Happy Weekending

It's been a while since I've blogged about the basic happenings in our lives -- in part because we've been traveling like crazy people. Last weekend we went to NY to visit my friends Erica and Feroz at their lake house for a weekend. They are expecting their first in the early fall, so we wanted to get some pre-kid chill time with them. We had a blast, and Rob kicked all of our butts at Scrabble.

This weekend was even more jam packed, especially since it's the only weekend in July we're in Chicago. We spent the day yesterday prepping for my birthday party last night, a casual affair with friends at our place. Rob pulled out all the stops to put the fun in casual though. Rob themed the party "Iberian Nights," inspired by last year's trip to Portugal. He bought Spanish and Portuguese meats and cheeses, made some amazing gazpacho, and got paella catered from Cafe Ba Ba Reeba. We served Spanish red wine and Portuguese vinho verde with dinner. Then after dinner we had a port tasting. Rob gave everyone a little port tutorial and then we all tried a white port we'd brought back from Portugal and a ruby, a tawny, and a late bottled vintage ("LBV") we bought this week. We finished the evening off with oreo custard pie from Scooter's, naturally. It was a really wonderful evening. I was so happy to share it with an awesome group of friends.

(We were also glad for the opportunity to show off our new bamboo floors in our bedroom and one of our spare bedrooms. Yea for green remodelling. I'll blog more about that later.)

A Saturday night party did not, however, slow us down in our most important event of the weekend. Sunday morning was the second annual Teb's Troops March on Melanoma. We were so happy to have my friend Nadine, her sister Sally, and her friend Kelly stay with us for the weekend (and join in my birthday festivities) because they were in town for the event. We are also thrilled to report that through the support of our incredibly generous friends and family, we surpassed our fundraising goal by a wide margin and raised over $1200 for Teb's Troops! We were the second highest fundraisers for the event!!!

It was a humid morning, but fortunately the sun was hidden behind clouds, so the 5K run itself wasn't too bad. Rob and I were about 30 seconds off last year's pace, finishing in about 37 minutes. Rob once again played supportive spouse and ran with me at my slow pace instead of trying to clock a speedy time for himself. Most importantly, Teb's Troops raised $50,000 at the event -- part of which is funding a melanoma research grant at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania. Nice choice!

We were able to squeeze a few errands this afternoon too. A Pier One gift card from my cousin and cousin-in-law for my birthday got us a gorgeous new rug for our living room! And we crossed lots of little other things off our to do list as well. We're resting up tonight though because tomorrow is our Top Chef dinner -- Top Chef 4 contestant Valerie is cooking us dinner tomorrow night. We can't wait!!