Our Biggest Adventure To Come

Although you probably can't tell it in these pictures, there is a little tiny baby in there! Our baby! Our wonderful and perfect baby!
Josh and I got to go in and hear our baby's heartbeat this morning for the first time! And boy, if it wasn't real to us before it definitely is now! What a special moment for any parent to get to hear that defining proof of a little life that you have been blessed with for the rest of your lives. A complete and total blessing from the Lord is the only way to describe it. And Josh and I are both extremely excited and abundantly happy to have this amazing gift!

So far everything is going very well in the pregnancy. My hormone and progesterone levels are very very good for where i am in the pregnancy. The baby's heartbeat registered at 154 heartbeats per minute which is also very good (normal is 130)! Today they gave us a due date of May 15th! I know time is going to fly, so we're trying to soak in every moment as it goes by. I will try my best to keep the blog up to date with any knew news as the baby grows!

A Preview Of Our Home

Our New Address. 210 Sweetbay Drive!

A view of the front Garage/Dukes new hangout spot.

Backyard Attic. We have future plans of closing this in and making a bonus room up here. But for now, reeeaallly great storage!

Office looking out on the backyard.

Spare Bedroom (this room is still a work in progress)

Hall Bath (also a work in progress)

A view of the Living room from the hall (sorry for the weird shadows).

A view of the living room from the front door.

Living room from in front of the fire place looking at the front door.

Front Foyer area.

Formal Dining room.

Eat-in kitchen area.

A view of the kitchen from the dining room.

Master Bedroom (it was hard to get a good shot, so here's one of our bed:-) ).

Master bath (also a hard one to get a good shot of. It's actually a lot bigger than this picture shows).

I'm sorry for the poor picture quality and bad picture angles, but this has taken me over an hour to upload these photo's so it's gonna have to do for now. I'm gonna try to get some photo's on here of the lake area across the street, but just didn't have time today. Enjoy!

Pics to Come, I Promise.

So I know that it has been over a month since I've posted a blog, but life in our house has been pretty hectic lately. Let me just recap the past few months for you: At the end of May/First of June, Josh and I went on a vacation to TX with my sister and brother inlaw (Adam and Bentley and the girls) and spent a week there on the South Padre Island beach. It was alot of fun, but like all (and I do mean ALL) of our trips that involve flying, our flight to TX was delayed a day (no, not an hour, a day). Of course that meant spending the night on a couple of comfy cotts with some airplane plankets in the Dallas Fort Worth airport (wouldn't have it any other way!). But hey, it wouldn't be a trip without airport/flight drama would it?
As soon as we arrived home from our week in TX we started our hunt for houses. We had decided that we were ready to settle down somewhere and it just seemed like, despite our efforts of searching for Josh a new job elsewhere, God just wanted us to settle down right here in Maylene/Alabaster, Alabama. Now that we've let ourselves accept it, this place really feels like home to us and we wouldn't have it any other way.
After about 3 weeks of solid house hunting and praying, we finally found a house that we both really liked and found at peace about. After all, this is supposedly one of the biggest decisions/purchases you make together as a married couple, so we were not taking it lightly in the least! The next step of course was to put in an offer (which of course was imbarrassingly low, but ya never know right?), the sellers came back with a counter offer that of course we didn't accept, and we came back to them with our final offer. Offer accepted! Annnnd yada yada yada...we closed on the house about a month later, moved in about 2 weeks after that, and the rest is history.
Point of the post is: We are now homeowners (YAY!!), and it is my plan to have pictures posted of it least most of the house sometime over the weekend. There are still some rooms that need to be painted (the old home owners were ever so gracious to leave us with screaming bright blue and lavender) but we're working on that as we have time. Keep a lookout!

Furniture Makeover!

Over this past 4th of July weekend while Josh and I were starting the beginning stages of packing the house up for our big move, we found our old cedar chest in one of the guest bedroom closets. We bought this thing over a year ago at an estate sale with every intention of refinishing it. I really wish I had taken a picture of it when we first bought it (completely covered with floral wall paper and painted in puke green-it was a cheap price for high quality furniture though!), then you would really be able to see it's true transformation. However; after striping off the wall paper and sanding down the paint we kind of lost interest in it and reverted to sticking it in the closet.

After making our recent rediscovery I told Josh that I had a new plan for the old piece, forget "refinishing" ('cause lets face it, that'll never happen), lets paint and distress! He was cool with the idea, so I dug out some old white paint out of the garage we had for painting trim work. Also, I thought I'd mix in a small amount of the green paint that we had left over from painting the kitchen to tone the straight white color down just a tad - it worked perfectly for future reference!

It took about 4 coats of paint to completely cover over the wood surface (that's painting a coat, then lightly sanding the surface to take the brush strokes out, then painting the next coat. etc.,). After the painting process was complete, we went back and used a fine grain sand paper to do a little touch of distressing to give it some character, and viola! We were both very pleased with the outcome. Looking forward to putting it in our new home!

Before shot of the top (with Duke posing).

Before shot from the side

After- front

After

Auburn The Great!

Our first stop when we got to Auburn was of course the Forestry building. Hasn't changed at all since we left. We also got the chance to go in and Visit with one of our old professors, Dr. Gallagher. It was really good to see him and catch up, It's been over 2 years!

Josh posing with the eagle in front of the old Colisseum.

Walking around campus just like the old days.

An outside view of the new Colisseum.

We were able to sneak in and take a quick tour around the new coliseum. It is so NICE!

Toomers Oak. This is the one they are projecting to survive.

And of course we had to go by and see Josh's old trailer site in Gentilly. Different trailer, but everything else is the same

A bad hail storm his Auburn on Friday night. It was crazy how much fell, it looked like snow everywhere!

Toomers Drugs

This is the exact spot where Josh Propose to me back in December of 2008. On the Agriculture side of the Samford Building. It was neat to get to take this photo on our 2nd anniversary weekend. We had not been back here since the proposal!!

The new Track and Field facilities. Also very nice!

These silo's and barn were right across from the new track. I thought it was pretty scenery. Don't you just love Auburn's campus?

Getting ready for the A-Day game to get started.

Gus Malzahn Coaching the guys before the game

Trooper Taylor getting the guys pumped up!

Who's that cute guy? The great Gene Chizik!

Doing what he does best!

Taking it all in.

For our 2nd anniversary (which is going to be this coming Monday the 18th), Josh and I took a trip to Auburn for the A-Day game, and just to hang out in our old "home away from home". Neither one of us had been to Auburn in over 2 years, so it was such a sweet return for both of us!

We have sooo many great memories of Auburn. It's more than just where we went to college and earned our degrees, it became our home in the years we were there! Auburn is where Josh and I met, and over the years I got to know him better than I had ever known anyone before. He became my very best friend during those years and the best friend I could have ever asked for. While we were in school we spent a lot of time together. Not only in classes everyday (and studying for class at night), but I really believe we explored every single inch of that city together. Whether it be canoeing in the Saugahatchee, cruising the trails of the Tuskegee National Forest and the old back roads of Auburn in the green machine, hiking around Chewacla State Park or just going on walks around campus, we did it all. Every single memory we have of our college career is one that I know we will cherish forever. And to think we were "so ready" to graduate and leave. What were we thinking?!?

Going back to Auburn this past weekend just confirmed how much we really miss it there! I don't know why we've waited 2 years to go back, and I know we won't wait that long for our next visit. In fact, if we could we would move back there in a second! Needless to say, it was a wonderful 2nd anniversary weekend. It was just what Josh and I needed to remind us of old times, and of how we met and fell in love. Every single road, park and building has a story behind it. It might sound like just another college romance to you, but to us it is a very sweet and special story, in a very sweet and special place!

Mentone on The Mountain

My Apologies for not posting a blog in nearly a month. Things have been a little hectic lately and to be honest, there hasn't been very much to post about our little lives other than just normal 'ole life itself. However, Josh and I did go on a little weekend trip to the great Mentone this past weekend to visit with the Smalley's for a few days. Our "visits" to Josh's hometown are hardly ever a relaxing time spent with the family. Nope, they are almost always spent working on at LEAST one project if not more. For this recent trip we had three.

First and foremost is Josh's little project. We'll call it project number one: Building a rack to plug into the hitch receiver on the Jeep so that we can carry even MORE junk with us when we go places (now don't get me wrong, this thing is pretty nifty). This little project of Josh's took nearly 2 solid days of cutting and welding metal to complete (one that he estimated to take around 3 hours or so. You know, the usual).

Project numero dose: Breaking the horses. This one required the use of my little horse professional sister, Emmaline. She came down Friday night and spent all day Saturday working with the 8 horses that Larry has recently acquired. She rode a few, saddled a few and helped Larry decide which one's were keepers and which were no-go's. She did a superb job with the horses and really impressed me with her horse training knowledge/capabilities. Turns out the few horses that are broken and only "green broken". But Emmaline seems to think that they could turn out to be really good horses with a little work.

Project # 3: Building the floor to the playhouse. Now this project is really the main reason we even went to Mentone in the first place, but of course it got pushed back to the last thing we got around to (sorry about that Larry). Larry has been working on this great playhouse out in the middle of one of the pastures and I think it is going to turn out to be really great! When they finally did get around to putting the floor down on it, it turned out to be the fastest and easiest thing we had done all weekend.

Although we stayed extremely busy (as always), we had a great time on our little weekend getaway. We got a lot accomplished and got to visit with the fam a little bit too. Thanks again to Emmaline for coming up to help with the horses, I hope you're planning on making another trip up soon! And Thanks to Larry and Gail for sharing your home, farm, shop and time with us :-)

Cruisin

Can you say no to that face?

Focused.

This big canyon is part of some park property down the road from our house. This is the most "off-roading" the Jeep has seen thus far.

In All Of It's Glory

Although it's still February and we're the only crazies driving around with the top off, I just wanted to show you that we are thoroughly enjoying the Wrangler. Bought it in January, took the top off about 2 weeks later and it's been off ever since! Yep, we're the real deal. And Duke loves it too by the way, quite a true riding dog he's become.