Pittsburgh

Happy Monday! How was your weekend?

Jimmy and I were able to sneak in a date night on Friday while my mother-in-law watched Sadie. It was so nice to spend some alone time with Jimmy! We went to a local pool and spa store to look at hot tubs. We’ve been wanting one ever since we stayed at my parents’ beach house last month and went in their hot tub daily.

Time will tell if we actually get one because we are going to be spending a good chunk of money here soon on a fence extension to keep our Houdini dog from escaping, lol.

On Saturday, Jimmy went to a work day at our church and Sadie and I did some cleaning and organizing around the house. She’s been getting into our snack drawer lately and running around with crackers while Niva chases her and it’s just a constant mess. I put all the snacks up high and hopefully it saves me from cleaning cracker crumbs 24/7 😉

I also filmed a vlog on Saturday because I realized I’ve rarely documented a Saturday at the Zottola household. In the evening, we had a bonfire!

Remember how I said I was really excited to decorate for Christmas? Well, I made a pom pom garland. I had some twine laying around the house and I used a hot glue gun to glue pom poms I bought at Dollar Tree to the twine.

Simple and easy! I promise I won’t hang it up until November 🙂

Well, I better get going and start my Monday. I hear Sadie stirring in her crib as I type up this post.

I’ll leave you with a funny occurrence that happened yesterday while we were at church…

There’s a family on our street that has a siberian husky that looks just like Niva. The dog escaped and was running around the neighborhood and a woman a few doors down from us thought she was Niva so she was throwing bologna into our yard to lure her in and even got her into our fence. Our next-door neighbor had to break the news to her her that the dog wasn’t Niva, lol. We have been blessed with some amazing neighbors!

On October 12th, 2010 I started this blog. My first post was a recap of my weekend and also embarrassing, haha. I was 18-years-old and just having fun sharing my days as a freshman in college, what I ate, what Jimmy and I did, and things that were on my mind.

I was swimming competitively, working at Penn State’s athletic center, Jimmy was my boyfriend, and Lola was a young dog.

While in college, I got into running and did everything from 5ks to marathon training, struggled with an h.pylori infection, and Jimmy and I were engaged. I graduated from Penn State in 2014 with a degree in journalism.

Jimmy and I got married, bought a house, I worked as a household manager and pet sat, began working for my family’s real estate brokerage, and were blessed with our daughter, Sadie!

We’ve gardened our little hearts out and served alongside our church family.

Throughout the years we’ve had quite a few pets: Lola, Ford and Scout, Malcolm, Mavis, and Niva. We did a lot of therapy dog training with Mavis, which was an experience I really enjoyed.

Animals have been such a huge part of my life and blog and I’m continually trying to convince Jimmy to allow me to have a bunch more cats and dogs 🙂

I have shared about my faith in God, my favorite recipes, books I’ve read, my journey as a new mom, and my everyday life here in Pittsburgh.

The landscape of blogging has changed so much over the past ten years. A lot of people may say blogging is old-school and defunct in the age of Instagram and Facebook, but I don’t care. I love this space.

I have made some incredible friends from around the world over the past ten years and I owe that to this little corner of the internet. The little blogging community here is so special to me. There have been fun posts, happy posts, hard posts, and everything in-between.

Whether you’ve been connecting with me for the past ten years or this is your first time visiting my blog, thank you for reading! I’m looking forward to the future here at Living My Full Life!

Living My Full Life

Weekend Fun at The Zottola House

Ten Years of Blogging