Showing posts with label birthdays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label birthdays. Show all posts

Sunday, November 09, 2008

Humming the Birthday Song...

Thursday was my birthday, and we had the distinct delight of having my parents join us for the celebration. :) :) :) :)

My kids were really sweet at school on my birthday, and I received several flowers, a card from each of them, and a couple other things. :) Then after I tutored Thursday afternoon, I got to come home to Dad and Mom--what a treat! Matt came home, and we had a yummy dinner together, cake and birthday cake flavored ice cream (one of my favs), and then opened presents. I felt very loved, and it was a GREAT day!!

On Friday, Matt and I both worked. Dad went to a nature preserve to take pictures (though the wildest thing he saw was.... a squirrel.... no bison, gators, or deer, as we know actually live there). Mom stayed home and caught us up on some things around the house. Sammy apparently played outside most of the day! So we all the FL residents were on the receiving end of huge blessings! :) Friday evening we had a second, yummy home-cooked meal (more later on why that's special). YUM!

On Saturday, the guys inspected our damp laundry room. It turns out the water heater may or may not be leaking, but it's far enough along in age that we plan to get a new one. As for the washer, the line it empties into is backing up, so water is pouring down the wall and onto the floor. Lovely, right? We have a plumber coming tomorrow to hopefully clean out the line and get that sorted out. Hooray for Dad the diagnostician!

That night we had another yummy dinner, some popcorn, and a movie. :)

It was a quick trip :-(, but it was soooo good to see Dad and Mom! AND, we'll see them again in 2.5 weeks for Thanskgiving (only 10 work days until then!).

I have tomorrow and Tuesday off, which I am really excited about! Then it's a full week next week and a 2 day week after that. Tomorrow I am planning on doing some school stuff since I have to be home for the plumber anyway. Tuesday I'm hoping to craft--I got great craft stuff for my birthday, like books, patterns, and awesome hippo fabric. :)

Before I close, here are some birthday pictures (because I KNOW those of you who know my family are waiting for them)...


with my special brownie pan (every piece ends up with at least 2 edges, so you get that perfect chewy bite every time)



With my Hoops & Yoyo card from Matt--it sings a really fun song. :)



Making a face when Matt called me "old" during the birthday song (HE would know!)



With Matt and Mom



With Matt

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

Matt's Final Birthday Party

Matt gets to have 3 birthday parties every year (it's so unfair!). :) This year, we celebrated on his birthday (July 1) with his parents and sister; then we celebrated on Saturday with my family; and lastly, he and I celebrated "just the two of us" this evening. I thought I'd share some pictures from our party. :)

Since we had a themed party back in TN, and he sprung on me yesterday that he wanted his party with me tonight, I got an exemption from thinking up another theme (I did Transformers last year). :) But we had a great time all the same.

I made chicken tortilla soup, bread bowls, and corn on the cob for dinner. As an appetizer when he got home from work, I had his favorite Green (iced) Tea waiting for him with some quesadillas, chips, and a yummy dip.


the bread bowl awaiting the soup



the birthday boy during dinner



pretty vase my birthday bouquet(s) came in now used as a votive holder... see how the design shines through to the tablecloth?



Bitsy's chocolate cake made an appearance! Mmmm mmmm good!



the loot



a cd he wanted



I wonder what this could be?



We like the wii. ;)


His final gift was hidden in the trunk of my car. This is Matt scurrying out to the garage when he figured out the clue I gave him as to the gift's whereabouts.


excited because he knows what it is AND where it is



an air compressor with 3 nailers--every man's dream (j/k)... he really did want it though, so he can finish our/do more crown molding

Monday, July 07, 2008

South Carolina Snapshots

The first part of our vacation (July 27-July 2) we were in South Carolina to visit Matt's family. Our time there included a baby shower for Matt's sister and our niece-to-be, Isabella; a birthday celebration for Matt; wild animals; and a great visit with Matt's best man, Tyson.

Isabella's nursery will be decorated with a ladybug theme, so guess what the theme of the shower was! :) Adorable ladybugs!

the cake


Matt's sister with a ladybug outfit we gave her


One morning, we went with Matt's parents to a kind of zoo/ranch place. We had a picnic lunch and the ranch had all sorts of animals and a wagon ride where the animals all come right up to you for food. I fed a giraffe, and Matt's mom almost lost a finger!

lily pads on the pond surrounding the lemur island


a blue and gold macaw

One evening, Tyson took us to a park his church owns as a ministry to the community. It was dark so my pictures aren't great, but it was BEAUTIFUL! Also, Tyson almost got attacked by an egret (he started it by pestering the mama bird)--fun times. :)

looking into a field


looking out over the river


We also got to celebrate Matt's birthday (July1) with his parents, sister, and his parents' dear friends Bob and Cindy.

Matt's yummy cake

In addition, we had a great lunch with Matt's sister one afternoon, got to see her house's remodeling progress (it looks great!!), all the baby gear she's acquired so far (so cute!), and enjoy a sweet time with his family. It was a wonderful first half of our annual "family tour." :) We can't wait to return early in September (or maybe the end of August???) to meet Isabella!

Friday, February 29, 2008

Friday Night "Therapy"

After a particularly tiring week, I decided to let the creative juices flow. A teacher at my school is getting married the beginning of April, and we usually have wedding and baby showers at school. I was trying to think of something I could sew for her, and first I thought of an apron. I emailed Joy, of course, to ask if she thought that would be too hard for me. She pointed me in the right direction, and off I went!

After waiting a long time at JoAnn's (a story for another day), I got my fabric cut and was on my way. This particular teacher is very fashionable and seems to be quite fond of the bright pink/bright green combination you see around. So, I found some fun fabric in those tones and set to work. I started probably around 5:30 or 6, stopped to get dinner with Matt, and then I finished up around 10. Without further ado, I present the apron...



This project included several firsts. It was my first time using the pom-pon trim (at least for me, I had to be particularly careful not to let the strip the pom-pons dangle from show through). That required thinking through right sides together and wrong sides out and turning and whew. I almost had a brain cramp, but I figured it out!



I also made the apron reversible... since I would be lining it anyway, why not make it fun?


I would also like to make her a matching oven mitt. I just need to get some plain fabric for the lining (or dig through my stash, but I don't think I have anything).

I've also considered making a 9x13 casserole dish carrier (like the brown, flowered one Mom has). I think it would be really cool and perfect for a new bride! :)

I am a little nervous--do you think they're good enough to give for gifts to someone outside the family??

We hope you have a great weekend and get even a smidge of time to do something fun you enjoy, too. While I don't want to wish this one away, Mom and Dad will be here next weekend!! :)

Love,
Becca

P.S. This is what your dog does while you are sewing. Isn't that nice? It's one of the shoes I bought for E's wedding... oh well... goody thing I don't wear heels much. :-( :-(


P.P.S. Here's Samuel's very belated birthday present. I just need to hand-tie it and send it in the mail!

Thursday, December 20, 2007

Happy Happy

BIRTHDAY

to Brad and Kim!!


Wow--it feels like I was JUST writing this, but it's already been another year! We are so thankful for both of you and your sweet families. You are amazing blessings to us, and we praise God for you!

Kim, one of these days I am determined we will get down to see you! We loved seeing you back home last Christmas--what a treat! :) Please tell D and the kids hi for us!! :) We LOVE you!

Brad, what can I say? You are a WONDERFUL big brother! You plug in all sorts of electronic equipment for me when I think it's broken. :) Kidding aside, you really are an encouragement to me, and I always leave our phone conversations with a smile. I'm so sorry we're missing your party by only one day, but we can't WAIT to come be with you!! We'll be there soon!!! We LOVE you!

Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Thank you, Ashley!

About one-half yard each of the following fabrics is headed my way, thanks to a birthday gift certificate to Sew, Mama, Sew from sweet Ashley. :) Thank you, thank you!!





I have to admit, I'm not sure what everything will turn into. I have a couple ideas for some of them. But I decided, since it was a gift certificate, to let myself just go with what stood out to me. Projects can be determined later. :)

Thanks again, Ashley. It was absolutely delightful to scroll through their inventory and fill up my "shopping cart" with the click (or two, or three) of a button. :) I can't wait for them to get here!

Also today, we finally got our digital SLR ordered. I have wanted one for *quite* some time. Matt kindly agreed that we could use the money I earned by teaching summer institute to purchase a digital rebel (canon's line of digital SLRs). Amazon dropped their price dramatically recently, which Brad alerted me to (thank you!), and now it's on its way! I can't wait to use it! :)

We hope you are having a good week. I have only 1 week of school left. We'll be on our way home for a "tender Tennessee Christmas" before we know it! Hooray!!

Love,
Becca

Thursday, November 08, 2007

Birthday Pictures

Streamers from the chandelier

The crepe paper chair, of course

with the coat tree/umbrella holder
(and yes, I'd been crying...over an amazingly sweet poster everyone back home signed)

blowing out the candles for a really good wish ;)

the amazingly decadent cake--yum!

Thank you, everyone, for making my birthday so special!!

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Party!

Happy Birthday to Me! :) :)

Monday, October 29, 2007

Oops!

We had another oops today. Well, a couple actually. The biggest were:

  • I figured out today, the day grades are due, that my username wasn't working. Yes, we were supposed to check last week. Yes, I started to. No, I didn't finish. Not only was my username not working, somehow I was BOOTED FROM THE SYSTEM!! I had no anything. I have to resign up for a school board account (AGAIN) and they had to add me in so I could input my grades (which, as I said, were due TODAY). NUTS! The ladies at school who helped me were very kind, though. I appreciate it! And.... my grades are DONE!!!
  • This OOPS was NOT mine. At about 3:40, I got called to the office for a flower delivery. I thought that was kind of odd. When I got there, I saw a birthday balloon. My birthday is next week, bu tthat is a week away. Something seemed off. Apparently, Mom ordered flowers to be delivered from her and Dad... ON MY BIRTHDAY (imagine that). Mom is coming to visit this weekend, and she has to go back the morning of my birthday. She specified for the flowers to be delivered early morning on November 6, so that I would have a happy surprise to cheer me up about her having to leave. But no, they delivered them after school hours today (?). She called (in her very hoarse voice) and they were apologetic. Someone new messed up. They said they will deliver a balloon on my birthday. I hate to sound like a brat, and obviously with the whole "lonely" thing I've been kind of emotional lately, but I almost cried when I found out they messed up. It felt like they took something special away, and now I wouldn't have something fun that my parents so sweetly planned to ease Mom going back. So, even though I'm now expecting it, at least there will be a fun something on my birthday. Here the "early" flowers...
The arrangement even has cute party blowers mixed in. :)


The vase has flowers painted onto it. :)



  • Oh, and while we're talking about birthdays. Matt ordered something for me, and the company sent a postcard telling him that his gift (and what it was) has been shipped. I check the mail, so of course I came across it. That's ANOTHER birthday surprise ruined!
  • And Brad and Joy ordered something off my Amazon wishlist. I thought that my wishlist address would change when I updated our mailing address after the move last summer. But no, it didn't. So my birthday present was delivered (or attempted to) to our old address. Who knows where it is.
  • I'm beginning to wonder if 26 is not going to be a good year. :-(

Sunday, September 09, 2007

Procrastinating....

I am ALMOST done with lesson plans.... almost.

I have science left to plan and math page numbers to write in. Then I am DONE! Hopefully this week I can plan during the week so I can get a week ahead. Now that open house is over and we have some normalcy to our routine, I should be able to plan more than one week at a time. Gotta love having some cushion built in for when busy weekends come up.

This weekend has been nice. Yesterday we slept in and then went to Home Depot. We've had our eye on a couple light fixtures at Lowe's, but we wanted to compare them to Home Depot's offerings before we settled on our purchases. As it turned out, at HD we found a dining room chandelier we liked better, hall fixtures we liked better, and a new kitchen ballast we liked better... and we spent less $$ than we would have at Lowe's. Woo hoo! So we loaded up a cart! We still like the prices/choices on the medicine cabinet, interior doors, and storm door better at Lowe's. But we got all our lighting out of the way! Matt installed the chandelier last night, and the hall lights and kitchen light are waiting for when he has a buddy (the hall lights will require some attic work and the kitchen ballast will require 2 people). My dad is coming to visit in October, so maybe we'll get to do some work then. ;) We'll try to get some pictures up in the meantime. :)

It's very exciting to be checking items off our "home improvement" list. At this point, we basically have left painting a few things (laundry room, master bath), updating the den (take down paneling and put up dry wall--happening in October), and switching our fake wood stained slab doors to white molded doors. We have already painted almost every room, replaced the lighting/fans in the eat-in kitchen, den, master bedroom, and dining room, done some landscaping, bought new furniture, and painted some trim. We're going to install the fans we took down in the kitchen and master bedroom in the two secondary bedrooms for now. At some point we put in something newer, but for now, we'll take advantage of what we already have!

Sammy has been a sweetie-pie lately. She LOVES being allowed in the den. She is definitely my little buddy when I get home and wait upon Matt's return from work. :) She's just such a quiet and sweet-natured little dog. :)

Alright, I think I should finish up those plans now before we leave for small group. We hope you've had a good weekend.

We especially want to say

HAPPY BIRTHDAY
to
My mom and Matt's mom!!!

Wednesday, August 01, 2007

A Comedy of Errors

**EDIT** How could I forget?? There's more to the story!! After all that, I looked in the fridge, and some extra beef I had set in there to stay cool until I could divide it into meal-sized servings for freezing had leaked (okay, gross coming up) blood all over the shelf it was on and then dripped down and underneath the veggie bin. It was disgusting!!! I mean, seriously. It took me a long time to clean up, and it just was so gross. Then I guess I twisted my foot funny when getting back up from cleaning the fridge, and I split my big toe nail!! It's split/torn far enough into the nail that if I try to clip it or anything, it will go to the quick. So anyway, there's the rest of the evening's events from yesterday...**

Sorry the last post was just pictures. I'll go back and add captions if necessary. Most of them were pretty self-explanatory. I wasn't particularly in the mood for typing up a post after our interesting evening. Nothing awful, but mishap after mishap.

It all started when....

Matt was sweetly retrieving the spaghetti sauce from the pantry for me while I browned the beef. I heard him say, "Shoot!" and looked over just in time to see the glass jar of spaghetti sauce go crashing to the floor. It splattered all over the walls, the door, Sammy's crate, Matt's clothes, the tiles, the grout (the FRESHLY CLEANED GROUT!!!), the table and chairs... you get the idea. I was aghast! It was such a mess, I didn't even know where to begin! I had Matt turn off the stove where the meat had been ready and waiting so it wouldn't burn. Then I got a dark kitchen towel, dampened it, and I set to work wiping down the walls and trim first, as I didn't want little red dots staining the paint. Next, He gave me some cardboard that had been in the trash, and I used that to scoop the majority of the tomato sauce and large glass jar pieces into the trash. After that, it was wiping up all the tomato sauce. It took a l-o-n-g time. I tried to rinse out the grout several times. I haven't yet determined if it will need any more recourse. In living here just over a year, Matt has now exploded a bottle of orange soda and a jar of spaghetti sauce all over the kitchen walls!! Then, as I was trying to wipe up some glass shards in the pantry entryway, I lost my balance and fell onto Sammy's water bowl on my way to the floor. You guessed it, all of her water spilled onto the floor annnnnnd soaked up into my clothes. I was laying flat on my back by this point, and there was dead silence. I started to laugh/cry and Matt asked if I was laughing or crying. I laughed, "I don't know!" and then the tears came. I cried. And cried some more. He told me to go change; I told him that was my only clean pair of jeans. He told me to go ahead and put pjs on and he'd clean up the rest. I cut my foot on the glass while cleaning the floor, and then in trying to catch myself during my fall, my finger got sliced (the size of a bad paper cut) in two places. I was a mess.

Then, twice last night Matt knocked over materials where I was working on stamping cards. We ended up about 0-4... every near mishap turned into a spill by the end of the night.

Today has been better. I am excited about some sewing books I requested a "hold" for at the library, including the new Bend the Rules Sewing. I really stopped by to pick up a reserved copy of The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. When they handed to me yesterday, I realized it was the teacher's guide I had reserved! Which is great, but now I still need to go check out a copy of the actual novel.

Today I made some more cards, which I'll post later. Matt and I also had lunch with our pastors to brainstorm ideas for renewing the usher/greeter team for the next 6 months. And that is about it. Matt's probably working until 7 or so, since we had the lunch today with Rob and Frank. I think we're having either soft or fractured tacos if he ever gets home. :)

Sammy has been a sleepy head all day. All that commotion last night must have really worn her out!

Oh yeah, and Matt's party! Matt's birthday was July 1, and we celebrated it with each of our families during our vacation the beginning of July. But then we came home, caught up from that trip/prepped for Matt's next trip, he went to Portland for a week, and then it was Kids Camp. This was kind of our first opportunity to celebrate just the two of us. Last summer we saw Pirates II with Jamie and Mark, and Matt and Mark were both really excited about a Transformers preview that we saw at the time. I immediately ordered Transformers party gear from birthdayexpress.com thinking we'd have Jamie and Mark over for Matt's birthday this year. Fast-forward to December when Jamie and Mark moved to ATL. No more Transformers party. I finally had to tell Matt I had Transformers themed goodies and ask him to think if there was anyone here who wouldn't think it was totally kooky-weird to have a party like that. We couldn't come up with anyone. :) So, instead, we had a Transformers party just the two of us. I had even ordered stickers to make invites... but I guess I'll scrapbook his party with them instead. He picked steak and baked potatoes for dinner, so I picked that up during my grocery shopping on Monday. I'd honestly been able to scrounge with what we had, so I hadn't gone to the grocery store in 2-3 weeks. It was restocking time. :) I also got some yummy fresh romaine lettuce for a birthday salad, yummy fresh-from-the-bakery rolls, AND I tried a from scratch red velvet cake (thank you Kris and Bob Johnson--it was from the recipe book they gave us for our wedding). It's supposed to be the same recipe at the Waldorf Astoria uses. It was a really pretty cake and yummy batter. Unfortunately, our oven cooks kinda hot and with a brand new recipe, it can be hard to judge "done-ness." So , you could say the cake's a little on the dry side. But, at least I tried. :( I gave him a movie he wanted and an accessory for the 360. Lastly, ever since we got married, Matt has raved about cool globes we've seen at various stores. I saw one was on sale at Pier 1, and I went for it. He was realllly surprised, and it's really fun! We've both looked up lots of places. You know how you'll have a general idea of where something is, but it's fun to find it exactly. I looked up places in Mongolia (for Amy D.) and Australia (for Ashley). What does my husband look for? Dutch Harbor (gold stars if you know what tv show that references). I cracked up at that. :) "OH LOOK, honey!! I found Dutch Harbor!!" For now, we have it placed in a front corner of the living room. It's wrought iron stand and "old world" look are quite masculine and handsome, so says my hubby. :) And it fits nicely in there. We have several wrought iron accents throughout the house, so it's a perfect "model" for us. He wanted it somewhere with a light ("a soft light"), so people wouldn't have to strain their eyes if they wanted to look for something. :) He's SO CUTE!!!! Anyway, if you go on a world tour or even just a hop, skip, and a jump away, you can bet there are some people in Gainesville looking up your vacation destination! :)

I guess that's about all for now... Yea for play days before school starts!

Love,
Becca

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

The last few days in pictures...