High Holy Day

Happy Birthday to me!!!

David decided to spruce up my office for me to help me enjoy my day. The tiara he gave me has a butterfly on it and its' wings flash. Everyone is making me keep it on. I'm so thankful to have such a wonderful, caring husband. I love you sweetie! Thank you for making my day extra special!

Great new video!

Tyler has learned a new trick by clapping his hands. He thinks it's so much fun! The video is a bit "grainy". I'll change the setting on the camera to make it better - sorry; but hope you still enjoy it!

July 22: Megan's tooth

Well, Megan's first visit from the tooth fairy came this week. I guess I should say first "real" visit. As you know, her top tooth got busted out a year and a half ago, so this is the first natural tooth loss. Her two bottom teeth have been loose for several weeks now and I finally was able to get in and get one of the teeth out. The big day was on Tuesday. She would let me feel it and wiggle it, but she just didn't want me to get it out yet. So, I kind of tricked her and made her think that I wasn't pulling it, when out it came! She didn't even know it until we after we went into the bathroom to swish some water. I unfolded the napkin that I had used and out dropped her tooth. She didn't know what to think, but after the shock wore off, she was so excited. She was anxious to get to bed and put her tooth under her pillow for the tooth fairy. I wanted to get a video of her waking up and finding what the tooth fairy left, but she woke up before I could get there. She came into my bathroom SOOO excited and showed us what the tooth fairy left. She got a dollar bill and three quarters and even a note from the tooth fairy herself! She couldn't wait to tell and show all of her friends at church. As you see, her permanent tooth is already coming in. The other middle bottom tooth is loose, too. It will probably be out by the end of the week. I'll be sure to get a great picture of her new toothless grin!

Tyler eating

Here are some pictures and videos of Tyler eating some rice cereal. It took him about three days of eating it to get the hang of it. Now he's like a baby bird with his mouth wide open waiting for the food.

This first video was on June 30 when Tyler had his first bites of cereal. He kept wanting to grab the spoon, but otherwise he did great! As you'll hear, Megan had to be right in the middle of it all.





This second video was taken over two weeks later, and as you'll see, Tyler figured out things very quickly! He doesn't try to grab the spoon anymore, but he's got to check everything out around him and make sure everything makes a good banging noise. But he LOVES the cereal!





Here are a few pictures that we took, also...

May 23: Megan's school performance

Here are two videos from Megan's program at school on May 15.

This first one is when she had three speaking lines, but David wasn't quick enough to turn on the camera and missed her first line. Also, he was sitting right behind her teacher, so you'll have to pardon her head and hands. Be sure to watch Megan after she sits down while Gideon is saying his verse; she catches a glimpse of my proud face and knows that she did great on her part!





This next one is a small clip from one of the songs.






We're just waiting for that Academy Award one day in the future!!

May 13: Get ready to laugh!

How great is this video???!!!

April 17: SoCal or BUST!

We made it! After a 24 hour delay, we finally made it to Palm Desert on Monday night. Our flight on Sunday out of Pensacola was cancelled and the earliest we could leave the area was Monday morning. We had to go to Orlando, then Atlanta, and finally on to California. We had an hour drive to get to our hotel, so it was about 9:00 Pacific Time before were able to crash. Since we started out Monday morning leaving our house at 6:20 am Central Time, you can imagine how drained we were.

It's now Tuesday morning, and David has left for Palm Springs to go the meetings for today. I'm going to hit the town and see what kind of mischief I can find. I'll try to post every day and add some pictures, too.

Here's a Google map that shows the area. David's meetings are at the Palm Springs Convention Center. Our Hotel is in Palm Desert.



http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&q=palm+springs,+CA&layer=&ie=UTF8&om=1&z=11&ll=33.823082,-116.51207&spn=0.407292,0.913239

April 18: Tuesday

I finally made it out of the hotel, and decided to head into Palm Desert to El Paseo. It's the "Rodeo Drive" of the area. It's about a mile or so strip of shops, art galleries, and restaurants. I tried to get a picture of the street, but couldn't get a good one, so here's a link to it... http://www.palmsprings.com/elpaseo/index.html It was a GORGEOUS day and I enjoyed being outside and strolling the street. I had lunch at a little place on one of the balconies looking down into a courtyard. It was so good, that David and I went back there for supper. After walking El Paseo, I headed on to Palm Springs and checked out the area. I picked up David at the Convention Center at 5:30 and he took me in to see some of the booths and talk to some of his co-workers. After that we headed back to Palm Desert and ate supper, then came back to our room and crashed for the night.

April 19: Wednesday

Wednesday was a good day filled with SHOPPING! I headed to the Desert Hills Premium Outlets which is about 30 minutes from the hotel. It's a pretty typical outlet mall, but it seemed like a dream knowing that I could spend the day going to shops that I wanted to go to and not have to have a 5 year old and 4 month old dictating my day! I miss my kids terribly, but it's so nice to be on my time. The main things I shopped for was for a new outfit to wear tonight. Today is our 10th Wedding Anniversary. We've got reservations for dinner at Europa, which is a restaurant in the Villa Royale hotel. It looks so charming and romantic and I can't wait to get there. But, first, today I'm going to do some sightseeing, so hopefully I'll have some cool pictures soon. I took a few yesterday of the mountains and the Windmills. There's a huge field by Palm Springs of these and they are so cool, and so HUGE!

Wednesday, Part II

After I picked David up after the conference, we hit the street in Palm Springs. Palm Canyon Drive is the "strip" there. It's lined with a gazillion shops and restaurants. I had walked some of it earlier in the afternoon, so David and I decided to check it out together. First, though, we got the important stuff done...SUPPER!! I was in the mood for Mexican, so we scoped out a neat little Mexican restaurant and feasted on a delicious meal. Since we were stuffed to the brim, we decided to walk off our supper. On Palm Canyon Drive, they have the sidewalks lined with a "Walk of Stars." There's over 200 stars and we recognized a few names. I've included some of the pictures of them. Along the way we came across a statue of Sonny Bono and his star in front. You may remember that Sonny was the mayor of Palm Springs when he was killed in a skiing accident several years ago. It was a neat tribute.

After walking a while, we decided to head back to the hotel and rest our feet! I took a picture of one of the street signs along the way. A lot of the streets here are names of famous people. There's Bob Hope, Gerald Ford, Dinah Shore, and Frank Sinatra to name a few. It's funny trying to figure out which direction you need to go using these peoples' names.

April 21: Thursday and Friday

Happy Anniversary to us!! Thursday was our 10th wedding Anniversary. I'm so blessed to have been given such a wonderful gift in my husband. I cannot believe that we've been married for 10 years already. It seems as though it's only been a few days. I can't wait to see what joys the future will bring.

I ended up spending all day Thursday shopping, so I didn't get to do any real sightseeing. But I still had fun! I picked David up after the conference and we headed off to dinner. We ate at a place called Europa. It was a fantastic place tucked away in a neat little spot. I knew it was going to be pretty "swanky" and it sure delivered. Our first clue was a sign on the door that said, "No Cell Phones, please." When we arrived, there were only a few people, but it quickly filled up. Our waiter was very nice and personable, which made us feel a little more at ease. Since the choices for drinks were either water or wine, (what, no cokes???) we opted for the water. We both chose the same entree for dinner, which was the filet and lobster. The word "divine" doesn't even begin to describe the whole experience. It was everything I hoped it would be. What a fabulous way to celebrate our special day.

Friday was me and David's first day to spend together, and how did we spend it????....Going to separate attractions. I really wanted to ride up the aerial tram to the top of the San Jacinto Mountain, but David liked the idea of staying closer to sea level. There's a World War II plane museum in Palm Springs, so I dropped him off there while I went to scale the mountain. It was a cloudy day with sprinkles of rain, so at the top of the mountain, there was absolutely no view. But it was a cool ride and I got to see snow...it was snowing at the top! It wasn't heavy at all, just light flurries, but it was cool (literally), none the less. After coming back down, I went back to the museum and picked David up, and we were finally able to spend time together. We had a late lunch, then took in a movie at the IMAX. It started raining when we came out, so we decided to call it an early night, and get some rest.

Celebrity Tour

On Saturday, our flight home was not until 11:00 pm, so we had all day to play. We decided to take a celebrity tour of the area to get the scoop on everything. It was so cool to see the homes of all the stars and hear the stories from years gone by. Frank Sinatra especially loved the area and moved his mom there. We saw where they lived and the church she attended. Bob Hope and his wife had several homes there and she still lives in one on the mountain, just up from the vacation home of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver. We saw so many homes and heard so many names, that I've forgotten them all. The lady doing the tour was great and really knew her stuff. She's been doing tours for years and has very close relationships with the remaining family members of the stars. She told such neat stories and you could tell that she loved her profession. Palm Desert is known as the "Playground of the Presidents" and from what our tour guide told us, it was certainly true. The Kennedys, Nixons, Fords, Bushes, and even Clintons spent regular time there, playing, of course, golf. If I remember right, there are over 150 golf courses in that small area. We had a wonderful time on the tour and considered it time well spent.

April 23: Home at last

After the Celebrity Tour on Saturday, we decided to head on to Ontario to where the airport was. It's about an hour from Palm Springs on I-10. We scoped out a place to eat supper, then headed on to the airport and waited for a couple hours until our flight at 11:00 PM. Finally, the time came and we were on our way home. It was a 3 1/2 hour flight to Atlanta and then we had an 8:22 flight to Pensacola. Since we were coming from the West Coast, we lost three hours so needless to say we felt like walking zombies! Fortunately, our flights were great and we made it home about 9:45 Sunday morning. We were greeted by smiling faces and a big hug from Megan. Tyler was finishing a bottle, but took a quick break to greet us. Our trip was wonderful and we're so thankful that we had the opportunity to go, but it was so great to be home.

March 13: What a day

Well, Friday was an eventful day. David had been gone to OKC and had come in on Thursday night. He decided to take the day off on Friday to hang out with me and Tyler and to just take a break from work. It was report card day at Megan's school on Friday morning, so we went to her classroom to watch that. Megan is doing so good in school and we're so proud of her work. Her best friend is Gideon and whenever they both received the same awards, Megan would scoot right in beside him instead of going to the end of the line. They are two peas in a pod.





After that, we ran a few errands in town, then decided to eat lunch at Chick-Fil-A. Megan had fun playing in the playground after lunch. Then, we drove up to Niceville so I could buy some tickets for a play that we're going to next week. Since we were there and it was a GORGEOUS day, we decided to go to the Children's park and let Megan play for a while. It's a nice park with about 5 different playsets. She had a blast running around playing. I was having a craving for a Blizzard, so we decided to end the play time and head to DQ. It was a nice treat!

We came home and crashed for an hour or so, then decided to go bowling. Megan has been once and loved it, and I thought it would be a nice way to cap off such a fun day. So, we hopped back in the truck and went. Megan was doing great, and for a while, was beating both me and David! We pulled ahead after each getting a strike.







On the 9th frame, Megan had just got her ball and was stepping up into the lane area and missed the step. She fell onto the ball and somehow split her chin open. She, of course was screaming and I scooped her up to comfort her and see the damage. At first, I couldn't see any blood, then she moved her hands and the blood was just pouring out. When I wiped it off, I could see the injury and it wasn't pretty. I knew that she would need stitches. So, David went and paid for our game, got Tyler ready, and we jumped into the truck and headed to the ER. They took her right in and the doctor confirmed that she would need to be stitched up. She was such a trooper and handled everything like a champ! She got 5 stitches and lots of loving from me. David was just thankful that he had Tyler to keep him occupied!






We finally made it home and all has been well. She's had fun telling her story numerous times to friends at church and school.