Well even after watching Ben do a PhD I think I underestimated how much work/stress a PhD can be! It’s been a very busy semester and I came out with more Bs than I like to admit (I think my last B+ was 8th grade dance 🙁 )… but I survived lol! And even had some occasional fun with the classmates – a few game nights and we started a dinner club where someone hosts each month!

In November we bought a house :D! But its a 15 minute drive from campus so we decided to finish up our apartment lease (1 mile from campus) and rent out the house until the end of the semester in May. We love being able to walk to school/work but every time we go over to the house we get super excited to move in! I has 2 garages – so Ben can use one for wood working and a nice little fenced in yard so we can get puppies this summer!

For Thanksgiving, Vanderbilt gave the whole week off! We were too poor from buying our house to do our original plan of going to Peru so 3 of Ben’s sisters came to visit for a couple days which was fun! We played lots of games and made a delicious Thanksgiving dinner with them and 2 of my classmates. Everyone’s first apple pie making and our first time doing the Turkey… even if it was pre-cooked lol. We also visited the flea market (so much stuff! Ben found us a dining room table for our new house and a painting lol!), farmers market, forced them to try Indian food (which I think they liked!), saw the Parthenon replica, downton Nashville, & some Christmas lights.

We also did a 5 mile run on Thanksgiving morning! My previous max distance was a 5k and I finished the 5 miler in 50 minutes which I was pretty happy with! (Ben was a couple minutes ahead…he ditched me the last mile ;).

Besides that we took Family Pics (just Ben&me) for the first time since our wedding which was fun! Pics can be seen here. Thanksgiving week was a much needed break and it was hard to get back into things for finals :-/. But now we are enjoying Christmas break and are excited to see our families in VA/MD/AZ this month!