Trip to Kentucky - Part 3

I know I promised you all this post days ago and I know you all have just been going crazy with anticipation waiting for it, but time got away from me this week. I realized after getting home that I had to pay the bills due at the end of the month and I didn't think AT&T or Verizon would care if I was late paying because I had to update my blog. Now I know you are all thinking "Why does paying the bills keep her from blogging for 4 days?" Ha Ha...if you are thinking that, you really don't know me well.

I am a CPA (certified public accountant). CPAs have a reputation for being anal retentive but even on the CPA scale of anal retentiveness, I rate really high. Ask the people who worked with me - sort of have a little problem with perfectionism it this area of my life. So my bill paying process semi-monthly isn't just an exercise in logging into my online banking system and paying a few vendors. Nope, I have about 6 spreadsheets that are involved in this. A budget spreadsheet, a spreadsheet to reconcile the checking account, savings accounts and our investments accounts (which I will note are really depressing to reconcile these days). All of these fun little spreadsheets automatically filter into our family's monthly financial statements. Yeah, that's right we have a family balance sheet and income statement (year to date and one for the one month period) that I produce monthly. No, I'm not joking (even my fellow CPAs are thinking I am crazy right now). So my bill paying process takes about 4-5 hours twice a month. So after bottle washing, disinfecting toys and folding laundry, I sit down and work on it a little bit each night and it takes me about 3 nights to get through the whole process. So sorry, the blog was put aside for my crazy financial organizing this week.

This obsession with organizing my life on spreadsheets started early on in my life. Somewhere around 7th or 8th grade, I developed a database system to organize my brother's baseball cards. I spent a lot of time one summer entering his hundreds of baseball cards into a spreadsheet. I also organized Miss. America and Olympic results in spreadsheets. Not surprisingly, I wasn't the most popular kid in middle school. Don't feel bad for me, I achieved some level of coolness by about 10th grade (well at least as much coolness as a kid in the accelerated advanced placement classes could achieve). I even managed to be captain of the cheerleading squad three years in a row. I strived for Kelly Kapowski levels of coolness...probably didn't quite get there.

Ok...so on to the real point of my post. More pictures from our trip to Kentucky!!! On Saturday, our last day there, we had a post wedding brunch at Rich's grandparents house. The whole family was there, and its not a small family. All of Rich's aunts and uncles and cousins and cousin's children. I love Rich's cousins, they are a lot of fun to be around, so we had a good time. Here are some family pictures we took.

All of Rich's immediate family:

From left to right is Papa Joe & Grandmommy (his grandparents on his Dad's side), me, Richard with Joseph, my mother-in-law Priscilla, my father-in-law Rick, my sister-in-law Kipling, my future brother-in-law Jason with my niece Kairi, and my sister-in-law Devon.

The 4 generations of Joseph Richard's:

Joseph having fun with Grandmommy:

Joseph and Kairi with Grandpa Ricky:

Joseph and Kairi with Grandpa Ricky and Cilla:

And last, a cute picture of Richard playing with Joseph:

We left on Saturday afternoon. We did not attempt another through the night drive. Instead, we made it about halfway by 7 pm and got a hotel in Knoxville, Tennessee (a nice suite room so we could stay up and watch TV past Joseph's 7:30 bedtime). We made the rest of the trip home on Sunday morning.

We had a wonderful trip home and look forward to seeing everyone again at Christmas!