Wheeee, blog award!

Valli, the fabulous writer behind The Eminent Stylings of Tenacious V, has awarded me my first blogging award! Thanks, Valli :) I've known Valli since our junior year of college (when we sat in Dr. E's newswriting class, I think?) and fought to stay awake/sane. She was one of the fabulous dormmates mentioned (and now that I've updated the post with a photo, pictured) here. We spent plenty of time together in the wee hours of the morning putting out the university's newspaper as well. It's been great to reconnect and follow her path through post-college life (including motherhood!) not only on Facebook but also on her blog.

Valli has awarded the Versatile Blogger Award to me and my little corner of cyberspace.

Here are the rules:
*Thank the person who gave you the award and link back to them in your post.
*Tell us seven things about yourself.
*Award fifteen recently discovered new bloggers.
*Contact these bloggers and let them know they've received their award.


My seven things (I tried to think of some very random, not widely known points about myself, but I apologize if they're woefully lame!):

1. I love to cross-stitch. For a while (mostly from college until about a year after I was married), I was constantly stitching samplers for close friends and family members to mark their weddings or births of children. I'm currently working on one (slowly, but surely) to record Elle's birth details.

2. I have an intense fear of having my pelvis broken.

3. I never flew until I was 23, when I flew from Kalamazoo to Pittsburgh for a job interview. Now I fly 3-5 times a year, and Elle will have at least five trips under her belt by the time she's 14 months old.

4. I dated Tim's cousin Jeff before I dated Tim. Tim actually set us up. Our "first date" was Jeff, me and Tim at Damon's. Romantic, eh? :) Tim is almost 13 years older than me, and at the time, neither of us thought the other was romantically interested in the other, and Tim thought there was no way I'd date someone that much older. Tim deemed Jeff and I a perfect match because we were about the same age and "equally lame." (Yes, I'm serious.) So Jeff and I went on a few dates, and he's an awesome guy, but I knew that I really had feelings for Tim. (And eventually, when I told Tim this and he confessed that he felt the same way, HE was in the awkward position of explaining to Jeff "Hey man, I know I fixed you up with Kristin, but we're kinda going to see if there might be something there between us, OK?" at the family's Thanksgiving dinner.) I honestly thought the whole family was going to hate me and things were going to be awkward for Tim forever (he and his cousins are pretty close). But now we all joke about it. For a while, the running line was that "so-and-so was 'next'" to date me. I absolutely adore Jeff's wife - we get along really well and enjoy picking on Jeff and Tim. And Tim and I love spending time with Tim's cousins and their wives.

5. Tim and I broke up twice while dating. We long-distanced dated for almost three years (living anywhere from 2.5 to 5 hours apart until I moved to Florida and he joined me two months later) at the beginning of our relationship. I broke up with him once, he broke up with me once. Both times were for about two months. Luckily, we saw the error of our ways and reconciled both times - and now, the rest is history!

6. I never drank alcohol until the day I turned 21. Like, not even a sip. Mostly because I've always been a) a goody-two-shoes and b) stubborn. Once I was close to making it to my 21st birthday without major temptation, I figured I should just hold out so I could say I'd done it and it would make the actual birthday much cooler. It was definitely one of my most memorable birthdays, full of good friends and lots of laughter, and although I had four mixed drinks and four shots over the course of the night, I wasn't wasted at all, thank goodness. We spread it out over a long period of time and had plenty of food along the way :)

7. We had hermit crabs as pets when my siblings and I were younger. I used to name mine after my favorite baseball players. At one point, a crab I'd named after then-Seattle Mariners players Alex Rodriguez and Joey Cora stopped moving for a few days. I chalked it up for molting, a normal, skin-shedding process for hermit crabs, and waited for him to come back to life, renewed. After a few weeks, I knew it wasn't just molting. He was dead. I buried him in the woods behind our house and painted a rock, writing out his full name (which I can no longer remember, but it was something like Alexander Joey Cora something something Rodriguez) on it as his headstone.

Now, 15 fantastic blogs I've discovered in the last six months or so:

BeakTweets

Country is a State of Mind

Our Little Lifesicle

It's a dog lick baby world

E-Tells-Tales 

Stilettos and Diapers

Angie All the Way

Loving the little things

Life on the Terrace

Domestic Jenny

Wilson's (almost) Irish Twins

Two Boksen Babies

Krystal's Kitsch

Littlest True Blue

The Power of the Pink Lines