Trip to the Texas Fair

Leslie and I both ended up with a free weekend last weekend, so we decided to visit my parents to go to the Texas State Fair! Leslie wanted to check out all the fried food, and my dad loves the fair. We'd been trying to make it work out for a few years now, but we were just never able to make it.

 

We felt bad leaving Linus at home, so he made the road trip with us on Friday evening! He was pretty good in the car, but kept trying to climb over to visit Leslie.

 

My parents' cat, Spud, wasn't too sure about Linus.

 

 

We knew it was supposed to rain on Saturday, but we thought it would clear up in the afternoon. It ended up raining all day, and it just got harder and harder as the day went on. We still had a great time, but we didn't take too many pictures of ourselves. Leslie and I did get one picture with the big longhorn, though!

 

One of my favorite parts was the petting zoo. It was great to get out of the rain, and they had so many neat animals! It was like a trip to a real zoo!

 

These little guys were strange- they had 4 horns! None of them looked too happy about it, either.

 

 

This little goat decided to make himself comfortable, ha!

 

 

This is a baby llama, but we got to see two people show their much bigger llamas! They had to show that they were agreeable going through different environments while carrying a load on their back. It was like a llama obstacle course! It was neat to watch, and they seemed like really sweet and smart animals.

 

 

We thought this goat was too funny not to take a picture! Leslie said it looked like Charlie Hall or David Crowder.

 

We also saw the biggest pig I've ever seen!

 

 

The shoe competition was another favorite of mine!

This is the Nine West Nile Virus, clever because of the current West Nile outbreak in TX.

 

Little Honey Boot Boot, ha!

 

 

We also got to try several strange fried things (thankfully Leslie decided to skip the fried butter, previously at the top of his list to try). We had fried cheesecake, fried jambalaya, fried lobster macaroni and cheese, and fried lemonade! All surprisingly good (in small quantities).

 

It was such a fun weekend! I think we wore Linus out. This is him relaxing in my lap in the car.

 

 

We got home Sunday and I had fall break on Monday and Tuesday! Such a nice long weekend.

Linus

Most of you probably know I'm a cat person. I've wanted a kitten since Leslie and I got married, and especially wished I had some company when he had to travel and work a lot last year. At the time, we lived in a guest house and we weren't allowed to have a cat, but Leslie promised me that as soon as we moved to somewhere we could have a kitten we'd get one. 

I planned to wait until we were all settled in and unpacked, but Leslie was out of town one weekend and we had a few days off because of the hurricane, so I decided I would start looking. Leslie said it was fine if I went without him since we probably wouldn't find a time soon to go together anyway, and I promised to send him pictures of potential kitties! 

I Facebooked and called around a few places and they were either closed or had no cats at the time. Someone suggested that I visit the local animal shelter, and I decided to go take a look even though no one was answering the phone there. 

It took me forever to find the shelter, and when I got to it it was not at all what I was expecting! The animals were kept in cages like you would expect to see in a shelter, but they weren't in a normal building. They were all practically outside, with little protection from the weather. It was so sad!

There was a lady sitting outside and I asked if they had any kittens available. She said that there was one that had been put out on the side of the road near the shelter just that afternoon. It was lucky that they had been there to find him, because they were supposed to be closed all day. 

She took me back to see this little guy and I couldn't believe how tiny he was! I got him out of the cage and he meowed and meowed. I sent a picture to Leslie and my mom and they both approved. I wasn't sure if it was a great choice with him being so loud and since he hadn't been to a vet, but I knew he needed to come home with me!

He climbed me on the way to the vet and insisted on sitting on my shoulder. I'm sure I looked incredibly intelligent trying to pry him off of my back when I parked at the vet's office, but he was not letting go of my shirt with his sharp little claws! 

He meowed loudly throughout the ride and in the vet's office. Thankfully he settled down and took a nap once we were seated. 

The vet said he was only about 5 weeks old, and he only weighed 1.2 pounds! He was a very healthy kitten, aside from ringworm in his ears. Since then it has spread and I've had to give him lots of medicine and two baths a week, but now it is almost gone!

He was so tiny!

He has grown so much and he LOVES to play! Sometimes he gets a little too playful and hurts, but overall he's a very fun kitty!

Home Sweet Home

As I mentioned before, Leslie and I are super excited that we are now homeowners! We weren't even sure that it was the right time for us to buy a house, but we decided we'd look around some anyway. Leslie spotted our house the first day we both decided to drive around and look on the way home for work.

 We looked in a TON of other houses over several days, but none of them compared in our opinion! We're so thankful for all the help we had from friends in finding a house and getting everything moved in and unpacked! And a big thank you to my parents for most of the furniture!

 Our living room! The bookshelves we had just weren't enough, so we decided to get three to put in our living room! I really like how it turned out, and we have room for all of our nerdiness now :)

 We have two guest bedrooms, but they're both still pretty filled with stuff that has only partially been unpacked, so here's the better of the two for now! The other one has the furniture that I've had in my bedroom since I was a little girl, and I don't think I EVER cleaned out the drawers! I had to stop in the middle of cleaning out the other night to go to bed, so it looks like an explosion of pre-teen girl happened in there right now!

 Our dining room. It's smaller than it looks, and we're going to have to find the right table for the area!

 I love having a kitchen and dining area now! We had a super nice kitchen before, but we only had two bar stools, so having people over to eat didn't work out too well. Now we have a bar area and a kitchen table that sits six! I love that the kitchen opens up to the dining area and the living room. It's also awesome that the sink is facing the TV- it makes washing dishes so much better!

 Our bedroom! Still have quite a bit of stuff to unpack in here, but we're getting a dresser and chest soon so we'll have a place to put it all!

 We still have our fish, Dot and Carl! They made the move very nicely.

 Our bathroom, which is currently being taken over by this little guy...

Poor Linus' ringworm spread ALL over him, so he still has to sleep in the bathroom and stay there while we're at work. 

Thanks to Leslie's parents for the washer and dryer! We were so lucky to be able to get them delivered and installed as soon as we bought them on Labor Day!

We're so thankful for our new home! It will be so nice to have a place for family and friends to stay when they visit us, and we love having our own space. We've had several comments about filling the house with kids, but that's not the plan right now! This little guy is filling it up quite enough :)

August

 I planned to just write a post on all of the excitement we've had lately, but thinking back I decided that August deserved its very own post. This post is ridiculously long, but it's mostly just for me to be able to remember, so no hard feelings if you don't make it through!

 August was an overwhelming, difficult, exciting, miserable, wonderful, BUSY month. Life definitely happened, and I felt super blessed to have my sweet husband, family, and our wonderful friends by my side.

I finished up my summer classes in the beginning of August and made a trip the first week of the month to Southlake to get my doctor & dentist visits in (yes, I still need to find both in Natchitoches)! I ended up staying a little longer than planned and was able to visit with most of my very best friends from high school.

 On the drive home I noticed that my arms and legs were getting very itchy. A week and a half before that some of our Sunday School class went to clean out a sweet lady's yard, and unfortunately Leslie and Emily got poison ivy (after I told them they wouldn't get it in a flower bed- oops!) but I was lucky enough to get away with just a tiny bit on my arm. As it turned out, because it was my first time being exposed to poison ivy, it took 10 days to break out! It was ALL OVER me! I'll spare you and not post any pictures :) I ended up going to the doctor for steroids twice, had quite the scare from a lab error in a blood test, and found out that I need lots more Vitamin D! So, at least from all the itching I now know to take Vitamin supplements AND I get to be a patient of the doctor I went to! No more Urgent Care for me!

Our friends Jake and Kayla got married the next weekend in Alabama so we made a quick trip to Tuscaloosa! We got to see lots of friends and visit with Leslie's family. It was a beautiful wedding!

The next week we lost my precious grandmother who I named Mama Too when I was little. I got to visit her in July, and I was so thankful for the time I had with her. It was very difficult even though we knew it was coming, but it's comforting to know that she's not in pain anymore and that we'll see her again one day. We traveled back to Alabama for the second weekend in a row, and although it was under sad circumstances it was great to have most of the family together.

This picture was taken on our trip to visit Mama Too over Christmas break.

 The week after that it was back to work and school for me! On that Thursday we found out we would be closing on our house on MONDAY! We did tons of packing over the weekend, and thankfully we were able to get most of it done by Monday! We closed that morning, had everything switched over to our name, and went back to work (even though it was really hard to focus knowing we had a house)! That afternoon some wonderful (strong) friends from church helped us to move everything! I pictured it a bit differently in my mind, and forgot that we didn't have a single chair for the house! My parents are on their way now to bring us some furniture, but last week we were sitting in the floor! I'll definitely be doing a house post once we have some furniture!

We didn't have anyone to take a picture of us, so this was as good as it got!

With hurricane Issac moving into Louisiana, Natchitoches prepared for bad weather. I got three days off of school and work (score!) but it meant that Leslie had to leave on Wednesday to head to Lubbock with the football team to beat the bad weather (which we never got, by the way). I had plenty of unpacking to do, and I was glad I could stay busy! I had mostly everything done by Friday, and I decided I couldn't wait any longer to look for a kitten! I knew it'd be difficult for Leslie and I to find time to go together, and I thought it'd be good to have a few days at home with a kitty before I had to go back to work and school. I didn't really expect to find one, but I did! This is Linus, and he will most definitely be getting his own post later :)

Don't you just love him!?

Summer Recap

I'm not sure how this always happens, but I guess I really haven't posted since March! This summer has been anything but relaxing (for me, at least) but it's been great!

We started it off with Leslie's graduation! So proud, and so happy for him to be finished.

Then, once baseball season was over we had a couple of weeks to enjoy before I started summer school. Marsha and Mark came to visit us in Natchitoches! The four of us went to our local gator park for the first time and enjoyed some time relaxing and fishing at home.

After that, the four of us drove to Dallas to see my parents and Kevin flew in to spend a few days with us! We even got to spend some time with Katie and her sweet puppy, Zola. The family took me to the AT&T store to get a new iPhone for my birthday, and thoroughly embarrassed me by singing to me in the middle of the store- ha! Loving my new phone though, and really loved getting to see all of them!

The next week summer school started. I'm taking three classes, two of which are online, and it's been a lot of work! I'm a few weeks from the end now, and I'm so ready for it to be over!

We celebrated our first anniversary on June 11th, and it was a super busy day!

First, we volunteered at VBS. I had first and second graders for the week and Leslie had fifth and sixth graders. 

After VBS we went to an active kids' camp we were working that week. We had around ten kids and had the camp for two weeks in June. It was a lot of fun, but very hot and tiring! 

And after camp on our anniversary I had class, so my sweet husband did the cooking that night and we each took a few bites of the top layer of our wedding cake!

Between our weeks doing kids' camps, we got to enjoy a week at the beach! The weather was wonderful and we had a great time! I loved having my birthday at the beach and we even got to see Marsha and Kevin again while we were down there. We were happy to get to eat some of our favorite foods that we miss on the way there and back, and we had some great beach food while we were there!

We were also able to take a trip to Alabama after we finished our camps to visit Leslie's family for the Fourth of July. We got to spend some time in Tuscaloosa and visit with friends that we hadn't seen in a while.  It rained on the Fourth and we were super lazy! Leslie's grandmother came over to the house and had lunch with us and we all went over to his other grandmother's house to have dinner with his dad's family. 

I was also pretty excited that Leslie's mom got free tickets to a Ringo Starr concert and gave them to us! We went with our friends Jake and Kayla, and had a lot of fun!

But, the most exciting news of all... Leslie got a JOB!!! And it was the one he was hoping for :) He'll be NSU's newest Athletic Trainer. Yay!

Next week I'm heading to visit my grandmothers with my parents, but Leslie won't be able to join us since he has to start work. Hopefully I'll remember to post about our adventures there! 

Mini Vacation

The last two days have been so great! Let me just start off by saying that Leslie had a rough week last week. It started with a 6 am appointment in Alexandria (which is an hour away from Natchitoches) on Wednesday, and a trip to LSU that afternoon with the baseball team and back late that night. Then back to Alexandria at 8am the next morning. That afternoon they were leaving for San Antonio for the weekend, so when he got home he had just enough time to shower, eat lunch, and pack before getting back on the bus, and when he got home the power was out. Nevertheless, he made it to campus in time to get on the bus and head to San Antonio where they had baseball games Friday, Saturday and Sunday and ate Luby's FIVE times in one weekend. All this time only getting a tiny bit grumpy from the lack of sleep. I felt like I didn't see him all week! In the meantime, I enjoyed my class all day on Friday, my parents came to see me on their way home from Florida Friday night, and we had a baby shower on Saturday for three girls in my Sunday School class!

This is not the point of my post, but since I didn't include it in my last post, here are some cute pictures of our shower decorations!

On Tuesday the rain started and didn't stop! Leslie and I came home to eat some lunch and he found out that he didn't have to work any more for the rest of the day! That was a huge treat! So we relaxed and watched a bunch of SVU and were super lazy until our landlord called and told us we were under a tornado watch. We got in the closet and did some laundry and worked on our Bible studies and played some scrabble. THEN we found out that campus would be closed on Wednesday! We got to sleep in on Wednesday and be lazy some more and eat lunch together before he went to work and I went to volunteer. My night class was canceled, so my group got out of providing dinner for the class for the evening, and Leslie and I had a little date night and went to Hana. It was only a day and a half, but it was so nice just to relax and hang out together :). Here are some pictures from our crazy rain!



Usually a dock- all you could see were the benches!



On campus- none of this is usually water!

Two posts in one week! Maybe I really will start posting more often this time :)