Memorial Day Fun

As I already said, we went to the lake for Memorial Day. It was a little surprise trip that my husband and his friend organized for the wives. They planned a trip to drive about an hour away to go shopping at Trader Joe's, eat lunch at Chipotle, then head to the lake for the afternoon. It was a perfect day!

*Side note, I saw a building that is being built on our main street in town and we are getting a Chipotle!! SCORE!!*

We didn't end up heading to the lake until about 1pm, and by that time, it was super crowded. We drove by all the entrances to the swimming areas and each one was full. We thought we weren't going to be able to get in, but we decided to make one more round to each of them and, thankfully, we got into one! Jax took a few minutes to warm up, but it wasn't long until he was jumping off the dock into our arms, and running through the waves and digging in the sand. It really was the perfect Memorial Day!

Jax's birthday was yesterday! There will be a birthday post coming as soon as possible... we have family in town so I'm a little pre-occupied. But I will get it posted soon!

Weekly Randoms

As always, I have already fallen behind on my weekly randoms... And this is only the second week. Ha!

This week has been a little busy. My mother-in-law was supposed to come out here on Wednesday but the nasty weather throughout the South ended up getting in the way of her flights. Her layover in Dallas was cancelled so she ended up re-booking her trip for 2 weeks later. That ended up being a major bummer!

But my parents are arriving on Wednesday so at least I've had that to look forward to. PLUS, my not-so-baby baby is turning two on Friday. So I'm really looking forward to that but I have lots of last minute planning and organizing before his party on Friday night.

Anddddd Hubs has been off work for the last 4 days because of the holiday weekend. We've been enjoying family time and spending lots of time playing in the sunshine.

We took Jax to a local playground that has a small waterpark. It's just a fenced in area that has water shooting out of the ground and out of metal fixtures.

He loved the gun the most!

We had an overflow of basil

In our garden so I clipped a ton of it

And made a huge batch of pesto! Yummm!

Jax's nose is almost healed, but he pulled off his scab so I think it's going to scar a little bit :(

He somehow got ahold of a highlighter and decided to color all over his face and tummy. He was very proud of himself. Ha!

I was so proud of my big boy using some (child) chopsticks to eat at dinner tonight. Notice how much rice the cook gave him! Apparently he thought that my 2-year-old could eat like an adult!


I will post some pictures of our Memorial Day once I get them uploaded. We drove about 90 minutes away and went to Trader Joes for some shopping, Chipotle for lunch, and then to the lake for some sun and swimming. It was a great day!

I hope each of you have enjoyed your memorial day as well. I am so proud of my soldier and so thankful that he is in my bed each night. I had a few high school friends who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country and on this day we honor them. God Bless America!!

iPhone randoms

I'm going to try to start doing a weekly post of pictures I've taken with my phone over the past week. I'm not very good at keeping up with scheduled posts, but I might as well try! Here's this week's batch :)

Always being silly... And always wanting to wear a headband


He kept falling asleep then losing his balloon and waking up. He did it 6 times on the drive home. Poor guy!


Peppers!


Strawberries!


Basil and Rosemary!


This kid is a tiny bit ocd :)


We bought a new car!! We had a 2007 Pilot and traded it in for a 2011! Love!


Scraped nose and cute jammies


We've been enjoying the nice weather recently and playing in the backyard.


Have a lovely weekend!

**I have no idea how to make all the pictures the same size... sorry!

Coupons and a Recipe

I think I've mentioned before that I read/love The Pioneer Woman. She's very funny and entertaining, plus she makes yummy food and gives us printables so that we can make it ourselves. A few weeks ago she posted THIS recipe for grilled chicken salad with feta, corn and blueberries.

Photo Credit

Now, I know that sounds strange but the picture and description made it sound very appetizing so I printed the recipe and decided to make it last night. It was SO yummy!! I made a few minor adjustments... I only did 2 chicken breasts, I used basil instead of dill, and I skipped the lemon. It was very simple and very refreshing. I served with sun-dried tomato bread. It was a perfect summer-y meal!

On a totally different topic, I took a quickie trip to Target this morning to get a few good coupon deals. First, I picked up 2 Sally Hansen nail polishes (polish-i??) for $2.04 each. I had two $1/1 Target coupon that I paired with two $1/1 manufacturer coupon (mf) (click on Personal Care on the left), which made them just $.04 each! I also picked up an Up&Up (Target brand) children's acetaminophen for $2.54. I used a $1/1 Up&Up pain relief coupon and paid just $1.54 for medicine for Jax! Finally, I grabbed a 24 ct. box of Up&Up Ibuprofen for $.97 and used another $1/1 Up&Up pain relief coupon, so I got it FREE!! My total was $1.91 for all 4 of those things! That's less than the price of 1 nail polish.

I had also planned on buying John Frieda Root Awakening shampoo and conditioner but they were out. They are priced at $4.99 this week and the plan with those was to use a $3/2 Target coupon stacked with a $3/1 mf coupon (from the paper) and a $2/1 mf coupon. (If you don't have the coupon from the paper, then print 2 of the $2/1 mf coupons). It would have worked out to just $0.99 each! I will be making another trip over there sometime this week to hopefully get those!

Finally, I ran to Party City to buy a few things for Jax's birthday in 2 weeks. It is Mickey Mouse themed (have I already told you that?) and I am currently working on party favors. I placed a balloon order to pick up the day of, and I will need to go back a few days before the party to pick up plates/cups/napkins. I can't believe my little man is turning TWO!!

HAPPY MONDAY, Y'ALL!

A Birthday Party

Yesterday we attended a birthday party for our friends daughter, Taylor. It's hard to imagine that the little girl we met when she was turning 2 turned into a big 5-year-old!

The party was at Monkey Joes, which is a local bounce place... and just happens to be where we are having Jax's party in 3 weeks!

He had SO much fun and I cannot wait for his party!

Jax is also obsessed with Taylor, so he was very excited to be there with her!

Today is Taylor's actual birthday and we are heading to "Balloons" (Red Robin) for lunch after church. We are trying to enjoy these next few weeks because our friends are moving out of state (stinkin' Army), and we will miss spending time with them!





Yesterday was a great way to make some memories that will last forever :)

Mother's Day

We had a greatest yesterday! Hubs got up with Jax and made me breakfast. He also got me a gift certificate to get a mani/pedi! I can't wait to use it! We had a great day at church, them grilled with friends at our house. It was a lovely day!

I am so so blessed that God chose me to be Jax's mommy!

**My heart is with those of you who so desperately want to be a mommy. I know how heartbreaking it can be to get through the day. I constantly pray that God will bless each of you with your own special little one :)

Ohhh, man!

Summer Lovin

I am getting so excited for this summer! Jax is turning TWO (can you believe it?!) and I have fun things planned.

We went to our town's annual Dogwood Festival this past Saturday and while we were there I saw a booth for The Little Gym. They are just building one here and I can't wait to take Jax! Hubs and I both did gymnastics when we were young and I'm so excited to introduce Jax to the same thing.


They are opening a few days after Jax's birthday so I signed him up for a free trial day. I really hope that he loves it because they have a summer session that is once a week for 10 weeks. It's pricey (boo) but totally worth it to me. It will give us something else to do this summer and I think it would be so fun!


Before this came up, I signed Jax up for gymnastics on Fort Bragg. It is only for one week but I thought that could be fun too. So now he'll have lots of fun gym time this summer!


In a few weeks there will be swimming lessons opening up so I plan on enrolling him in those too. I am just so excited that he is old enough to do all these fun activities with.


I'm not looking forward to the sticky heat that comes with summer, but what better way to cool off than playing in an *air-conditioned* gym and swimming in a pool?!

(Sorry that some of the pictures are blurry... Taking iPhone pictures of a busy toddler is hard!)

Easter!

I really should be heading to bed (since it's 10:30, which means it's past my bedtime) but I realized that I haven't blogged in a week, and that is just sad! PLUS, I have to do the requisite Easter 2011 post... so here it is :)

Our Easter went really well. I spent Saturday cleaning the house and getting food ready for Sunday. I planned on making red velvet cupcakes, but instead of doing red food coloring, I was going to do Easter colors for both the cake and the frosting.


Not to brag, but I'm a good cook... however my good-cook-self didn't account for the fact that red velvet cake has cocoa powder in it, and when mixed with pastel colors it turns a lovely muddy color. Lame. So instead of having pretty pastel-colored cake, we had this....

*the flash made it look brighter than it was*

*it was supposed to be pink, blue, and green*

*not so much*

Thankfully, the delicious cream cheese frosting is white so that was easy to turn into the correct colors and they turned out lovely.

Except that I overcooked them and they were dry. So they looked lovely, but didn't taste as amazing as I had hoped. Plus the whole mud-colored cake thing wasn't so lovely. So I guess the frosting looked lovely, but the rest... not so much. Oh well. It still provided sugar, which is always good in my book.

On Easter morning, we put Jax's basket in the middle of floor so that he would see it when he got out of bed (aka- when we got him out of his crib). He was so excited and he carried the basket over to his daddy and said "oooooohhhh" the whole time.
He went straight for the "choo-choo" and daddy quickly opened it so that Jax could play.

He slowly made his way through other toys and candy... and of course had to bite off the chocolate bunny's ears!

He got this airplane lollipop from his grammy and the propellers spin when you push a button... he kept staring at the lights and putting it right up to his face. Too funny!

We got ourselves nice-looking and went to church to enjoy the AWESOME Easter service that our church put together.

I really, really love our church here and that is one of the only things I will miss when we get out of the Army and head back to California. So anyway, the service was great and there were probably 30 people that went forward to the altar call! Isn't that awesome?! And our church had 9 services at our 3 locations, so who knows how many people in total came forward?!

After church we headed back our house and had some friends and their kids over for a BBQ lunch and Easter egg hunt.



I was preparing the food and hubs asked where the chicken was... well, this absent-minded mama forgot to take it out of the freezer. Major fail. So the daddies made a trip to the grocery store to get some un-frozen chicken to grill. In the mean time, the kids just played and had fun. Jax is obsessed with our friends' 5-year-old Taylor. He is alllllways asking for "teeyo" and always wanting her to come over to play. They had a blast looking for eggs and running in and out of the house, and playing on the slide, and getting hyped up on sugar.

None of the kids even ate a real lunch. They filled up on candy and that was that. Ha! The food turned out delish, the time with friends was great, and overall we had a really lovely day!

Tornado

Well we are currently in the aftermath of a very nasty tornado that came through our area. We live in central North Carolina and multiple tornados came through on Saturday and ripped paths across a hundred miles. We are so blessed that our house wasn't hit but people just down the road weren't so lucky. There is so much devastation and ruin. Streets are closed and traffic is terrible around town. I spent the afternoon with a friend handing out water bottles to the people who are working to clean up the mess. I took a few pictures (inconspicuously because I didn't want to be rude) but I thought I would share.










































I took a video on Saturday during the storm but I'm having trouble uploading it. I will try to add it as soon as I can.

The tornado hit Fort Bragg too and there is a lot of clean up that needs to be done there as well. Please keep these families in your prayers... Especially those with deployed soldiers. They need it right now!