Charleston

Yesterday we went to Sullivan's Island to see the Charleston lighthouse and the beach. Its amazing that even though I've lived here for years, I have never seen this lighthouse before. Its not much to look at and you can't walk up it though. We agreed that it looks more like a prison than a lighthouse but still fun to go visit. Then we walked on the beach for a little while. It was a beautiful day in the morning but by the time we got there it was gloomy.

Then we went downtown to the battery to walk around. I love looking at all the old houses that are just so beautiful. We also needed a current picture by the pineapple.

Year of the Eppersons 2013 review- Mike

Here are a few of the accomplishments that have made this past year awesome!

-Cycling: I was able to ride 1,806 miles with 66,280 ft of climbing. My longest ride was the Tour De Paws which was 62 miles in 3 hours and 22 min.

-Running: although running is my second sport, I was still able to run a total of 96 miles on the year and I was able to finish in the top 3 of my age group at the Sherman College Commit to be Fit 5k run with a time of 22 min.














-Weight Loss: This year I decided that I cannot be a healthcare provider without being healthy myself so I decided to lose weight by simply using the Law of Thermodynamics. Energy In=Energy out I had great success and lost 30+ pounds :)













-Push Ups: To kick off my weight loss last new years I wanted to see if I could do 1000 push ups in 2 weeks. I did much better than that and decided to keep track of every push up I did this year. 2013 total equals 21,197!

-Published Article: From my work at Collage of Charleston we were able to published the results we were able to obtain in an article in the Journal of Organic and Biomolecular Chemistry.  Paper









- Traveling: We were able to do some traveling this year to scope out some possible future locations to settle down. We were able to travel from sea to shining sea to Las Vegas NV, Phoenix AZ, Las Angeles CA, and New York City NY.

- The most important and exciting thing that I have accomplished this year is the possibility of becoming a father this coming June. I could not be more excited!

Bring on 2014!! Happy New year!

Christmas Day

We had a very nice Christmas this year. Between the advent calendar keeping us busy with fun activities and being on vacation for about 3 weeks, its been extremely relaxing. Mike and I have been able to go running in nice weather in the mornings and the time before Christmas was spent doing lots of shopping and baking. Now that its over we're spending most of our time relaxing and taking little trips to do fun things around here.

Before:

After:

I'm excited because a lot of the stuff Mike and I got was stuff we will both use and can both benefit from and it was stuff we needed. 

Then we had the traditional Williams family Christmas breakfast of coffee cake.....mmmm so good. Seriously its homemade and its so bad for you but its delicious. We spent the rest of the day enjoying spending time together (movies, going for a long walk, reading books, face timing Mike's family ) and just relaxing until it was time for a yummy Christmas dinner. I feel like we had a great Christmas and that we did a great job balancing the fun and spiritual side of Christmas. We did all of our fun traditions but we also spent time remembering Christ and his birth since he is the reason for the season.

Merry Christmas to all!!

A Special Day

I always feel so bad that Mike's birthday is at Christmas time. It always seems like it doesn't get quite the attention that it deserves. I love birthdays and I love making someone's day special for them. So each year since we've been together for his birthday I try really hard to completely set Christmas aside for that one day and make it all about Mike.

We started the day with a special breakfast and one of Mike's favorite things to eat. In his family they traditionally have this on Christmas morning but since my family wasn't entirely thrilled with giving up our tradition of coffee cake on Christmas, we compromised and did it on Mike's birthday. If you can't tell, its waffles with strawberries and ice cream on top. It was delicious and amazing! Mike had eggnog with his as well :) I think my family ended up enjoying it for the most part....I know I did.

Then Mike decided he wanted to go play miniature golf as Frankie's Fun Park.We all did well but Mike got 4 hole in one's :)

Mike chose Applebee's for his special birthday dinner. After a delicious dinner, we went back to my parent's house and opened presents and just relaxed for the evening. I hope you had a great birthday sweetie! I love you!

Do You See What I See?

Yup, that's right, it's a baby!!

Mike and I are excited to announce we are expecting our first baby next year! Right now I'm 15 weeks along which puts my due date at June 14 ,2014. We are so excited to expand our family! Its been a crazy couple of months in our house and we're so happy that all of our fertility treatments finally worked. For those of you wondering, yes this is an IUI baby so not a normal conception but we already couldn't love our baby more! (I'll post more about our fertility journey later)

We've known we were pregnant since October 4th when we were 4 weeks pregnant. We got to hear the heartbeat for the first time at 6 weeks and it was amazing to be able to hear it and see it. We got to see our baby again at 9 weeks and hear the heartbeat again. Since we had to go through IUI to get pregnant we've gotten to have lots and lots of ultrasounds that other people don't get and we've gotten to see our baby a lot more than normal which is fine with me. If I could I would have an ultrasound every day just so I could hear and see my little baby whenever I wanted. Our most recent ultrasound (pictured above) was at 12 1/2 weeks along. We'll get to find out the gender in about 8 weeks.

This was how we told our parents :) We surprised my parents by showing up at the house and gave them this cookie cake. They were so excited! Enjoy the pictures!

Hi everybody! Can't wait to meet you!

PS: Thank you to all of the people who have known and kept our secret and a special thank you to the people who supported us during the fertility stuff and were extra patient with me. It was a small group of people but you have no idea how important each of you were both directly and indirectly.

Cookies!

One of the best parts of Christmas is all of the baking that we get to do. I love baking cookies and then taking them all to other people! Its fun to do nice things for other people and hopefully make Christmas a little happier for them. This year we started baking a little later than usual. We made about 100 cookies- sugar, snicker doodle and peanut butter with Hershey kisses. I know that may not seem like a lot but it was pretty impressive when we got them all done in less than 2 hours. We're efficient.

Unfortunately, a few of the cookies broke ;) So we just had to eat them but the good news is that they have been tested so we know they taste good. Now since all of the cookies are to be given away, we must make more for us to eat :)

Lastly, my family is strange and by family I mean my brother Joshua but he does make us smile and laugh a lot.

This was his 'answer the door for the UPS man outfit'. I think the UPS guy got a good laugh out of it. I know we did :)

Festival of Lights 2013

I love going to the festival of lights! This is my favorite Christmas activity and for me its just not Christmas if I don't get to go. I have about a million of the same pictures but I really don't care. I love driving around and seeing the lights, we always go around twice and its fun to get out and walk around too. The lights were much brighter this year since they had replaced a lot of the lights with new LED ones. It was really pretty and a fun night! Enjoy the pictures :)

Merry Christmas!