Turning 28

I celebrated my birthday by traveling to Jacksonville to spend it with family.  My mom threw me a baby shower on the following day so it worked out well to come down for all the celebrations.  It was a pretty low-key birthday.  I had sweet friends and family call and sing "happy birthday" in their best voices.  I think my favorite (although they were all very special) was my 4-year old niece Charlotte sing to me.  It was absolutely precious! :)

My mom made one of my favorite meals for me and I had a delicious chocolate chip cookie cake for dessert.  It was so good!  Not only were my parents there, but also my grandparents and my cousin Jane (who I hadn't seen in almost 2 years).  When I was growing up, Jane was probably the closest thing that I had to a sister since I only had brothers.  It was a real treat to have her fly down from Washington, DC to see me for the celebrations!  We finished off the night with watching the movie Brave.  Great day!

Yes, I'm officially at the age now where you don't get the actual amount of candles for each year of life on your birthday cake.

C Diddy's Bday

One of my very best friends, Catherine Mack, recently celebrated her birthday on October 18.  I hadn't seen her since last Christmas and I hadn't been able to spend extended time with her since before I was married (over 4 years ago), so it was about time for a visit to Boca.  I'd heard so much about her family, her church and her town that I just had to see it for myself! :)

On her actual birthday, we went shopping and to the beach.  It was a really relaxing day and there really aren't many places that you can go to the beach in October.  It was a little sunny so Catherine was having a hard time keeping her eyes open in this photo.

We went to P. F. Chang's for dinner with her family and a few of her friends.  It was really tasty and fun!  I had a great time talking and sharing stories with her mom each day.  She has such a servant's heart and I was easily able to see where Catherine gets hers. :)  

I really also enjoyed getting to know her sister, Paige, because we have very similar taste buds.  We had the most amazing dessert there called Flourless Chocolate Cake.  It was heavenly!

Catherine's mom even made her a cake!  We were so stuffed from P. F. Chang's that we had to wait until the next day to actually eat some of it.  Catherine was able to blow out all of her candles in one breath.  I was seriously impressed.

I spent about 5 days with her - we had amazing food, lots of shopping, great conversations, and I was able to worship at her church.  I had a wonderful time and it was definitely well worth it to get away.  I left at a good time because it was right before the presidential debate took place in Boca!

A Quick Getaway to St. Simons

Last week, Curtis and I traveled to St. Simons Island to visit our friends, Jenna & Dan.  It was nice to get away and be refreshed, even if our trip was less than 24 hours in length!

Jenna and Dan have the beach literally in their backyard.  Here's a good shot of Curtis and I in front of the dunes.  It was really really sunny!

You can see my baby bump starting to show -- I was 19 weeks in these pictures. :)

Jenna and I have been good friends since college when we met in RUF.  She and Dan recently moved to St. Simons Island and we are happy to have friends not that far away.

They took us downtown and showed us the pier, the lighthouse, and we even saw a little bit of an antique show.  We had some fabulous sweets from a little shop downtown while we played Rummikub (a really fun game!)  Jenna was an amazing cook and she even taught me how to make some homemade guacamole.  We also got to walk around Christ Church, its cemetery and the Wesley monument.  St. Simons is a beautiful area and we look forward to visiting again in the future!

Our 4th Anniversary to the Southernmost Point (Key West)

This was my first trip to the Keys, but it was Curtis' fourth trip!  We were there from June 10 - June 15.  We got a pretty good hotel deal through priceline.  Our first day in Key West, we went snorkeling.  I have a slight fear of water and I kinda freaked out on our snorkeling adventure during our honeymoon, but I was willing to give it a try.  Curtis claimed that the best place to snorkel in the United States is in the Keys.

We boarded the Jolly Roger in Marathon, Florida to begin our excursion.

I was a little nervous!

I think I did pretty well!  I was able to swim around and see all sorts of fish and coral.  I'm pictured above in my snorkeling gear.

The view was amazing!  We actually were able to see dolphins when we were traveling to our second location to snorkel.

Unfortunately, Curtis got a little seasick during it, but he was fine once we were back on stable ground.

For dinner, we went to a place called 2 Cents Restaurant.  Everything on their menu was much more than 2 cents, however.   It was very tasty though.  It was fun to see Curtis finally able to completely relax.

On our second day, we took a trolley tour to explore the entire island of Key West.  We thought this was a pretty cool sign above - it showed how many miles away we were from lots of places, in and out of the country.  We actually ended up purchasing a picture of a similar sign that we are hoping to put up in our Master Bedroom.

One of my favorite things that we did was we went to a the Key West Butterfly and Nature Conservatory.  It took me forever to get a good picture of the morpho butterfly pictured above.  I love the blue color!

Orange.

Yellow.

These are baby quail birds.  I thought they were so cute!  They were placed in this ecosystem so that they will eat the fruit flies.  (Butterflies eat fruit, which brings fruit flies.)

Look at how little this bird is compared to Curtis' hand.

There were two turtles there too.

Here we are in the conservatory.  Curtis had a bird poop on him when he was sitting in one of these benches.  It was kind of funny...although, it probably wouldn't have been funny if it happened to me.  He had a good attitude about it though!

We also visited the Southernmost Point of the United States.  We were actually closer to Cuba than Miami.

You have got to love the dorky cut-outs!  Here's our advertisement for Old Town Trolley.

Everywhere we walked, we found baby chicks, hens and roosters.  This was the best one that I got all week.  Apparently, roosters were brought to Key West back in the day for cock fights (which is now illegal).

We also had the opportunity to see not only the beginning...

...but the end of US 1!

We went to Mallory Square because we heard they had some of the best sunset celebrations.  Not only were they selling all kinds of unique items, but they had magicians and performers.  We watched this guy do really cool gymnastic tricks.  I was impressed because he gave all the glory to God when he succeeded. :)

Here's the sunset at Mallory Square.  I even have a sailboat in the distance (on the left) and I caught a bird in mid-flight.  Not a bad picture for a iPod Touch camera.

Of course, we had to try Kermit's Frozen Dark Chocolate Dipped Key Lime Pie!

These pictures aren't the best, but it was my favorite way to eat a key lime pie!  (But I am a chocoholic.)

I think the third day was my favorite.  We went to Higgs Beach.  The weather was amazing and we had shade under this nice palm tree.  You can see Curtis was reading a book. 

Here I am under the palm tree.  I am in the midst of reading The Hunger Games Trilogy.  I thoroughly enjoyed it.  What a great book for vacation!  

We ate dinner that night at a place called Paseo and it was probably our favorite place to eat.  We tried to eat there on about 2 or 3 different occasions, but they have really odd hours.  It was definitely worth the wait!

Margaret on Margaret Street.

We went on a Sunset Sail after dinner.  It was beautiful on the boat.  We met some nice people and got some great photos.

I love this picture.

And then the sun began to set.

How romantic!

Yes, this was my favorite day.

We even had an amazing dessert called "Cookie Monster."  It was a half-pound chocolate chip cookie, with 3 huge scoops of ice cream - "Brownie Boom," "Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough," and "Cake Batter."

On our fourth day, we went to No Name Key and had a kayak tour!  I had never been in a kayak so Curtis helped me out by taking a double-person kayak.

We were able to see sponges, conch crabs, birds, fish and jellyfish. 

Every day we were there, it was perfect weather.

What a fun experience!

On our final night, we went to the top of the Crowne Plaza to watch the sun set go down one final time.  Curtis and I are already wishing we were still there!

NYC - Day 3

 
So, we tried to mimick the famous kissing shot in Times Square above.  See original below:

 I think it our picture is surprisingly more similar to the original picture than I expected.  Just different types of hats!  It took us a while to find someone that we were willing to kiss in front of them.  Haha!

We planned on visiting the Statue of Liberty, but before we did, we ate lunch at a restaurant called Gigino's.  This was the view from the restaurant, isn't it a great view!?

Unfortunately, there wasn't any shade in the restaurant because the wind was blowing and the umbrellas wouldn't stay up.  So, we had to eat with our sunglasses on!

This was our view as we arrived from the Liberty cruise ship -- I had no idea that the Statue of Liberty was so huge!

We had a great view of the cityscape as we were visiting the Statue of Liberty.

The black building on the left is the new Freedom Tower that they are constructing.  It's weird that the Twin Towers would have been in this picture if we would have visited 10 years earlier.

Here's a good view of the front of the Statue of Liberty.

You can get an idea of how big the statue is in comparison to Curtis and I in this picture.  All you can see is the feet of the statue!

For dinner, we went to Qdoba.  This was very exciting for us because Curtis has so many free burritos that he acquired when we lived in St. Louis and he isn't able to use them in Savannah because we don't have a Qdoba.  We stumbled upon one downtown and we were excited to get to save some money!

This is the Rockefeller building - on Day 4, we spent a lot of our time in this building visiting the NBC Studios and the top of it!

One of the beautiful churches downtown.

This is a statue of Atlas holding up the world.  I know it from the beginning of the television show "30 Rock."

This is inside St. Patrick's Cathedral.  Heather (Curtis' sister) recommended that we visit this ornate Catholic church.  It was really awesome to check it out and see how large it was!  It's definitely not like any Presbyterian churches that I've ever been to.

This is the outside of St. Patrick's Cathedral.

One of my new favorite tv shows to watch is called "The Voice."  Here Curtis and I are posing in front of an advertisement for it.  We are holding up "V"'s like the celebrities behind us are doing (even though you can't see it from this picture).

So we were able to see where David Letterman has his show around Times Square.

Here's a large Superman figurine that is inside the huge Toys R Us store.  We went back to the huge Toys R Us because we knew there was an ice cream shop inside it called "Scoops R Us."  It was so expensive that we decided to go somewhere else for dessert.

So, we found ourselves at a place called Roxy Delicatessen.  We are sitting on the second floor in this picture, but you can see some of the sweet treats below.

I got the chocolate covered sugar cookie.  It looked so yummy!

Curtis got a peanut butter brownie.  It was delicious!

We finished off almost all of the sweets!

Curtis was full!  A nice finish to another fun-filled day in New York City!