1 year down, 79 more to go...

July 14th, 2008 marked the first milestone in our marriage, our 1 Year Anniversary. Because the 14th fell on a Monday, we celebrated the Saturday before. We started of the day celebration at Northpark Mall & enjoyed a wonderful breakfast at Corner Bakery and then walked around the mall and went shopping. We even made a stop by Bed Bath & Beyond and bought curtains for our living room! (pictures on that to come)

The running joke between JT and I for our anniversary is that he was going to take me to Chipotle for our anniversary dinner.... very funny, I know. Well, he's joke actually became a reality because that is where we went for lunch! After that the rest of the day was an big unknown to me. JT had it all planned.

We get in the car and JT gives me a map with directions on it so that I can be the navigator and all I can tell is that we're headed out toward the airport... I have no clue what's just north of the airport... tumble weeds? After about 40 minutes of driving we pull up to a place called The Gaylord Texan resort & conference center. I can't do this place justice with words, so you'll have to see it yourself. He had planned a wonderful couple's massage for the both of us and then spent some time walking around the recreation of San Antonio's river walk & reminiscing the week of our wedding.

That evening we attended their famous Murder Mystery Dinner Theatre, “Missed Fortune”. While we stuffed ourselves with dinner, 6 characters performed their play in the midst of our tables and even interacted with the crowd. It was very entertaining and we really enjoyed a fun night!

On the 14th, I walked in from work and was greeted by the most beautiful arrangement of flowers. JT had gone to the local florist and had a custom arrangement put together of all of the flowers from our wedding. I loved it! We ate one of our favorite dinners that night, spaghetti and caesar salad, and I even used our candle votives from our reception as decoration.
We can't believe it's already been a year! God has blessed us in so many ways and we look forward to what is to come in the many years ahead!

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Fun Weekend Ventures

I know, I know... I've been slacking off on the blog and I need to catch everyone up to speed on everything we've done over the past few weeks... well, several weeks. So here it goes, let's start with our first weekend down here.

Chris, my brother who lives in Thailand and travels the globe to document God's work, had a layover in Houston for a few hours and the last time we had seen him was our wedding, so we decided to make a trip down to The Woodlands (just north of Houston where my parents & brother Sam live) to visit with Chris & a few of his co-workers (who were also on the layover).

Being from the South, there is one common denominator among all our family gatherings... delicious food :) My mother, who is one of the best cooks I've ever known, made her famous chicken enchiladas with all the fixin's and we all stuffed ourselves. We enjoyed food, laughter, and fun stories of Chris' teams travels to Peru & Ecuador. It was a quick visit, but we're looking forward to see him again here in the next few weeks.

We've met a lot of wonderful people here in our apartment tower & believe it or not, we've found couples who don't have kids yet! (I say this because currently there are 22 kids living on our floor and there is only 1 other apartment that isn't pregnant or kidless. We started to think you couldn't be at seminary if you weren't pregnant or had kids!) Anyway, we've done a lot of fun things with them, one of which is playing pool volleyball every weekend.

These are our friends, Dan & Christy, and daughter Abbey. They live on our floor and just had their second daughter, Olivia, last week. They're so fun!

JT's mom, Marcy also came down one weekend to visit and see our new lives here in Dallas. She got to meet some of our friends here at the Seminary and also played volleyball with us! We had a great time while she was here.

KLTY is the main Christian radio station here in Dallas and every year they put on a huge weekend event called Celebrate Freedom. A wide variety of bands come and we went to see some of our favs, Shane and Shane & The David Crowder band. That night we also decided to start sponsoring a child overseas. His name is Emmanuel. He was born on January 20th, 2003, lives in Uganda, and loves to play and have fun. We have placed his picture on our fridge so that everytime we open it to see all that God has provided for us, we can be reminded to pray that God would abuntantly bless Emmanuel in the same way and more. To read JT's blog on this, click It's not about Charity, It's about Justice.

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