Fishing!

Being that I grew up in Alaska, I truly do love to go fishing. It's so relaxing, the water is so peaceful, and all the cares of the world just go away when that line starts tugging... ahhhh.... love it. Anyways, although nothing on EARTH could ever top fishing in Alaska for REAL fish (you with me Alaskans!?), Arkansas is known for its fishing and there are tournaments held all the time all around us. Now, it's hard for me to get used to a 20 inch fishing being huge, BUT... I'm working on it.

All that being said, we haven't gotten out and fished really since we've lived here. I think Joel threw a line in the water a few times from our lake boat, but I don't remember him catching anything over a few inches. SO, a few weeks ago Joel surprised me with a guided fishing trip on the White River. We are good friends with the guide and it was a fabulous day. It was real foggy in the morning and almost chilly, though by noon I had a ridiculous sunburn that I'm still peeling from.

Joel caught the first few fish of the day, but I came back strong and started just bringing 'em in. I caught the first Brown Trout of the day and it was pretty decent at 19.5 inches. Once again, they tell me that's good :). Well, after my run of luck, the luck went back to Joel and he caught several more towards the end of our trip, including a nice Brown also (not as nice as mine though, tee hee!).

 

Thank you Babe for such a great day on the river! I had so much fun!!!!
P.S. I'll let you catch the big one next time :)

Wedding

Joel was asked to officiate another wedding, this one was for a beautiful young couple, Lance and Trista. They had a very fun wedding outdoors. It was H-O-T though, and I felt terrible for the guys in black suits. But it went really well and I believe they are off to a good, God-centered marriage.

Mia's Birthday

Well, our little girl turned 1 May 15th. Wow. What a crazy year. It has gone by very fast, but at the same time I can't remember life without this little creature that only showed up a year ago. She gets to be more and more fun every day. Ashley Myers once told me that every stage will be your favorite stage and you'll think that nothing could ever top that stage - until the next day :) She's so right. Anyways, enough sentiment... here's the birthday party!

I didn't want to use up any of the REALLY cool birthday theme ideas on her first birthday where she really doesn't "get it"... so since she's into bubbles I thought I'd do a bubbles theme, which kind of led to a rubber ducky theme. So here's the cake:

Well, Joel didn't exactly ask what I was planning to do for Mia's birthday, so when his mom asked if I had a theme, he said "no". SO...she showed up with a whole theme set up for Madagascar, complete with a 4.5 foot tall giraffe pinata. Whoa. So at the party there was a bubbles and rubber ducky area with a kids pool full of all sorts of different rubber duckies for the kids to play with (or chew on), and then a Madagascar area. Classic... :) If it wasn't totally random, it wouldn't be our family, right?!?

Anyooo, here are some other photos from her party:

Mia hitting her ginormous pinata!

Then after the party we went home to open gifts. I swear Joel's mom bought all of WalMart. I had to pack up all sorts of toys in boxes for future use as we only let Mia have a few at a time. At least she won't get bored! AND...we won't have to buy her another toy until she's 8! Ha!

I'm always getting sneezing pictures! (I think they're cute...)

And at the end of everything, she gave us a little recital. Awww.

Well, we've been doing a lot of adventurous stuff, so stay tuned, I shall be posting!

Mia Mia Mia

When looking through recent photos to give you guys an update, I realized that little miss is getting ALL the camera time! I hereby resolve to take more pictures of Joel and I. Promise. I can't believe it, but her ONE YEAR birthday is this Saturday. CRAZY!!!! In the mean time, here are pics of her this past month.

Giving "knuckles" is one of her favorite things to do:

Her famous "Avatar" Face. We can't teach her to blow kisses for anything, but she'll do her crazy avatar face 1000 times a day on command. Even when crying. Who woulda thought?  

She LOVES to talk on the "phone". Anything can be a phone. Yesterday a toothbrush, a dog toy, and a CO2 detector were all phones. She says "hewhoa" because those L sounds are hard to make in hello. When we get off the phone, she always helps by saying "ba". I can't tell if she's just sounding SUPER southern saying "bye" with a drawl, or if it's just her not being able to say the actual y part very well...  

Walking with grandma and grandpa... She has taken 2 steps on her own, but just gets SO scared to let go. 

I took a photo of her on this thing when she was quite a bit younger and it's neat to see how much she's grown.  

Here she is with Peanut being a rockstar... 

Her first time playing real drums. Mia has ALWAYS been into tapping on everything in sight and has been able to keep a rhythm by tapping her toes or hitting something for several months now. We think she's gonna be a drummer chic- which would be cool - no one messes with the drummer chic! Anyways, we are going to try to find her a little drum set for her birthday but until then, her awesome drummer cousin, Alex, will be teaching her on real ones.

 Alright, I'll work on getting photos that include Joel and I and I'll work on posting more than once a month :)

Ha!

I actually did go outside and started to take photos of spring flowers when, shocker, my camera's battery died. SO... here are two that I got prior to the camera casualty:

I hope everyone is enjoying spring so far!

Another day...

Life is busy busy as usual. I'm sure you're bored of hearing that! The sad thing is, reflecting back, I have no idea what we've been doing this past month! I mean, there's the obvious, running a restaurant, catering for a lodge, raising a monkey - I mean 10 month old, being the youth group leaders and doing at least 3 events with them per week, trying to catch a few minutes to ourselves here and there, but other than that, where has the time gone!?! 

One thing that consumed a lot of my mental time was that on March 22nd, my mom went into ICU for 4 days, then remained in the hospital for another 4 days for monitoring. She had bacterial pneumonia that was sepsis and through her entire blood stream. Her kidneys were having a hard time, her potassium levels were far too low, her blood pressure was terribly low, and her heart rate was irregular and far slower than normal as well. Poor thing! If I had been thinking clearly, I would have blogged about that and asked for prayers! Oops... Anyhooo, she's at home now recouperating. She still feels terrible and is very weak and easily exhausted. She has a ton of pain where her lung infection was as well. So some extra prayers in her direction wouldn't hurt :)

I have hardly any photos of things going on lately, though the trees are blooming and flowers are everywhere so I should get my hiney outside and take some photographs. Stay tuned... but don't ever hold your breath :)

Mia is doing fantastic. Crazy, but good. She has 1.5 teeth at this point. Her 2nd one breached the surface yesterday but you really can't see it yet. She's very efficient with that one tooth though. She can take bites off a whole strawberry or hard boiled egg and loves to eat most anything.

Here she is with a strawberry:

This one was a disaster. I was baking for the restaurant and needed to keep her busy so I gave her a little tub of all natural peanut butter, forgetting that she had a toothbrush in her other hand. Well, needless to say, she brushed her hair, her face, her clothes, her chair, everything, with peanut butter. Right before the peanut butter, she had eaten a strawberry - which of course was every where also, so when you got close to her all you could smell was peanut butter and jelly sandwich !!! But it kept her busy, and that's what baths are for, right!?!

This is my dad and his birthday cake. My dad LOVES to squirrell hunt, you could even call it an obsession. He gets on his horse and goes in the woods for hours. He calls it his "therapy". So mom made him a squirrell cake holding a white flag in surrender. It's on a tree stump and there's another squirrel looking out of a hole in the tree.

A Little Bit of Everything

I don't feel like separating these posts, so just go with the randomness. This is what we've been up to the past few weeks!

First off, we live crazy lives - as evidenced by my child's hair:

Next, we took over the youth group for our church, which we were pretty much doing anyways but now it's "official". Our first trip was to ChrisTeens, the annual youth rally in Russellville. We had SO much fun, though it was an exhausting weekend.

Joel's older brother, Ernest, came to live with us for a while, these are a few photos of a hike we went on with him this past weekend.

Ahhh the peace that nature brings. Thank you God for making beautiful little things to look at.

OK. Now we've of course been doing some more cakes, which are TIME CONSUMING. We've actually had to inflate our prices so that we only do the coolest cake orders and not spend our entire lives doing cakes. It was getting a wee bit overwhelming.

A baby shower cake:

We used the center of that cake to make this little monster for the new big brother to have his own cake:

Our first wedding cake:

And the grooms cake for that same wedding.

I'm so happy that it has warmed up here. It was SO cold for the south for SO long. I felt like I should have just stayed in Alaska. At least I used AutoStart then and dressed for the cold! Ugh-hands down to all the mom's in Alaska. I can't imagine having to bundle up my little bundle every time we wanted to go outside. YUCK. (Geez, I've become such a pansy!) Ok. That's it for now.