vacay!

all my christmas orders are done, presents are wrapped and bags are packed!

nette and i grew up living in the same room from the time i was born til her senior year of high school. we each had twin beds and every christmas eve we would push them together or sleep in each other's bed. we don't have twin beds anymore and we don't share a room, but every christmas eve i go over to their house to spend the night.

i'll stay there tonight. we will wake up and see what santa brought. have christmas breakfast in our pajamas with mamaw then load up the car and head to birmingham! clint & brooke get jack the day after christmas, so we wanted to go celebrate with them!

i'll be in birmingham til next tuesday....then it's off to the BEACH!!!!! that absolutely deserves all caps!

a group of friends from college are going down to seagrove to ring in the new year!

my dad wants me to stay down there a couple extra days, so i'm not really sure when i will be home next. i'll have lots of pictures to share when i get home!

but for now....i hope y'all have a wonderful christmas and new years!!!

merriment...

i decided to make my own christmas cards this year, and had a brilliant idea to save them in picture format and just get them printed.

i'm working on a lot of orders right now, so i didn't think i would have the time to address them all.

plus...

sending that many letters can get expensive. especially when i think that everyone is my best friend and needs a christmas card from me.

so...

i emailed them this year.

don't be offended if you are one of my best friends and you weren't on the list. i got frustrated trying to find everyone's email, so i just hit send. i decided i could post it here instead.

in case you are wondering. i do realize that my nieces and nephews aren't my real children, but i love them like they are my own!

plus sending a solo pic of me just doesn't say merry christmas! although it would be funny!

i hope everyone has a wonderful and merry christmas!

i love y'all!

(you can click on the picture to make it larger)

book report

i was the dork in school who read every book that was assigned. i secretly loved it, but had to act annoyed at the audacity of a teacher to assign us another book to read.

there was only one book i didn't read. it was in college. i had to compare a book that i forgot to read to a movie i fell asleep in. i still have no clue how i pulled that one off.

when hallie was in town she mentioned this book to me....
























it's called cold tangerines by shauna niequist. hallie hadn't read it either, but heard it was amazing. she said you don't find out why it's called cold tangerines until the very end. this completely bothered me. i always have to read the end of a book first. i started that in school because i would rush through a book trying to figure out the ending, but not paying attention to all the things the teachers wanted you to write about.

i have only read a few parts of this book, but i was deterimined not to read the end first. i am loving it though. i'm sure i'll tell y'all all about it when i finish.

here is a quote from the book on the back cover. i don't know if it's where the title came from, but it's good....

"I want a life that sizzles and pops and makes me laugh out loud. And I don't want to get to the end, or to tomorrow, even, and realize that my life is a collection of meetings and pop cans and errands and receipts and dirty dishes. I want to eat cold tangerines and sing loud in the car with the windows open and wear pink shoes and stay up all night laughing and paint my walls the exact color of the sky right now. I want to sleep hard on clean white sheets and throw parties and eat ripe tomatoes and read books so good they make me jump up and down, and I want my everyday to make God belly laugh, glad that He gave life to someone who loves the gift."

i love that last line.

i have about 4 other books i'm reading right now, but i think this one just jumped in first place.

tacky christmas

it isn't christmas without a tacky sweater party.

for some reason i feel like there are more tacky parties this year than ever. does that come with age?

our supper club is a random assortment of people...which i love. we usually meet once a week, but this fall we have been slacking. we decided a christmas party would fix everything.

the majority of the people weren't even our normal supper club, but we had fun!

somehow i only took two pictures

hallie's visit...

i took a week hiatus from the blog this past week because......

HALLIE WAS IN TOWN!!

(i know...all caps!) she is back from africa and came for a visit! she called me back around thanksgiving and told me she could only come during the week because she had something every weekend. good thing i paint from home!

she came last monday and was going to leave on thursday, but got snowed in. she decided that mississippians driving in ice/snow was too dangerous, so she left on friday. we made a list of people to see and things to do, and pretty much accomplished everything on our list!

we had the greatest time and got to see cute, pregnant helen a couple of times. helen had us over for dinner one night and carter, kate and jmay stopped by for a little while. we looked at pictures from college that helen had, and laughed at our outfits. i mean...we haven't been out of school that long, but we definitely made some bad decisions with our outfits. sequin tops were number one on that list. those pictures you will not be seeing.




















































cute helen....you can barely tell she is pregnant from this picture





























we surprised helen with some cupcakes, so we could celebrate her birthday early!


the next morning hallie went with me to alex's gingerbread play. stephen wanted us to meet him for breakfast, so we met him before the play. the play was hilarious. the kids had a "free style" portion of the play. alex totally rocked it....














































side note...molly doesn't like looking at the camera any more because she doesn't like the flash, so she smiles and looks to the side.

another stop we made was to the sorgenfrei house to see sweet baby shelby! shelby is the sweetest baby ever. i was nice and let hallie hold her some...only because she lives in atlanta.






















shelby was asleep when we got there, but that didn't stop us from holding her! she is such a love!!






















brian talking to shelby while she was waking up. he and liza are such great parents!! brian has come a long way from when alex was a baby...he wouldn't hold him til he was at least crawling!






















shelby has the greatest hair on any baby i've ever seen!



on thursday night we had the brilliant idea to go see a movie. the only one that was out that we had heard about was twilight. neither of us have read the books, but wanted to figure out why everyone is obsessed with them. we now know. it was a great movie and i might have to borrow someone's books. after the movie we decided to take a trip to canton to see the lights. if you haven't been to canton at christmas....you should go. they go all out. pretty much anything with lights is put out. we decided to pose by some of our favorites.















































hallie is going skiing in january, so she had to get ready for the slopes.
























the bears playing instruments were a definite favorite

















































it was really cold, so we just took the picture of the christmas tree from our car.


this past week was such a great one! i am so blessed with the friends i have and love y'all so much!!

now i'm off to put together my outfit for our supper club tacky christmas party tonight!

really?

i know jackson is getting cool these days, but i hope that this fashion trend never comes here...




























these are "harem" pants from the versace spring 2009 collection

i just don't get it. i know it's not their first appearance in fashion and they have been popular in europe for a year or so, but please don't come to mississippi.































these, i can only guess, are male harem pants.
i'm not big on fashion, so maybe i'm way off base here.

i have cool friends: part 2

i thought that i would tell y'all about my cool friends that work with RUF (reformed university fellowship). it is a ministry of the PCA church to college students. i have been putting this off for a while trying to gather info on everyone, and decided that i would just dedicate this post to erin newman. you got it newman...a whole post just for you!!

newman is the intern program assisstant. (newman, aren't you impressed i knew the title!)

colleges that have an RUF program have campus ministers. some campus ministers are able to have interns...after they have flown solo for a while. newman is in charge of the interns. there are a lot of them. i try to help out by sending her funny emails every monday morning to cheer her up...we all have to do our part!

i'm lucky though because newman is one of my best friends. we first met our freshman year of college, but didn't become BFF til sophomore year. she is always giving people her time, and would do anything for anybody! i personally think she has the greatest prayers of anyone i know. the Lord has completely blessed me with friendships like this one. newman is amazing and everyone should want to be her best friend! please pray for the work that she does and for the ministry of RUF.








































...excuse hallie's dad in this picture...he just wanted to make sure elvis got in the picture with us.

if you're sitting there thinking...where have i seen that face before...



















the USA Today put this picture on the front page the weekend of the presidential debate in oxford! yeah, she's famous.

more installments of "i have cool friends" to come...