Chicago here we come!!

So sorry Jeff and I haven't had much time to report anything these days. Its a busy time, let me tell you. I did want to let everyone know that we are leaving here in about 3 hours to go to Shaumburg/Chicago for the weekend! Our first vacation together, yay! (besides the honeymoon) I suprised Jeff with Cubs tickets about a week ago as an early birthday present. I knew we were taking a trip to IKEA sometime this month and found out there was a game this weekend and my boss had tickets so figured it was the perfect opportunity to suprise Jeff. He's talked about wanting to go to Wrigley ever since I met him, and since in October when his birthday rolls around, there are no baseball games left, I figured we'd just go now! So anyways we are really excited and know we will have a great time. We're also going to try to get to the Navy Pier after the game tomorrow since Jeff hasn't been their either.

So expect a full report and new photos sometime fairly soon.

TTFN!

Sarah

P.S. Alexis, I will miss you SOOO much!!! Have a safe trip tomorrow. love you!

A little update....

Just wanted to say a short hello since neither Jeff nor I have had a chance to get on here in awhile and update you all on our lives. First off, its finally a hot sunny day after 4 consecutive days of non-stop rain and cloudy skies. However, it is supposed to rain again later tonight Jeff just told me, so we better get our lawn mowed soon! I guess I just watered the flowers for no reason. haha.

Jeff and I are still just busy working everyday and coming home to lots of unfinished business with the house. We FINALLY got the painting of our bedroom and bath done, and all of the office furniture is assembled and up! The only major things left are painting the kitchen and office and doing a little decorating of the walls and things here and there. We are taking a trip to IKEA next weekend to hopefully find some good finishing touches and possibly some dining room chairs, as we still don't have any of those yet. I also suprised Jeff last night with a very early birthday present of some Cubs tickets to a baseball game that same weekend, on Sept. 1. He has been wanting to go to a game since I met him, and I thought this would be the perfect time so I looked and looked and finally got lucky and found tickets thru a guy I work with. I was going to wait until next week to give them to Jeff, but just couldn't wait any longer so I spilled the beans last night and he is really excited. So it should be a fun weekend.

I do want to say how much I miss everyone, especially my family and close friends. Alexis, I am beginning to get very sad that you are leaving! I promise I'll see you before you go. The transition of moving here to Ft. Wayne probably went better than I expected, and getting to work full-time with Jeff's mom has been great so that I can at least have an income while I'm getting settled. I do tend to get nervous, however, when I start thinking about how I need to look for a job of my own and where I am going to find one. I still don't know the area all that well so it may take some time to figure it out. Everyone is very nice, friendly, and helpful here though so I hope I don't have any problems finding something.

Well, I suppose I shall try and enjoy the rest of the sunny day. Jeff and I are going to grill some steaks and maybe eat out back. Too bad we have no friends here to invite over! Keep in touch everybody! And check out our picture site to see the update house photos.

Talk to you soon!

Love,Sarah

P.S. Here is me with my new hair cut!

Baby pictures are posted!

Hello again!

I just wanted to let everyone know that my new neice Camryn's photos are posted on our photo website where you will see the link to the left. There are also a few of Drue, my other neice, being a cutey at 4 months old. Nothing like going from having 2 sisters to 2 sisters with baby girls in a matter of 4 months! I love them all so much. Now if I just wasn't living so far away....

The past weekend was great with getting to meet Camyrn Bailey and seeing all of my family and a few friends again. I didn't want to leave! Jeff was so cute with the babies, he makes a great uncle (and of course I know he will make a great Dad one day!). Jenny, I will come visit you as much as I can so that I don't miss out on the first few months of Camyrn's life. Just thinking about it all makes me teary, I am so happy for you!

Well, Jeff and I are in the middle of painting our bedroom and bathroom before he heads off to work here in a couple of hours so I better get going. Enjoy the new baby photos!

Love,Sarah

Camryn Bailey Zabel

We are down in Seymour, IN for the weekend because Sarah's sister Jenny just had a little girl. Camryn was born on Thursday, August 9th at 4:38 PM. She was 20" long and weighed in at 8 pounds 4 ounces. She looks a lot like Jenny did when she was a newborn, but she has Jeff's lips. Once we get back home we will post the pictures we took of her and our weekend extravaganza.

House Update:

Well we are at the exact same place we were when we stopped painting the other night. However we did order our entertainment center last week and that should arrive by the end of the month.

I'm getting very sleepy...

Hola. Well I just got home from spending the night with Jeff's family while Jeff is at work till 11. He has to work a 2-11 shift 3 days this week. I work about 9:30-5 so I won't get to see him much this week!





Anyways, I don't have much else to report at this time. We purchased our entertainment center on Monday so that is to arrive in 3-4 weeks. Last night we sorted out the office and filing cabinet so that's all done and things are falling into place. We have finished painting the foyer and family room and are still working on our bed and bath but I know its going to look fabulous when it's all done! Here are a couple of pics of the finished blue walls:

Well, its off to bed here shortly. I have a busy day ahead of me of work and then driving back to Carmel to get ready for the birth of Jenny's baby on Thursday! How exciting!!

Goodnight!

Painting, painting, and more painting

So guess what we did all day today??? PAINT! And we are still not done. It's amazing how much time it takes to tape, prime, and paint one big room. We started at 11:30 this morning and got done with the family room around 7. Then we moved on to our bedroom which we were planning on getting done tonight along with the master bath, but after doing the trim in both rooms and it turning 10pm we decided to stop and have dinner. So we'll finish up tomorrow I guess.

So its 1am and I'm tired and achy. I'll be back sometime soon hopefully with some more exciting news....like my sister Jenny having her baby in a few days!

Goodnight!

New Pictures!!

We finally figured out a good way to display all of our pictures so that everyone could see them. Here is the URL: http://thesteegs.shutterfly.com There are some albums up there now and we will be adding more to it over time, so you can check it out to see what's new.

We just got done watching our wedding video and it was fun to relive that wonderful day. Before that we were doing more home construction (we're going to take on "This Old House") adding some fresh paint to the foyer and some faux wood blinds in the kitchen and in the dining room (pictures to follow later).

Tomorrow Sarah has another bridal shower, Yes after the wedding. We were fortunate enough to have the Berghoff's throw her a shower here in Fort Wayne so that all of our friends and family that couldn't make it down to Carmel could join us here (and also get us more stuff..hahaha). In addition there is a birthday tomorrow as our little cousin Madi turns 1...woo hoo!!

That's it for now and remember to check out the photos.

Photos of upstairs

Here is the office in progress:

Upstairs hallway
Upstairts Guest Bathroom

All about the Honeymoon

Okay, well now that I am all about this site and wanted to spend some time posting pictures, I've spent my morning loading pictures into the computer and playing around on here instead of going to work. I've still got the second half of the day for that, right? :)

I got a request from Granny to talk some about the honeymoon, so here we go. We got to San Juan at about 6:30pm on Sunday the 8th and had to take a short bus ride to the port where we boarded the Carnival Destiny ship and got right into our awesome room which was a suite with a balcony. It was huge! We didn't have our luggage yet as they take it from you and probably xray it and all that fun stuff before returning it to your room. So we decided to walk around for a few minutes until the emergency evac practice started around 9:15pm. That was so not fun, it was hot and sweaty out there and with everyone crammed in with huge lifejackets on, you had no room to even turn around. So that lasted probably 20 minutes, and by 10 or so we had set sail to our first destination of St. Thomas!

St. Thomas was awesome, the locals are really nice, and there were actually quite a few Americans that lived there. For instance our shore excursion guy was about 30 and from Michigan and said he'd just moved to St. Thomas 2 months prior because he got sick of the snow. Haha. Wish I could just pack up and move to the Carribean! So anyways, Jeff and I went on a Catamaran sail to St. John for our excursion where we laid out on the boat for the hour sail there, snorkled on a private beach, and sailed back with some free food and champagne! It was awesome.

Second day was in Dominica where we went river tubing. So fun, you have to try it! The locals there are fun and speak sort of like Jamaicans and just want you to have a fun time. We both got really bad burns on our arms that day (the lifejackets covered the rest of us) because we forgot the sunscreen. Woops! But I would definitely do it again, it got the adrenaline moving. We didn't get to do any shopping that day because when we got back on the ship we had lunch and took a nap, and the ship left at 5pm so there wasn't much time left. So no souvenir shot glass from that stop! Oh well.

Third day was Barbados. One of my favorite stops! We saw the whole island on a 4X4 safari island tour with a stop for some free rum punch. It was really beautiful there, white sandy beaches with huge rock formations, fields of sugar cain, and really nice locals with funny accents. They grow a lot of local fruit there too, and we would stop along the tour to pick it off the trees and try it. We picked up some of the local rum from there too, one of the most popular and oldest in the carribean, called Mount Gay Rum. Funny, I know. Have yet to try it though. We also did some shopping and headed back to the port for debarkation!

Fourth day (Thursday) was our stop in St. Lucia. I was pretty bummed that day because it was our first day of no shore excursions and it kept raining off and on. We finally got a chance to go out and do a bit of shopping, but that was it. We got some nice views from the ship of the beautiful trees with big orange flowers on them, and lush mountains with houses sticking out here and there. Jeff and I say we are going to go back and stay since we didn't get a chance to really see the island.

And finally the last major day was to Antigua, part of the U.S. Virgin Islands. The locals here were most annoying, offering this and that and wanting to take you around in their taxis. But it was still a lot of fun. They had some of the best shopping and here we were actually able to walk around the town quite a bit. Visited an old cathedral and graveyard, went to the Antigua Museum, and saw a few funny locals dancing to the music. We had $3 cans of Diet Coke at a bar called Cheers which actually tasted kind of wierd, seeing as they were made in the Carribean. haha. It was a fun day.

Saturday was a "Fun day at Sea" where we spent 6 hours at the pool and went down the huge slide about 5 times. It was a great way to end the week. We got back to San Juan around 8am the next Sunday morning. Jeff and I had already planned to stay the night there so that we could do some sight seeing of Puerto Rico, so we headed off to our hotel and unloaded. The day of sightseeing was awesome and I think I even spoke a couple words of spanish to one of the locals. haha. We went to some old forts from the Spanish-American wars, went to Hard Rock Cafe for lunch, and shopped in Old San Juan for most of the day. I would love to go back and see more of the area.

We got back to Indiana around 8:30 Monday night and headed straight to Ft. Wayne to spend our first night in our new home! And we've been non-stop ever since.

So as you can see, we had a wonderful Honeymoon filled with experiences we will remember forever. It was perfect from beginning to end.

Will we ever get a free night with no house work??

Hi everybody! This is my first time on our new site so I'm not so sure how it works yet but I'll get it figured out. So here's a run down of the events since our office furniture was delivered and mostly put together. Last night (Wed.) Jeff and I went to the Wizards baseball game with his parents and sis cuz we got free tickets, and that was fun. The Wizards are a Single A team that aren't really very good but it's pretty much the best we got here so who cares. haha. The game ended up running long because, for one thing, it was tied for a couple innings and also the umpire got hit in the head with a swinging bat so the game was delayed. So we were there from 7 to 11:15pm. Fun stuff. We pretty much went right to bed after that because we've been pretty pooped from late nights and early mornings.

I started working with Jeff's mom at the warehouse for a local store here called Rustic Hutch. I can pretty much set my own hours which is good because I am always running here and there or have to be home for when furniture gets delivered, so its a pretty flexible job. Once things settle down a bit more and I actually get a day where I can sit at the computer and look for jobs without a million other things running thru my head I will start looking for a "real job". So anyhow, I'll at least have some sort of income for awhile.

Tonight Jeff and I are continuing the assembling of the last piece of our new office furniture (for now). We are still waiting on the last 2 to arrive from backorder. It's looking awesome though! I can't believe how hard it is to put a new house together (Well, new for us...the house is 5 years old). We have been working non-stop so far since we moved in on Monday the 16th of July. I must say I have had a fun time shopping for all of our new stuff!!! Let's see here, to give you an idea of what we have purchased, let me just give you a short list....patio furniture, blinds, lighting fixtures for the whole house including ceiling fans, closet shelving, stones for out by the patio, flowers, couch, recliner, dining table, office furniture, slipcover, lamps, new cabinet hardware, mirror, coat rack AND all the stuff I still wanted from my registries!! We still need an entertainment center, coffee table, dining chairs, and an entry way table. Those are the main remaining missing pieces. :) Anywho, enough boring stuff.

I'm gonna be posting pictures soon of the house and its progress. We are very proud of what we have and what we are turning the house into and hope that you guys enjoy watching the renovations! I guess its back to work for now....

New Furniture!!

So we have most of our furniture purchased and in the house. We received our Family room furniture about a week ago and our Office furniture just came yesterday. The office furniture did not come assembled so we spent all of last night putting most of it together and we just have one of the desks left. Pictures to come soon.