Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Our Disneyworld Trip-May 2011

Since I never manage to find time to blog about our annual Disneyworld trips, I decided to make a photo book and share it with the blog. Plus, I bought a Groupon-type deal for this photobook so I had a DEADLINE to get it finished. I think this might be my new mode of scrapbooking.


Enjoy!!





Thursday, August 25, 2011

Summer Fun 4 Parents

Will and I sent the kids to his parent's house a couple of weekends this summer and it was a MUCH NEEDED BREAK from the kiddos. Do you know how quiet this house is when the kids are gone?

The first weekend was back in July. On Friday night Will and I ate dinner at our fave restaurant (Stoney Creek) to celebrate our 11th wedding anniversary. (Sorry, no pics!) On Saturday, we did a few projects around the house, including installing a ceiling fan in Claire and David's room. It turned out to be a bigger project than we expected and ended with me on a ladder in the kids' room and Will in the attic with a broom and flashlight directing me where to put the screws. We are still a good team after 11 years! Saturday afternoon, we headed out with some friends to the U2 concert at Vanderbilt. We had a blast tailgating before the show and the concert was AWESOME! It was hot!hot!hot! and sticky but a great night.

Beer and a few games of cornhole before the show. Always a hit with the guys.


Me and my honey! Happy Anniversary!


The beautiful, glistening ladies.

Inside the stadium. It was so WAY hotter in there.

Awesome stage!

Here comes U2 on the big screen.


Awesome stage at night. It was not any cooler after the sun went down.

Best. concert. ever. Hands down.


We also managed to snag a babysitter for a date night with friends to celebrate our friend Rocky's birthday and his almost last night as a father of three. (Teri delivered baby #4 two days later.)
The whole gang (at Stoney River again).

Happy Birthday Rocky!!

The lovely ladies.

Our cute hubbies.

In August, we sent the kids to Alabama again for some adult only time. Friday night was dinner and a movie date with Will. Saturday morning, Will played in a golf tourney with a bunch of guys mostly from our church. This is an annual event, topped off with a evening soiree with spouses.

A group of girls from our Sunday School class. The two girls on either end are expecting baby #3. Their worlds are about to be ROCKED!

Will and me before we made a quick exit to avoid being thrown in the pool.

The Winners! (I'm not sure why this picture is so teeny-tiny, but we'll just roll with it.) Will played with Wade (by random pairings) last year and this year. Last year, they came in second place, losing in a score-card playoff. (For those of you who play golf, maybe you know what that is.) This year, they won the tourney outright. Wade is the younger brother of the tourney organizers and they always give him a hard time. Will was glad they won!

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Back to School

We started school for the year on August 1st. It was pretty uneventful. Claire is set up at our dining room table with a laptop for now. Here she is at her station on Day 1.


David had his first day of preschool with teacher "Mommy" on August 1 too. When he starts his Parents' Day Out program at the end of August, he will do preschool with me on the three days he is home. But for August, I have him all 5 days, which is exhausting. He is a very good student though. Here he is hard at work on his Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tot book.

I have my work cut out for me with this guy! He is a silly boy!

My sweet girl ... cannot believe she is old enough to be in Kindergarten. I'm just glad I didn't have to drop her off at "real school". No tears were shed in our house on the first day ... except maybe tears of exhaustion by me!

Looking forward to a great school year!

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Breaking my silence ...

I haven't posted in a while for several reasons:

(1) I am now working from home and I have been home with my kids all day, every day this summer. It has been great fun, but exhausting and leaving me very little time to doing things like blog. (The 4:15 am wake-up for the gym and subsequent 8:30 pm bedtime have not helped my free-time situation either.)

(2) We've had major computer issues the past month. We had some kind of worm on our home computed (which I also use for work) that I spent an entire day removing and installing new security software on our computer. Thank you to our IT guy at work and my brother-in-law for walking me through all that over the phone. Then, I found baby Luke playing with our external hard drive and it was making a grinding noise. After several minutes on Google, I discovered that this was NOT GOOD and the drive was probably broken. All of our pictures were on there (thankfully, all were backed up on Snapfish and most were backed up on CD or my i-pad so we didn't lose much at all), but since our 2004 Dell desktop has absolutely no memory (hence, the external hard drive), I am still waiting on my replacement hard drive from Seagate to get my pictures back in my immediate possession (and on my computer so I can blog).

(3) I am homeschooling Claire for Kindergarten. We started August 1st. I have kind of avoided talking about this subject. I am solid and confident in my decision to do this, but don't really like to discuss the ins-and-outs that much and most people really want to discuss the ins-and-outs. Will and I decided to do this for several reasons, but the bottom line is I feel called to do this for whatever reason. Right now, I feel like it is the best thing for Claire and our family life in general, but I also feel like God may be leading me to do this for other reasons that will become apparent down the road. I prayerfully made this decision back in February when God just kept throwing it in my face over and over again. He solidified my decision when I broached the subject with Will and he was totally on board. I was shocked.

Anyway, as you can see, I have been super busy and unfortunately, for the grandparents and the 4-5 people who read this, the blog has suffered. I hope to get back to regular blogging soon (once I recover all of my pictures) and get the boys started in their new Parents' Day Out program at the end of August. Until then, I have an extra "student" named David that I have to keep entertained with preschool activities while his sister does Kindergarten. I will also being doing preschool stuff with David on the three days he is home during the school year since he is not in a true preschool program.

My friend Amy and I were texting back and forth today and she asked me if I was going to blog about our homeschool experience and I told her "yes." (Actually, she asked if I was going to blog about my "honest oiling" experience. Don't you just love auto-correct?) I won't give you a daily play-by-play like a lot of homeschool bloggers do, but I will share some of our school activities throughout the year.

So, just to clear the air ... I am not pregnant again (like I was when I took my last blog hiatus), but I am very busy!

Stay tuned for more ...