Oh happy day!

We are off to IKEA for the morning! We're making progress with the house -- the living room is painted (but not the trim) and the bathroom has been stripped of wallpaper, sanded, sealed, mudded, and sanded again. The kitchen cabinets have been sanded and half of them have been primed. The doors have new locks and deadbolts. We have a swing on the front porch. We have decided on bathroom paint colors and bought flooring. Oh yeah - and we have new bathroom light fixtures (yay for hubby working at a lighting company!). There is still so much to do, but we figured since we have been working our butts off that we deserve a break -- so we are introducing my parents to IKEA and The Varsity. :) Should be fun.

P.S. for Sarah - I tried to call you to see if you wanted to come. You didn't answer. But I forgive. :P Love you!

I thieved it.

I have been wanting to change the music on here for weeks now but just haven't had a chance to do it. For the past two weeks I have been listening to the music on Emily's family blog and it has been making me happy. So I thieved her playlist. Well, not the whole thing, but parts of it. I wish I knew about these songs of my own doing, but I didn't. I am so glad that Emily did.

Hope you like them!

P.S. My parents arrived yesterday afternoon with a truck full of stuff for us and the house (The Clampett's came to town! Ha!) and they are staying all week to visit and help us work on the house. I am so excited they are here! If you are lucky you'll get to meet them. :)

Need stuff to think about?

Hi.

Go here.

and here.

But only if you can handle sarcasm and are willing to really, truly think about some stuff.

What's that you say? That's not enough information?

Ok ok. Calm down.

The first link is to a fabulous blog called Stuff Christians Like. I love it. But I will warn you - don't even bother going there if you can't appreciate sarcasm. I have no doubt that you will go there anyway, but consider yourself warned. If you go and leave with a little different perspective on the church (hopefully better) or a better understanding of the Gospel, don't say I didn't tell you so. Because this is me telling you so. There's a post on there today about Christians and drinking. As in, drinking alcohol. Yep. It's wonderful. Go see. Make sure you read the comments.

The second link is to a blog called Ragamuffin Soul. The author is Carlos "Los" Whittaker who is the "worship leader" at Buckhead Church in Atlanta. Los usually has interesting things going on on his blog - but if you head over there today you will see some very heated and interesting conversations about worship and "worship leaders." I hope that it will make you think and...well, I'll just leave it at that. That is a subject that has really been on my heart/mind/soapbox lately and so maybe it won't mean anything to you, but then again, maybe it will.

I hope that if you ever learn anything new or if you are ever reminded of something you had forgotten that you'll come and tell me about it. I might need to be reminded or learn something too.=)

Thank you!

Well it's official - Justin and I are homeowners (again). We closed this morning in what was probably the smoothest closing in the history of closings. Yay! Thank you Lord.

Thank you thank you thank you to everyone who prayed with us through this! Y'all are amazing and we are so blessed to call you friends and family.=) Love y'all!

*P.S. You'll have to excuse me if my posting is sporatic over the next couple of weeks. I'm going to do my best to keep it up, but I'll most likely be painting and cleaning and moving and nannying. But feel free to comment and tell me how much to you miss me. That would be nice.=)

Friendship Part II

Ok - here's Part II of the Beach Trip pictures. I hope someone actually looks at these since it took a ridiculously long time to get this on here. You're welcome. =)

Seaside - sunglasses on

Sunglasses off

Seaside

I love pictures like this - -natural and un-posed.

Funny hats! I think I tried on every wide brimmed hat in the Florida panhandle that week. Seriously.

M & M still at Seaside

The Chapel at Seaside

We spotted this monstrosity somewhere between Rosemary Beach and Seaside. I mean really - what do you DO with a house that big (and ugly)?

One morning the boys got up really early to go fishing. They didn't have much luck, but Justin did catch this thing.

The Mays

The girls

The Moons

At Baytowne Wharf in SanDestin - the coolest little place ever.

Justin made me put this one on here -- he thinks it is hilarious. I have no idea why he looks like that.

Perhaps my favorite picture -- but you probably could have guessed that. This is at Baytowne Wharf on the dock.

This looks like a photo-shopped picture it is so pretty. I didn't touch it I swear!

Preciousness.

Yay! I'm just so happy that Sarah and I actually have a ton of pictures TOGETHER now!

Being silly.

Love this. And really - could my husbands eyelashes BE any longer? Gorgeous.

Zach's postcard picture

The biggest chair ever - notice the *warning* on each side. Ha!

Love the pink loin cloth.

And the ankle grass skirts.

So somehow my husband never flew a kite as a child. I know right?! Shocking! So we bought him a Osprey kite named Fluffy/Oscar (we were divided) and he "flyed" a kite for the first time our last day at the beach. Fun times.

You can't really tell from this picture, but Fluffy/Oscar was WAY up there. We ran out of string. Sad news though -- he didn't survive the flight back down. But at least he went out with a bang!

Don't ask me why - but this is what Justin chose to wear for our lunch movie hour. I think he makes a pretty good merman.

My little feetsies.

I love profile pictures. Notice the expression on Justin's face. ???

This was our last night in Florida. We ate at Uncle Ernie's - a fantastic restaurant right on St. Andrew's Bay.

Final group pic. What an amazing week!

There were dolphins in the bay right behind us as we ate dinner. Dolphins make me happy.=)

I am still completely unable to put into words the utter amazingness of this trip. Hopefully the pictures will speak for themselves. If you want to actually READ about the trip - go see Sarah.

Good grief.

When I sat down 30 minutes ago to write a post I had no idea of the events that were about to transpire in my kitchen. I was going to post the 2nd set of pictures from our Beach Trip, but now I have to tell you why my precious husband is scooping a sour creamy chickeny mess out of the drawer under our oven. I decided to get creative for dinner tonight - which usually means I throw caution and recipes to the wind and toss a bunch of whatever we happen to have on hand in a casserole dish. Tonight we happened to have chicken, black beans, Rotel (diced tomatoes and peppers), sour cream, cream cheese, corn, and flour tortillas. I lined the casserole dish with torn up tortillas, mixed everything else together (with some spices) and dumped it on top. All of that went smoothly and as planned. For maybe the first time in my life I actually preheated the oven -- to about 450 (not because it needed to be that hot - just because I am impatient and think that turning the temp up will get me fed faster). I'm still not sure exactly what happened next. I know that I opened the oven door and I think immediately after I opened it I reached for the casserole with both hands. I know I opened the door all the way - but for some reason it closed on my left forearm as I was leaning down to put the casserole in the oven. Since I had actually preheated it to a bajillion degrees it burned my arm and I dropped the casserole so I could get the door off of me. Of course, the casserole turned upside down and spilled all in the crack between the oven door and the oven. Since I was in pain and my mind quit working and everything was hot I just stood their staring at this huge mess and waste of what was to be a yummy dinner. I turned the water on to run it on my arm and of course it came out hot as crap even though I turned it to cold first. That's when I started crying. Justin wasn't home yet, and I didn't know how to clean up the oven and save dinner. I turned the oven off and started scooping up the chicken and stuff and putting it back into the dish. By the time Justin got home I had cleaned up what I thought was most of the mess, but when we opened the bottom drawer we saw where it all had really gone - on top of all our clean pots and pans. He shooed me away to tend to my arm (after hugs and laughs) and he's cleaning up the rest of the mess. The casserole (what I could save of it) is in the oven. It better be the freaking best meal I've ever made.

My arm hurts.

Friendship

Here it is - -the post about our beach trip with Zach and Sarah and my in-laws. I've had the pictures since Monday, but I've been having a really hard time finding adequate words to describe our week and how much I truly enjoyed the time spent with friends. So for the most part this post will be pictures with captions and hopefully the words will come later.

Geared up for the first day at the beach

Camp Helen State Park (or something like that) - this was the coolest tree ever so of course we had to take pictures in it!

Me and my babes.

Getting in and out of the tree was the most fun - I wish there was a picture of my trying to get in it. =) Fun times!

Camp Helen

Zach and Sarah

This old pier was the whole reason we went to Camp Helen - we wanted to get some pictures of and with it. Too bad we got there about 20 minutes before the park closed. We said we were gonna go back and shoot some more, but of course we didn't.

Zach got a new flash that is super cool and fun to play with so we'll be taking more pictures soon - when we actually have more than 5 minutes to play.

Smooch!

I love this picture of them. They match. Sarah hates to be matchey matchey, but I think it makes for cute pictures!

Seriously - why are kissy pictures so fun? I love them.

Help me! Help me! Poor little crawfish!

Mmmmm! We had some boiled crawfish one night and they were so yummy. Not quite spicy enough for me, but edible for everyone else.=) Sometimes I really miss Louisiana!

This is pretty much where we stayed if we were at the house - in the pool. One day I will have a pool in my back yard.

On the pontoon boat in St. Andrew's Bay - on our way to Shell Island

Another great pic -- and look at that water! We wanted to swim here sooo bad, but there were lots (LOTS!) of jellies and I'm terrified of them so that didn't happen. It was 20 or so feet deep but it looked like I could just reach in a touch the bottom. Amazing.

Justin caught a fish. Ha! He's a great fisherman - but the fish were not having it that day.

a closer look

Zach caught a fish too! I wish I had captured his face about 3 seconds after this picture -- the fish started flouncing all around and he nearly threw the pole in the water! It was so funny! He won't take the fish off of the hook. =) This fish did actually have real teeth though - so who can really blame him?

At Seaside (where the Truman Show was filmed).

In front of the Chapel at Seaside - yup. We might be the goofiest couple ever. And of course, I love this picture.

One.

Two.

Three!

The future Moon children will have these amazing little cars! They are called Plasma Cars and they hold up to 250lbs (fun for Mom and Dad too! ha!) and you just sit on it and wiggle the wheel back and forth and you start moving forward! They turn on a dime and we had a blast playing with them in the toy store at Seaside. =)

Ok - blogger is not letting my add more pictures at the moment and I have three more orders to fill today (yikes!) so I will post the 2nd half of the trip (We are only up to Wednesday!) this afternoon. And maybe the words will come by then.=)