27th Birthday/Weightloss Challenge

How is is possible that I'm now in my late 20s? Really, sometimes it feels like I just graduated from high school, but it's almost been 10 years! Stop. Really time needs to slow down. My 27th birthday ended up being super fun even though I'm getting up there in years. First, Ryan wasn't going to be able to do much on my actual birthday because on Mondays he leave for school at noon and doesn't get back til 11:30.... yes, commuting to Weber is getting old. But he surprised me the weekend before with a good amount of cash to re-decorate our front room! It was something I had been talking about doing for a while but wasn't getting around to it. After a trip to Target, I love how the room turned out.

On my actual birthday my employees surprised me with some delicious pumpkin bread in the morning, and I received a bunch of fun surprises/calls/texts all day. And I am so incredibly lucky to have such amazing friends who planned a party for me that night so I wasn't spending the day alone. Really, how did I get so lucky. They even made me a cake made out of fruit (because I was dieting... more on that later). It's always so fun getting together with these girls.

One year ago... 1 baby, now... 7 babies (Jack isn't in it) Crazy!

I can't forget to talk about our weight-loss challenge. As you can see, most of us had babies this year and we were all wanting to shed some excess weight. So we decided to make it a challenge to get us all motivated. With a $20 buy-in we had a pretty good pot to win for #1- total amount lost & #2- % of loss. The challenge went for 8 weeks and we all had our ups and downs. For the most part, I think we all lost more weight than we would have had we not helped each other stay motivated. My arch-nemesis was mostly Amy though... we battled it out til the last few days. And even though we tried really hard to beat each other, it ended perfectly with her winning the most amount lost and I won the percentage. Of course, after 8 weeks of hard work we decided to treat ourselves to a girls-night-out getting pedicures!