1. Buy a house... CHECK

This has been the absolute craziest few days of my entire life. We were called home from our one day vacation in N.C. because the sellers were refusing to extend our closing date. We closed in less than 24 hours of finding this out. We were out of state... we were 30 minutes late to the closing because we had been driving 7 straight hours on memorial day weekend and still could not get there in time. Does that sum it up enough?? We bought a house!!!!

There have been very few occasions in my life that I actually experienced pure euphoria. My wedding, our engagement. I'm pretty sure I've been euphoric almost this entire weekend. We drove out to OUR house Saturday early and sat on the back porch.. staring over the fields and trying to convince ourselves that the moment was real. We had waited for this for SO long. We had worked, without stopping, to reach this goal for the last 5 years. We stuck to what we knew and we made it. Woah, what a feeling. I'm in love all over again with my husband. I know this renovation is going to be incredibly stressful but I don't care. At the end of the day it's our house to stress over... and that's all we've ever really wanted.

Before Baby Bucket List

So for the last several years I've been living in some sort of weird, in between place. I was 17 and young and foolish and then suddenly I was 18 and responsible. My now husband (then boyfriend) and I moved out on our own. We started making BIG plans of saving our money and buying a house, of getting married and for me, having children. I guess for me, it was hard to be both young AND responsible so I chose the latter. I spent a few years after that, waiting. Waiting to move out of our little apartment and then to move out of our townhouse, waiting for Aaron to propose.. and then for us to get married.. waiting to buy a house, waiting.. and waiting. This is not to say I don't have great memories of these times but in the back of my mind I was pushing for more. But now, here I am. I'm still young and we've almost achieved every goal we set before us. The logical next step is children right?! RIGHT?! It goes move out, get engaged, get married, buy a house, have a baby, right? Wrong. A light bulb went off sometime in the last few months. I'm going to be able to experience life here soon.. the way we couldn't in our struggling earlier years. Why in the world would we have a baby now? Now when we can finally have some "us" time. So that's what I'm going to do. Let me tell you, it's quite liberating to not be waiting anymore. To just start doing. Anyways, all of that leads up to this:

My Before Baby Bucket List~

1. Buy our first home
2. Learn to speak another language
3. Vacation in Portugal
4. Drive to Florida
5. Visit a real fish market in New England
6. Be able to say "What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" while in Las Vegas.
7. Go whale watching
8. Spend a weekend in New York or DC or both.
9. Go to dinner on The Odyssey (the boat Aaron and I had our senior prom on)
10. Have a girls night out with my favorite friends (believe it or not, I've never really done this)
11. Rent an RV
12. See the Grand Canyon
13. Go to Disney World
14. Try to conceive a child while in a foreign country (obviously this should be last on the list :)
15. Stay in the Pestana Palace in Lisbon, Portugal
16. Successfully cook a pie from scratch
17. Learn to use a sewing machine *hey I can check this one off!!*
18. Own a car that I love
19. Jump off a cliff into a natural body of water


So before any of you parents out there get offended, I realize that ALL of these things can be done after having children as well.. or even with your children. But that's not what it's about for me. These are the things I want to do now, no matter how small or weird some of them are. I'm excited to get started.