Anniversary Weekend and Celebration

"And life is a road and I wanna keep going; love is a river I wanna keep flowin'. Life is a road, now and forever, wonderful journey. I'll be here when the road stops turning, I'll be here when the storms are through. In the end I wanna be standing at the beginning with you." -Richard Marx and Donna Lewis

On October 24th, 2009, at 4:30pm, I married the love of my life. What a wonderful two years they have been - being able to come through some major life challenges (job stresses among other things) with my best friend. Praise God that, in this world where so many marriages are broken, David and I KNOW that, because of God's guidance, ours will stand the test of time.

We started the celebration on Saturday. That morning, we headed to Lexington for the BBQ Festival. Had to go in the morning so we'd be back in time to watch the Carolina football game that afternoon. Had so much fun eating BBQ and going to the vintage car show!











That afternoon, we headed to Gibsonville to visit J Razz and Tazz Farm. Had a good time finding out way out of a corn maze...









David even had a little snack before we got out... ;-) (Okay, so maybe this corn had already fallen off and he was just pretending)







We got to play in a corn silo...







Picked out a pumpkin and looked at some farm equipment, too!











After the farm, we headed back into town to have our anniversary dinner at Green Valley Grill in the O'Henry Hotel. We had our rehearsal dinner in this hotel 2 years ago, and it's one of our favorite places to eat.









On our way back from dinner, we stopped by my parents house so I could get a pumpkin carving lesson from my mother. This is the first pumpkin I have ever carved myself!







On our actual anniversary, Monday the 24th, we had a nice little celebration at home. Here are the "2nd year" gifts we bought ourselves. "Traditional" is cotton (the bath towel set); "modern" is china (the Christmas porcelain china mugs) and the "traditional British" (a heritage thing for us) is paper (the framed paper saying). :-)



David also brought me fresh fall flowers and gave me this beautiful necklace and pair of earrings. Isn't he the best???



I wore an apron that was signed by all the people at the Pampered Chef shower we had before our wedding, as well as the shoes I wore on our wedding day...



We set up our dining room table with all the memorobilia from our wedding day. It was great! I got cupcakes (to symbolize the cake we had on our wedding day) and chocolate and cheese to symbolize the treats we ate later on that evening (David had a special goody tray lined up for us for our first night).







I SMASHED cake on David's face when we fed it to each other this time, since I was so "nice" with the cake on our actual wedding day...



And how else do you end an anniversary celebration other than going outside to look at your Jack-O-Lantern? hehe



Happy Anniversary to my sweet David! There is no one I'd rather go through life with!

Midnight Plumbing Crisis

"Ain't no rhyme or reason, no complicated meaning; ain't no need to over think it - let go laughing. Life don't go quite like we planned it; we try so hard to understand it. The irrefutable, indisputable fact is - it happens." - Sugarland

Last Thursday night did NOT start out as an evening I had planned to blog about. But surprise! David and I were just hanging out, having a relaxing evening at home, until about 9:45pm. Within less than 30 minutes, are plumbing went from fine to not fine. And I mean, NOT fine. EVERY SINGLE DRAIN in our whole house stopped up at once due to a central clog. Both toilets overflowed. Several times. Not kidding. Both bathroom sinks backed up. Both showers and tubs and the kitchen sink did the same. AND, of course I had started the washing machine to wash the towels used in the toilet overflow clean up (BEFORE I realized what a bad problem we had going on in our plumbing) and so water backed up in it, too, and ran across the tile floor. Awesome. It was such a crisis that I, at least, had about 5 minutes of sheer panic. There was so much water going coming from all over that at one point David yelled, from a different room, "I need more towels!" and I thought, "Are you kidding? At this point we are OUT of ALL towels!" lol. So, over the next few hours we did everything we could think of, including taking 2 trips to a 24 hour CVS to get more Drano and supplies. On trip # 2, I got ice cream. If we were going to be up dealing with this, I was at least going to get myself a treat. That's when I got the idea that this crisis just may be crazy/funny enough to blog about. Sometimes you just gotta laugh so you don't cry!







When the crisis first started, I was already in my pajamas and we were sitting in bed watching TV. Here you can see how we jumped out of bed and obviously I had to change from PJs to regular clothes to go to CVS...



At least our fall decor looked good through all of it (totally random, but when it's this late your brain gets loopy and you take random pics)...



But things throughout the rest of the house weren't so great...







Finally, at 1:17am, we decided we were defeated and could not fix this on our own. It was the middle of the night, and we had no working plumbing. Considered calling my parents to see if we could stay with them until morning, but hated to wake them. SO, we got back into our jammies and just tried to sleep until morning.



Luckily, David took the next day off to meet the plumber (who fixed our issues) and I went to work around 11:30 after I had washed all of our wet towels at my parents house. At least we were able to laugh about it and even have a little fun with the whole thing! What a memory! lol :-)

Mountain Trip, Jewish Festival, and Mimi's Birthday

"It is, I believe, the greatest generation any society has ever produced." -Tom Brokaw in The Greatest Generation

Weekend before last we had another weekend full of fun! On Saturday, we went to the mountains with our very good friends from our Young Marrieds Bible Fellowship Group, Brian and Marsha, to get some fresh produce and look at leaves. We started by going to some produce stands on the other side of Mount Airy, and by eating lunch at the locally famous "Hungry Farmer" restaurant...









We also bought some baked goods...



Which I promptly got into...



We even got a picture of my fellow "city girl," Marsha, on a straw tractor. Marsha, we are NOT letting our men turn us into country women! Stay strong! ;-)



My camera died after this picture, so I couldn't document the rest of the day. But we rode the Blue Ridge parkway all the way over to Boone and did some shopping in that area. Thanks, Marsha and Brian, for taking us along!

The next day, after church, we went to the Jewish Festival at the Synagogue here in Greensboro. While we are 100% confident in our faith as absolute truth, it is always interesting to learn about other faiths and cultures. We didn't stay too long, but it was fun to walk around and get a look at some cool stuff...







That evening, David and I went to dinner with my family (parents, grandparents, and uncle) to Harpers Restaurant in Greensboro to celebrate my grandmother's 90th birthday! WOW! Amazing to think of all she has seen in her lifetime - the Great Depression as a little girl in West Virginia, and then WWII and many many other events since she married my grandfather right after the war and moved to NC. She spent many many years being that very iconic "1950s housewife" and being amazing at the job, a thing that I always thought was so cool about her (you know me, being Mrs. Traditional - I love it!). We had a wonderful time celebrating the life of this lady who was part of "the greatest generation." We love you Mimi!











Thanks to my mother for getting the cake and my sweet hubby for finding the restaurant manager to write on it. What a special birthday for Mimi!