyweds in my life, I decided Kod and I should start a blog to record our happenings throughout our first few years of marriage! Two months down...many more years to go!

I guess a good way to start is from where we began: our wedding! Here's a link to our professional pictures. The password is: KNKC08. We just got our wedding video back and will soon get our professional album back! We watched some of the video last night and it brought back so many fun memories of the day. It already seems like so long ago! I'll post some pictures of the wedding later!