Baltimore and the FAGD

As in a Fellow in the Academy of General Dentistry. As of this past weekend, I happen to be married to one! Congratulations Kullen! We are so proud of you! But boy have we been able to get some good jokes out of the whole FAGD acronym. Then add to it that the graduate color for dentistry is purple, and we've got a whole other layer of funny. Kullen has a great staff at his office, and they created the best card for him (I've included just one of the pics... they're all pretty darn funny).

Ok - as for our long weekend in Baltimore, here's the recap:

Thursday - Drove down to Baltimore in about 6 hours. Kiley did really well in the car, but I've decided I may invest in a new DVD player that has a battery life longer than one hour for our upcoming flight to Vegas. We checked in to the hotel. When Kiley saw the big beds and fancy room she said, "I love it here!" We had seafood for dinner right on the Harbor and enjoyed the absolutely beautiful weather. That night, we enjoyed our hotel's swimming pool. Kiley's getting braver in the water.

Friday - Stopped in to the dental convention for a couple of hours. Met up w/ our good friends the Manwarings (Kullen served his mission with Andrew). We haven't seen them since their wedding 6 years ago. Now they have a sweet little boy, Landon, who we got to meet too. When they took off, we actually got Kiley to nap at the hotel. When she woke up, went on the Duckboats! Fun stuff. We had another night of swimming at the hotel.

Saturday - We decided to go to Fort McHenry, famous for where Francis Scott Key saw the flag and penned the poem, "The Star Bangled Banner." Or as my niece Kenna calls it, "the song they sing at Nascar" (Jen... we need to talk about that!). About a half hour in to our tour, Kiley had a really bad fall down some brick stairs. Bonked her head pretty good and cut her eye. We had a scary 30 minutes after her fall. But the swelling stopped pretty quickly, and the cut didn't get her eyeball. The cut literally goes up in to her lower lashline and stops. We are very fortunate. We layed low in the hotel for a couple of hours to see how she did and if we needed to go to an urgent care center, but this kid perked up and decided she wanted to go back out! So we stuck around the harbor area and attended Kullen's graduation ceremony. Alot of pomp and circumstance for these doctors. I guess they do work hard and all... but it's not so easy to attend a 2 1/2 hour ceremony w/ a 3 year old!

Sunday - Believe it or not, we ventured back to Fort McHenry. It was really neat and we wanted to finish our tour! Kiley held hands the entire time and helped me take some pictures. The fort was really impressive. Every now and then you're able to catch glimpses of all the sacrifices that were made to secure our freedoms. This was one of those times. Then we took the long drive home.

A bit lengthy debrief, but we had a nice trip. Happy for Kullen as he finishes a major accomplishment, and relieved that Kiley was not hurt worse than she was. Did I mention that we are really blessed?