5 years!

So I am a bit late in posting this but it still needs to be documented in my opinion. The 11th July was mine and Seth's 5th wedding anniversary! I cannot believe that it's been five years already, it's gone by soooo quickly. I still think of us as newlyweds but I guess at this stage I should accept the fact that we aren't anymore!

I had a quick look on google to see if we shared our wedding date with anyone I'd heard of (I do the same with my Birthday and I share that with Liszt, the composer and Christopher Lloyd. That's right, I share a Birthday with Doc. Brown from "Back to the Future". That makes me cool, right?) and it turns out that Channing Tatum and Jenna Dewan got married on the same day. I really like them both so I'm okay with sharing the date with them ;).

Being as it was our anniversary I thought I would share 5 random facts about us.....

1. I got to know who Seth was as my older sister dated his older brother. She always thought that Seth was really great but I doubt at that stage she thought that he would end up being her brother in law!

2. I am five years older than Seth. I found it a bit weird when we first started dating as I could still remember when he was shorter than me but needless to say, I soon got over that!

3. Seth started to like me when he was 14 years old. At the time, I was a youth leader for our church and he was one of the youth. I thought he was really nice and funny and thought it would be cool if he got together with one of my nieces when they were older, ha ha! Clearly, that didn't happen!

4. Seth froze hell for me. I sing a lot with my sisters and he told me he would love to hear me sing. I was pretty self-conscious about singing on my own and I told him that I would sing for him when hell froze over. When I next went over to his house, he produced a huge block of ice with letters spelling out "hell" frozen inside. Well played.

5. We did ballroom and Latin dancing for 2 years while he was at university. He said that when we got married, I could choose something for us to do together, whatever I wanted, and we would do it. So this is what I chose! We got our bronze and silver awards in Latin dancing and got our bronze in ballroom. I absolutely loved doing it and wish that we had more time now we live in London to do it again.  

So there you go! I love being married to Seth, he's a great husband and I love how much fun we have together and how I can always be completely myself with him. I remember before we got married and I thought that in some ways, being married would be so different. I honestly thought that I would have to go on shopping trips without him so that I could buy tampons without him being there. Within about three weeks of married life I sent him out to go and buy tampons for me, so that quickly went out of the window!

I am the most indecisive person in the world and I can't stand having to make big important decisions but I'm so glad that I made the right one in marrying Seth. Life is pretty sweet!

little changes

There have been a few little changes around here recently. Or, more specifically, changes with me. Regardless of how much sleep I get, it never seems to be enough. I look forward to Caleb's nap times as it means that I can get a little shut eye too. I am a lot more emotional than usual and it will just take a slightly sentimental advert on TV to get me welling up. I can't stand savoury food AT ALL. And I pretty much mean, nothing. It literally makes my stomach churn and if I actually manage to eat an entire meal and keep it down, it's a victory. I want to eat sweet things all the time and they are literally the only things I want to eat. Chocolate, ice cream, cake, chocolate milkshakes, you name it, I want it. My nose is so sensitive to smell, it's unbelievable, and it seems that no one else can smell the things I can smell. There is only one obvious reason for all of this, of course......

 Seth and I are so excited, and I'm sure Caleb would be too if he actually understood! He is a little bit obsessed with babies and wherever we go he seems to notice them, so I'm sure he will be thrilled with a little brother or sister.

Being pregnant this time round has been pretty different to when I was expecting Caleb. With Caleb I was pretty lucky, I had a bit of nausea in the morning but no actual sickness, and the nausea would tend to disappear at around 11am. I still liked all of the food I usually liked. Of course, I was still exhausted as I am this time, which is just one of those expected things, growing a baby takes a lot out of you! This time, I am nauseous from the time I wake up until the time I go to bed and as I mentioned previously, I'm having a bit of trouble with managing to eat! Things I usually love, I now can't even stand the smell of. Poor Caleb gets the fright of his life every time he hears me being sick, he gets so scared and we have to cuddle for a little while afterwards to reassure him that everything is okay (and of course, I just hate those cuddles.... ;)). And yet, even though I am feeling pretty terrible, I also kind of like feeling that way too, because it means that I am pregnant. Don't get me wrong, I'd rather not be feeling like that and still be pregnant, but it's just one of those things!

I had a scan at 9 weeks and again today at 12 weeks 4 days and we were able to see the baby moving around which is so exciting to see. I wondered if I'd be as excited as I was with Caleb being as this is the second time round and I really am every bit as excited. I'm not wishing time away because I know the baby will be here before I know it (whilst at the same time I know it will feel like I'm waiting forever!) and also, it's just nice to soak up all of the time I have with Caleb until the baby comes. Life is feeling pretty good at the moment!

On feeling sentimental

I was never one of these girls who knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. My sister, Laura, from the age of around 8 new that she wanted to be a lawyer and she did that and more, she's now a senior law lecturer at a university in Liverpool. I always wished that I knew what I wanted to do or be but I seriously had no idea!

When I graduated from university, I was still none the wiser on what I wanted to do. I worked in an insurance company, I then went travelling, came back and worked at BMW, then was an estate agent for two years. See what I mean about no direction? I then applied for a job as an administrator at an art school. It was a complete change and like nothing I'd ever done before. I was fairly in over my head! There was a lot of jargon that it took me a while to learn and I didn't end up being there for very long as during that time, Seth proposed, we got married that summer and we moved to Lancaster. And there I got a job at Lancaster university as the programme coordinator for the MBA programme. I worked in this job for two years and I liked it a lot, I loved working at a university and being around the students (who I didn't always get to see as they were doing the executive MBA and so were part time). I just liked the overall feel and atmosphere of being there.

Seth then graduated from university and got a job in London so we moved here. I decided that working at universities was what I liked and got a job as the undergraduate programme coordinator for the history programme at Goldsmiths. It's funny because when I went for the interview, I didn't like the area of London hat the university was in and so I decided that I wouldn't want the job and I would just treat the interview as good practise. Then I had the interview and immediately liked the people and the place. When they offered me the job I didn't hesitate for a second in accepting the position. I loved it! And I have never really loved any of the jobs that I have done, but this one was different. The staff I worked with were amazing and I loved always being in contact with the students and getting to know them and their stories. Some of these students had been through so much and had so many struggles and they were still at university, doing their degrees. One student who I got on really well with was married with a daughter and she was pregnant with her second baby when she started university. She had him at around Christmas of the first year and was back within a couple of weeks. I really admire students like that who still make the decision to come to university.

I was only at Goldsmiths for a year because then I had Caleb and didn't go back to work. The first years that I started with have now finished their degrees! I'm friends with a couple of them on Facebook and it seems so surreal to be reading their statuses about finishing university and moving on to the next chapter of their lives. I seriously don't know where the time has gone though, when I was at uni, those three years felt like an eternity and yet now those first years have finished! Surely they have only just started?! Although saying that, in that time, I worked at Goldsmiths for a year and have had nearly two years with my lovely Caleb, so I guess that a lot has happened after all. So like I said in the title of this post, I'm feeling a bit sentimental right now and I'm also strangely feeling kind of proud of those students for all that they have achieved. For someone that never knew what they wanted to do career-wise, I never thought that I would actually end up finding a job where I got such satisfaction out of what I did and I am really glad that in that time I got to meet and associate with such great people.

Oh and as an aside, while I'm talking about universities, a couple of weeks ago, part of the next Avengers film was being filmed at my university, UEA. My brother in law works there and he saw Chris Hemsworth. I don't care what you say, I think that's pretty cool!