Oh, We got you SO good!

Tim and I pulled a BIG one, I mean huge. We made approximately at least four people cry, in a good way, at Christmas Eve. Yes, we told our family that we would not be able to, under any circumstance, be in GA for Christmas. Fooled you fam! Tim and I had quite the adventure, flying in to Atl in the morning, living at the airport, taking a taxi to the home (only to be confused as he drops us off a whole block before the home) and completely surprising the entire family! Christmas Eve was so amazing, I am so glad God blessed me with a husband that likes to see his wife happy!

I was playing around with snapfish and they have a link where you can see all the picture from our weekend. And once I can e-mail the pictures Tim and I took on his phone from the airport, I can give an update blog and walk you through our day with pictures.

It was an amazing Christmas, I love waking up Saturday morning knowing I was spending Christmas in GA. And once again, I was reminded of what a holy day this was, as this day is the day designated to celebrate God's greatest gift to the earh, Jesus Christ, through Him we have Salavation and the privilege to live for something so much greater than ourselves.

I can use this...

To complain, right? I mean, I know it is mine and Tim's blog, but I run it, sometimes Tim walks by as I am blogging and complains about me blogging and then approves of all I have posted and then walks away. But I feel like I run 99.9% of this sucker, and I should get to use this as an outlet for me. I am much better at writing down my thoughts and feels than talking anyway. So, I will write my complaint.

And it is to complain about me. I wish I was not lazy. I wasn't at one point in my life. In high school, I was a cheerleader into two seasons, when I wasn't at my school gym, I was at another gym practicing, tumbling or something of the sort. I took honors classes, or advanced classes. For goodness sake I took physics my junior year and got a B in the class, that is pretty darn good for not knowing the math that it takes to understand physics!!! I went to college, and got a little more lazy in the beginning. But one semester I took 18 hours and had a job, and I got almost all A's. That is really impressive, at least for me. So the question begs.... WHY AM I SO LAZY!!! I have always worked hard. It kills me to know that my everyday routine is to go to work, come home, and sit around for five hours and then at 10 o'clock at night decide things need to be done...AH! I hate that I am mad at myself right now!! So, I am going to go finish wrapping presents, and try to come to the bottom of my laziness problem. And really, what I really need is prayer. If you guys could pray that God would reveal to me why I have become so slothful (it is a deadly sin). This really is something that affects my marriage (Tim hates laziness, I think it is because he is so Godly) and it is affecting my spiritual life. And as my sister writes about how she runs today, I kick myself because I am getting fatter and I still continue to sit on this couch. Jenn, you are truly an inspiration to me. My future as a mother, a good wife, and servant of God depends on kicking this habit of lazy. I ask for your prayers, not that one day I wake up and all the sudden I am just not lazy anymore, but that God would reveal to me the source of the sin.

That would be helpful, because I really don't want to get fat either. Night!

You better...

Save some time for reading this post, it may take awhile, cause I'm going all the way back...

To October as more fun things happened that I so rudely decided that the world could wait to hear about, (just kidding), but a lot has happened. First, I need to educate those on my husband, Tim. He is a man that LOVES to be connected with others. He loves to "make connections" if you will, and when the Chick-fil-a conference came down to Orlando, Tim could not wait to see the Cathy's and introduce himself, he was so excited to see them, and Bubba is such a hoot, he was handing Tim gifts as he was talking to Tim! But anyway, part of this experience and education about Tim, is that he LOVES planes. Loves them, he still stops talking to me to watch the plane, I have never taken offense to this because I love watching his passion. I honestly do not know how God is going to use that in Tim's life, but God gave Tim that passion, and God will be the one to use that passion to glorify Himself. So moving on, Truett Cathy flew down on his plane, and I have some lovely family members that were kind enough to get Tim "connected" with John Dixon, who was such a great guy, and let Tim take a tour of the plane.

Here is Tim in front of the airplane, this might looke like an ordinary smile, but it is actually his "Iam SO excited smile" trust me, there is a difference.


This picture is blurry, and you can't read the inscription, but Mr. Cathy puts this inscription on his plane, and Tim has stated that he has seen it elsewhere on other vehicles. I honestly can't remember what is says, hopefully Amy will leave a comment stating what it says, but it is basically a reminder to all that these gifts come from God and we are to be good stewards of them. Tim was very blown away and had an awesome experience touring the plane.

Ending our beautiful and exciting month of October was the GA/FL game. April gave a good synopsis of the game: we come, we eat really good food, we go to the game, we lose, we go back to the condo and eat more really good food. The most fun was had playing ultimate Frisbee and jumping into the ocean after than walking out of the Jacksonville stadium ashamed... Some pictures from the event:

Everyone getting ready before the game, hoping to use their "dawgs win celebreation tools." We did not use them...

Us before the game, before I sweated off all my make up and lost my voice yelling. Side note, Jennifer got me that wonderful purse for a Christmas gift, matched my outfit perfectly!

I was quite unhappy with the scoreboard the whole game :(

My first GA game that I attended that got me insanely addicted to UGA was the GA vs Northwestern game. It was a complete blowout, and the stadium was full, but not crazy and packed like this! GA/FL was Tim's first game, which I thought was very cool. But I still want him to go to one "between the hedges" to get the full effect one day!

And, I'm just throwing this one in cause Amy is hilarious!

OK, now we are finally in November, and I think at least my mom knows what that means, MY ANNIVERSARY!! I know two years is not that long, and it is not, Tim and I can't wait to be sitting on rocking chairs holding hands when we are eighty years old. He is still my best friend, I am still my crazy weird self around him, and we have loved getting to live in our own little world here in Orlando. But our anniversary gives us an excuse to go out of town, spend money, and take a long needed vacation. Tim's Aunt Meg and Uncle Jon were kind enough to open their home in Houston to host our gig.

Our first full day there, we went with Aunt Meg to our first dog show. They have the most adorable puppy who is a German Short-Hair that they show. Very cool!

This was just one of the dogs that was a winner, but it is an English Bulldog, and it WILL be our next dog, because I get to pick. They are so adorable :)

Just a couple of people at a dog show, lots of fun!

The next day we went to a mall called The Galleria, it reminded me of Phipps Plaza in Atlanta except it also had an ice-skating rink in it. Did we go ice-skating? Yes! Was I excited? Yes! Until I realized the last time I went ice-skating was OVER ten years ago! Oh crap! Here is what happened:

Me skating around looking like a fool, trying not to fall.

Stop for a fun picture on the ice, see I look like I'm having SO much fun!!

We go back to skating and the only way I would do it is if Tim promised to hold my hand, that is not a "pose" face, that is really sheer terror as I have realized what I got myself into.

I was not holding Tim's hand, I was clinching onto it for dear life.

Did I mention Tim was a pro at skating and had no problems whatsoever, and at one time he skated circles around my clumsy self??? Oh yeah, he's a skating pro! seriously...

The next day was our anniversary day, so we decided to stay at home and relax and go out to dinner that evening. The Vitarious's have a kyak, so Tim and I were discussing about going out on the lake that is in their back yard. It wasn't until I saw that kyak that I realized it was only for one person. Did we try to fit two in it anyway? Yes we did. Aunt Meg told us her daughter goes out on it all the time with her friends, so it should not be any harder for us.

Then Tim and I realized we DO weigh a lot more than two teenage girls. Here is our first try at it, I am in sheer terror, again, because as you can see, this kyak is a little back heavy (don't know why?? jk) and the slightes move of his orr was making the whole thing shake BIG time, that was going to send us tumbling into that VERY cold lake. Luckily, we did get back to the shore to try a different method:

This worked a little better, the kyak was still shaky, but our center of gravity was more in the middle, so it was doable. However, if you can see my legs, they were so pressed against the side of the kyak I lost feeling in the bottom of my shins. We did have fun though, it was quite an adventure.

That night we got dressed up to go to Vic and Anthony's.


I'm kind of upset that we did not take a picture with the food, it was an awesome steakhouse were the meat just melts in your mouth. Amazing. It was recommended to us by a friend and we thanked him for giving us a great place to eat for the evening.

Wednesday, Grammy and Grumpy came into town and unfortuneatly, we did not take any pictures that day (I need to work on that) but it was a fun day of catching up with them and relaxing around the house. Thursday we spent the day at a Museum in downtown Houston, and then went to dinner with one of my friend's, Kim and her boyfriend. That was a fun evening as well, and unfortunately, agian we only took pictures at the museum:

Me and Dinorsaurs.

Tim getting eaten by dinosaurs.

I love faceshots, I do them all the time with Tim. This is us having fun at the Museum.

To be honest with you, we did so much. There was a butterfly garden we went to at the museum (all who know me, know I love butterflies) I took SO many pictures, it is almost too much. We did a lot of relaxing that week, it was actually nice to go on vacation and relax and not be so busy we can't sleep or just lay around. And, I am officially going to have to cut this blog into two because I have pictures of our last adventure which was on Thankgsiving as we tooled around Orlando, with Riley, trying to find the perfect Christmas picture. More to come on that! So I hope you enjoy the catching up, more updates to come later!

Weekend update...

So, I don't have any pictures for this post, but I will leave links so you can click on things and be entertained. First of all, last weekend, Mom and Dad came down to visit. When you come visit me on a long weekend, this is what we do: Saturday we wake up and go to the Winter Park Farmer's Market. What I like to do is get $20 in cash and see how much I can buy for that $20. I always encourage people to buy the fresh squeezed lemonade that is always there, kettle corn (I have eaten a whole large bag by myself), and then I take you to the bakery part of the Market where you can buy Belgian waffles topped with fresh strawberry topping and cheese cake topping (you need at least three people to finish), or the fresh cheesecake "cupcakes" that come in all kinds of flavors from key lime to cookies and cream, SO good. The Market has fresh flowers there that I always think would be great gifts for the "green thumb" members of the family, and that does not include me. Very cool place.

After Farmer's Market, I would lead you to Park Ave just across the street from the Market. There are all kinds of boutiques and fun places to look at different clothes, however, these kinds of places you would buy an "investment" article of clothing, but they are fun nonetheless.

After Park Ave, we would come home and get Riley. Riley cannot come to Winter Park yet because he has not developed manners yet, we are working on that, mostly just waiting for him to grow out of being a puppy. We love taking dogs to Fleet Peeple's Park which is an off leash dog park. That kind of scared mom and dad because there happened to be a higher number of pit bulls at the park that day, but we have never had a negative experience with dogs at the park and most people are good about making their dogs behave, we love it there.

After Riley gets tuckered out, Tim and I like to take people out to "Orlando" restaurants, places that you don't have in your own home town. We do have a number of places we enjoy like, Blackhammock where you WILL try gator tail (good) and the other wonderful seafood selections offered. They also have an alligator exhibit and air boats, its a pretty cool place.

Sunday we bring you to our life group and church, which is always an experience, I like showing off my family to the group, its fun. Sunday's are always a lazy day maybe do some shopping if we didn't do any on Saturday.

So, hopefully mom will post the little pictures we took of the weekend on her post, but it was a fun weekend.

Currently, Tim and I are going to a class on Wednesday nights that focuses on the person not only finding their spiritual gift, but finding how that gift is married to their passions and how you can serve the church with the gift and passions that you have. We first had to take two spiritual gift inventories that Pastor Jimmy himself created with his wife (his ministry in the church is actually helping people find their passion and where to serve in the church) Try is for yourself at jandlministry.com. Very enlightening. I am looking forward to see where God wants me to serve in our church to better his glory. Hopefully I will have an update for you on where that leads in the coming months.

Ok, that's all for the weekend update, wish I had something clever to end this with, but oh well. Love you All!

September

So, so much has happened in September that is has taken me a whole month to think about what I have wanted to blog about. And now for some reason all of my writing is underlined. Due to the fact that blogging confuses me greatly, I will continue because I do not know how to get the underline to go away. Here are some highlights of the month...



September started out with an awesome extended weekend in New Hampshire/New Jersey. We flew into Manchester and spent a whole day with Tim's dad and the model T's driving around Keene. It is actually a very cool experience, you kind of feel like a celebrity, people stopped along the way and waved to us and honked (some good honks, some bad:)) I enjoyed the experience greatly and it was another unique part of Tim's life growing up we got to share together. Ah, the joys of being newly weds and continuing to get to know more about each other...



I don't know how many of you know this, but Tim actually knows how to drive a Model T. With some refreshment courses from Bill, Tim drove us around town in his (that's right, Tim actually has his own Model T that Bill is keeping for him for now) Model T truck.



Next we drove down to New Jersey to vacation a little bit with Kathy, Ed, Uncle Rod and Aunt Lori. While at the Jersey Shore, I was introduced to the fair, I mean the original one. So I partook of the goods and played one of Tim's childhood favorites and played Frog Bogs. I won a BIG FROG. The above picture is a picture of two grown people strategizing about how to win a carnival game... Nice...

This is all of us in front of Kelly's, an extremely authentic Irish tavern that has really good Reubens. I liked the place so much I got a shirt. I can fortell that there will definitely be more Kelly's in my future.

I know this is out of order but I am tired of trying to rearrange pictures on the blog and then having them lost. This is a picture of me in front of the Frog Bog place that I won BIG at the night before. That day we had rented bikes and you can ride through the fair because most of the shops are closed and not as many people are walking around. Fun times!

The next weekend away we spent was in GA due to the fact that Weston was supposed to be born only a couple of weeks earlier, not the day after I left from the last weekend I visited GA. So, I kind of missed my nephews "new born" baby stage, he was about a little over month old by the time we got up there. However, the boy is still so cute, a little grumpy, but very cute. He has an adorable sister, this is me, Emily, and Savannah, I like the pic!

I got the pleasure of assisting in bath time a couple of nights I was there. Those baby blues are SO adorable I cannot resist that child, her Aunt La definitely spoils her rotten!

I like this picture because this is my typical family, busy, organized chaos, and a whole lot of fun, this was our attempt at a Christmas picture, I think we should probably go with the one we took back in July, mostly due to the fact that is that picture all the girls were ready for it!

And finally, a couple of hours before we had to fly back to FL, Uncle David gave me and Tim our first tour of the Chick-Fil-A corporate building. For those of you who don't know, Uncle David is an awesome tour guide and is extremely informative about everything in the world, especially Chick-fil-a (one time I interviewed him for a term paper and with all the info I was given by him, not only did I get an A on the paper, but the professor wanted me to do more research on it for him!) This is Tim and I in Truett Cathy's office, very cool, really does feel like a tree house.

And last but certainly not least is us infront of the famed Batmobile that Mr. Cathy bought a long time ago. I think it looks cooler in person. We couldn't touch, but the pic is great.



So, here was September in a nutshell, lots of great memories and I am glad I got this one over with so I can blog about my other topics I have been thinking about!! ha!

My Jericho Progect

So lately, I have been reading through the book of Joshua and about all the many battles that took place in order to take the land of Canaan, the future home of Israel. And as I am reading through this, I am just now realizing, through all my years of Sunday School and Bible class with Mr. Bowman (home school teacher) and all my other Bible teachers, that taking this land did not happen over night after they took Jericho, it took quite some time. However, God was trying to teach them an important lesson beginning with Jericho.

You all know, that at Jericho, the only instructions for war, beside walking around the giant city a millions times (I'm sure it felt like that to them) was to shout, but not to shout a war cry, but a shout of praise to God, for HE had GIVEN them the city. They were crying victory before the war even began!! And then God handed them the city, almost gift wrapped it for them. And as I kept reading throughout Joshua, when the Israelites had to continue to fight to win there inheritance, Joshua reminded them over and over that it was not going to be a battle, God had already PROMISED them the land, the battle was mostly just a test of faith for the people, almost a technicality. What is even more interesting is, as I am reading I am just realizing that the Canaanites were not small villages that were in the beginning steps of forming a more sophisticated government. These were highly militarized, big states (kingdoms, as the Bible calls it). And even though they had such technology as iron chariots, Joshua continued to contend that God can take them, just show up for the battle!

So, through reading this, I am realizing there needs to be some application. We all have Jericho's, you can call them what you want, your "Giant," "Goliath", "Mountain"..etc. But the key is to praise God for the victory no matter what the circumstance and how crazy it is. I like to think of Tim and I's situation as a Jericho because we do have a promised land waiting for us, no more college loans! So as we are coming up through different obstacles, waiting on the Lord, and looking into the future, I am challenging myself to praise God for all the victories that are coming ahead and hope that it will not take us as long as it took Israel to take our promised land by storm, hopefully I can practice more faith in God for victory... to be continued...

Let me muse over this...

So, this week was crazy with so many different stories, and of course, I have a million different thoughts about each different event. First I will start out with my sister, Jennifer, had my nephew, or her son mainly. I am so happy and sad at the same time. This beautiful baby comes (two days after I left town, my theory is that its because he wanted to see me so bad he came four weeks early) and as I am joyous for this blooming family, my heart cries because I miss you all SO much. I don't know if anyone caught on, but when I was visiting last weekend I stopped myself from crying at least 100 times. :) So congrats my lovely sister for popping the little guy out!

My week at work was mainly uneventful besides calling my mom all day on Wed. to check up with Jen, and the weekend had come so quickly. Tim is now back to having Sat. and Sun. off with me which means two things: 1. I am happy again and 2. We will travel. This weekend we went to Wekiwa Springs Park. And we decided that we should do a 1.9 mile hike to a place called Sand Lake, with a five month old (Riley). When we finally reached this "Lake" it was more like a pond. We thought we would be able to swim. No. It had alligators. I will post the pic's of this tiny place and our exhausted dog later. Did I mention the dog was foaming at the mouth because we hiked in the middle of a Florida afternoon in August? Not, quiiiiittte smart, however, my amazing husband did pack water, so we were at least mostly hydrated for our total 4 mile hike.
P.S. I have several mosquito bites the size of softballs (Tim had zero).

So, next weekend, we will do another adventure, maybe to a more dog-friendly place where we can let the poor canine off the leash, I keep you updated on our new adventures. All, in all, the weekend was good and now I'm tired, and I start the week over.

Dear Lord,
I know you are always with me, but let me feel the power of your presence to comfort me when I feel like I can't keep going!