Thursday, February 20, 2014

Three on Thursday

Happy Thursday, everyone! Since I unfortunately haven’t had the chance to post regularly throughout the past couple of weeks, I decided to check in today with a list of three random facts about life lately in my little corner of the world.

1. Stephen and I celebrated Valentine’s Day a bit early last week with mini cheesecakes and moscato wine during the winter storm that brought a full foot of snow to our area – the most we've seen in four years. On Saturday night, we also headed to – where else? – the Kennedy Center to attend the Metropolitan Opera National Council’s Middle Atlantic Region Auditions for young artists. While this may not sound especially thrilling to everyone else, I was actually very excited to go, since I’d always wanted to witness the audition process and was quite lucky to even get tickets at all to this popular annual event. Of course, the performers were incredibly talented, and it was such a fun evening!

Brr! Posing in front of a cute little snowman someone built the day of the storm. 
2. Ever since I turned 30, my “baby fever” has definitely kicked up a notch, though there’s still of course the question of deciding when exactly the time will be right to start a family. Do those of you who are already parents have any helpful advice about how you ultimately decided it was the right time, especially in terms of finances? I've read some pretty daunting articles about the "start-up" costs for having a baby, plus the costs throughout the first year, not to mention during his or her entire childhood. 

3. A few weeks ago, Stephen and I went to a very helpful home-buyers’ seminar, and this weekend, we’ll be going to yet another one as we continue to think about when and where we might like to buy a house. The first seminar was geared specifically toward first-time buyers, offering a step-by-step overview of the house-hunting process, while this next one will be more focused on determining what you want in a house and how you’d like to tailor your search. Even though it’s a bit stressful knowing that this is yet another big life decision we’ll need to make, it’s also been exciting to start considering our options.

I hope you all have a fantastic day and a fun weekend ahead!