Anniversary Trip - Special Gift

James and I had decided a while back that our 10th Anniversary gift to each other would be our trip, our get-away, our mini vacation, our siesta. But of course, eventually, I knew he had something up his sleeve when he started asking what my ring size was. However, I did not know what it looked like or anything else about it. I did know that whatever it was, we would have matching ones.

So, on the morning of our Anniversary, he gave me the sweetest card (homemade of course!), and a printed copy of our favorite Song of Songs (the one read at our wedding), and then he pulled these rings out. Matching silver bands with the phrase from Song of Songs, "I am my Beloved's, and my Beloved is Mine" inscribed on them in Hebrew. Very cool. I loved them!! And we haven't taken them off since. I wear mine on my right ring finger and James usually wears his on his left middle finger because he wants it next to his wedding ring.

Side note: Here's a shot of us at breakfast on our Anniversary! I cannot express in words how good the breakfasts were!! First of all, we had a very sweet lady named "Mammie" who was our cook. This particular morning we had Cherry Jubilee Crepes along with sausage, fruits, coffee, juices, muffins, cereals, toast, fruit dip, jellies and jams, and a variety of pastries.

I think this is my favorite picture from the whole trip!! Enough said.

Right before checking out on Saturday morning, we ate another delicious breakfast of Quiche and bacon, walked the trail again around the pond, fed the turtles one more time, and took this self portrait...

It was a great 10th Anniversary!!

James

Please pray for James this morning when you think about it.

His job interview begins at 8AM!

Pray for peace and calm. Pray for guidance.

Thanks!
Overjoyed,
Karen (and James)

Anniversary Trip - Texas A&M

Last Friday morning, after a delicious breakfast at The Villa, James and I headed into College Station. We ended up at Texas A&M. Here's a shot of the Aggies Football Field.

Then we ended up at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum on the campus. This is the first Presidential Library I've ever been to and it was pretty cool. There is so much to see there. To give you an idea, James and I were kind of rushing through it and it still took us THREE hours. If we had really taken our time, I bet we could have easily stayed for 5-6 hours!

I just had to take a picture of this quote...just because my husband loved it and I love my honey!!

This was pretty cool...an actual piece of the Berlin Wall...I wish I could have taken more pics but some areas they don't allow photography and also some of my pics came out blurry because you can't use a flash at all. So, these here were the best ones!

I LOVE this one. What do you think? Would James make a good candidate? I think so!!!!! They also had a replica of Daddy Bush's Oval Office, but it was one of the areas I could not take pics.

And wouldn't you know it...the George Bush Library, for whatever reason, just happened to have a small Star Wars display area!!! (something to do with pop culture of that time). So, James of course LOVED it and had his picture taken with Bobba Fett.

The Library was a lot more fun than I expected and James even picked up a collector's golf ball in the gift shop there. After leaving the library that day, we were very hungry so we decided to have a late Anniversary lunch at Square One Bistro in the Historic Downtown area of Bryan, TX. We had been told this was a "great" place. It was an okay meal but not great. Our meal at The Vintage House was much better on Thursday night and then again on Saturday, when we ate at The Cheesecake Factory on our way home!! Overall, last Friday was a great day though!

Anniversary Trip - Turtle Friends

One of our favorite things to do while staying at The Villa last week, was feeding our turtle friends, located in the pond behind the gift shop, which also had a water fountain in the center of it and walking trails all around it. This picture below was taken from the railing on the deck built behind the gift shop.

At one point, James and I counted no less than 30 turtles!! And they were ALWAYS hungry!!

Then we walked off to the side a little ways down the walking trail where there is a little bank. The turtles would instantly follow us like a little turtle army. Then they would start literally climbing over each other's backs, or I should say "shells", in order to get to the food we had.

Here's James feeding a few of them. Turtles are so peculiar...they would come right out of the water towards us but were still skittish enough that they would turn and jump back in the water if they felt we were invading their personal space the slightest little bit.

Most of the time, they would just wait for us to drop it and then once we moved back enough, they would pounce on the food.

Here's a short clip of us feeding them at first from the deck and if you look closely, you can see all of the crazy little greedy catfish stealing the food from the turtles.

Here's a clip of James trying to feed some of them...the loud noise you can hear in the background of these clips is the water fountain.

We had a blast feeding and watching them!! Only two more Anniversary posts to go.

Stellan Update

STELLAN is...

going home today!!! Yeah!!! He is flying home with his mom to reunite with his family. He's not completely cured by no means but he is doing well enough that they discharged him from Boston Children's Hospital. He can go home to Minnesota now and be cared for by his doctors there until he's big enough for a pacemaker for his little heart. He's such a cutie! To read more, you can always click on MckMama's blog in my sidebar under "My Favorite Places".

Good Morning Houston!

It's a mess here!

Anniversary Trip - The Villa Grounds

Here's some shots of the grounds around The Villa. This area just happened to be right in front of our windows. It's called, "The Garden of Love".

The buildings in the background include a gift shop, winery, and the very well-known, Vintage House restaurant, where we ate a delicious meal on Thursday evening.

More flowers...

I don't know what these blue ones are in front of the gift shop but they were so pretty!

Roses...

More roses...these roses grow hanging right in front of the doors going into The Villa and each morning, we noticed more buds had bloomed.

One shot of the vineyard...there are 42 acres of grapes grown here and over 400 more acres grown in West Texas.

Right now, the grapes are itty bitty little beads...

James really likes this shot I took...it's amazing to me how grapes grow...the stalks look so dead and ugly and then out of nowhere a green shoot will come out of the dead looking part and flourish with beautiful green leaves and grapes.

I will try to finish up our trip later today and tomorrow with our turtle friends, our trip to Texas A&M, and a special Anniversary gift from James!! Stay tuned.

TAKS Time Again!

Today is Shelby's Math portion of the TAKS test!
Say a prayer for her when you think about it today.
Pray that she will be calm and not stressed.
We know she will do fine.
Thanks!
Love,
JKS&T

Anniversary Trip - The Villa

Here's my first of several Anniversary trip posts! As most of you closest to us know, James and I had a wonderful time celebrating our 10th year together and we are excited to share a little part of that with you in pictures. As usual, I have too many pictures so I will have to split this up into multiple posts. This is a start though - I wanted to show what our actual Bed & Breakfast - The Villa - and our room looked like. The Villa is located in Bryan, TX.

Here's the front of The Villa - it only has 10 rooms - 5 on the top floor and 5 on the bottom. Our room just happened to be the biggest one in the bunch. Our room is actually the one on the front, bottom right, where the bay windows are.

Here's a peek inside the lobby and lounging area and you can see where we eat breakfast. I took this picture on Thursday afternoon when we arrived.

This is looking straight up to the ceiling from the lobby. The chandelier they have is gorgeous - once again, my camera doesn't do it justice. I also liked all of the stained glass throughout The Villa.

This is our room. Each room has a theme. For instance: there is Romeo & Juliet, D'Artagnan, Camelot, Napolean & Josephine, etc...James and I had Lancelot and Guinevere!

Just inside the door there was this frame telling about how our room was unique...very cool. You might need to enlarge to read all of it.

James was on the phone and didn't know I took this...Ha! As I said, our room was the largest and we loved it. Gorgeous curtains and furniture made in the 1600's!

Check out the detail of this 1650 hand carved bed, especially the headboard.

We had a huge bathroom, including a nice whirlpool tub and enormous walk-in shower, the kind James has always wanted at home. :-)

When we arrived, we had this waiting on us in our room...Tuxedo dipped strawberries...YUMMY!! We almost made ourselves sick off of these babies.

That's all I have time to do right now...tomorrow I'll show more of the grounds, including a lot of cool flowers, the vineyard, and our turtle friends.

TOMS Shoes...

Dave used this video in church this morning to go along with his sermon on James Chapter 2...please watch.

Check out the website to learn more information!
I plan on buying my first pair of TOMS soon. :-)
Have a blessed day!

Our 10th! J+K=4ever

Today is our 10th Anniversary!! James and I would like to invite you to travel back in time ten years as we share some of our favorite photos from our very special day. And for those of you who were part of our special day or were just there in person sharing our day with us, we just want to say again, "Thank You!"

These first four are actually from my Bridal Portrait session. Out of about 20 shots we took, these four are James' favorites. :-)

This one below was the one used in our newspaper article.

My Bridal Portraits were taken at Norton Art Gallery in Shreveport, LA. It's a popular place for bridal portraits, especially in Spring when all of the gorgeous azaleas are in bloom.

James always likes to pick at me about how worried I was about the weather that day. It had rained a lot the day before and was overcast the morning of my session with another chance of rain. But once we got there, it turned partly cloudy and turned out to be great picture taking weather.

The handsome groom...

Our ceremony...lasted 13 minutes...and yes, we planned it out that way!! It was great!!

Karen's immediate family...Can't believe how small my two nieces are here!!

James' parents...

Our wedding party...one of my best friends, Erika, was my maid of honor. The ceremony went off almost without a hitch, except when Erika dropped James' wedding ring and it went rolling across the floor. :-)

Our beautiful wedding cake with real roses...this cake was almost accidentally knocked over by none other than our nice photographer, Roscoe. Notice I said almost. A couple of people raced over to catch it and stop the table from rocking. It was a scary moment, to say the least.

Cutting the cake...I remember feeling like my jaw was hurting by the end of that day because I just couldn't stop smiling. I don't think I've ever felt that happy before, except when I was baptized.

Feeding James some of his chocolate groom's cake was a lot of fun. His cake was in the shape of a giant rollerblade. It was pretty cool.

Drinking some wedding punch...

My ring with bouquet...Erika's mom made all of my bouquets, corsages, arrangements, and boutonnieres.

Husband and wife AT LAST!!!!

Signing our lives away on our Louisiana Covenant Marriage License.

We went with bubbles instead of nasty rice or bird seed...it was a BIG HIT. Everyone loved doing that, especially all the kiddos.

Final Farewell as we headed off to the hotel...next stop...Oahu, Hawaii!!

And there you have it folks...a quick summary of our wonderful wedding day!! To us, it was the most perfect wedding ever!! So much has happened on this journey together already...I can't wait to see what God has in store for us for the next 10 years and beyond!!