Mexico, here we come!!!!

So in TWO DAYS we will head to the airport to fly to Puerto Vallarta, and I am so stinkin' excited, I seriously can hardly contain myself! :) Anyways, just wanted to remind everyone that that's where we'll be for the next week, but come March, be looking for lotsa fun pics! Love you all, and please be praying for safe travels and for us to be lights to the friends we're going with!

Mexico Tour

I just booked our (and prolly only) planned activity for Mexico! Check it out: https://www.vallarta-adventures.com/tours/yelapa
We're going on a catamaran, snorkeling, hiking to a waterfall and kayaking. Fun, huh? Gosh, I'm getting SO EXCITED! Only 5 more days!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Jazzy's VDay

Can't believe I forgot to tell you about Jasmine's VDay weekend, too! She woke up to a brand, new baby to slaughter on Sat morning and was very excited!!! Here's a pic...sooooo cute!

VDay Cont'd

So Friday we headed out to do a service project with our small group, but before we left I gave Chris his next VDay gift...

you can't see it all that well, but it's a collage of about 15 photos of the 2 of us from all the diff places we've been over the past 2.5 years. And tho I wouldn't normally give sucha thing to Chris, as all of you know, I'm seriously obsessed with cheap and free stuff, and this was totally free from Walgreen's! :)

Continuing on....Sat morning I woke up to this...

I got 12 beautiful pink roses, a very sweet card, some much-needed warm socks, and some yummy, nutty snacks. I LOVE how well my hubby knows me and what I like and need. He also got me a new watch band cuz mine broke, and I'm obsessed with my Iron Man watch, BUT come to find out I need a whole new watch because of the way my band broke. :( But anyways, didn't he do a wonderful job? He's sooooo darn cute! :)

So, I made Chris his fave breakfast, Dutch Baby, a family recipe (which I meant to take a picture of, cuz it's quite an interesting lil thing, but I forgot and it was gone in just a few minutes after I got it outta the oven) and then before we had his parents over for dinner and cards, I gave him his next gift...

these are his fave candies of all time. they're California brittle from see's candies, and i can only get them online. and lemme tell you, they are YUMMY! :)


and yesterday, as promised, i let him watch every last second of NASCAR coverage without a single moan or groan, and tonight we will finish off our long, celebratory weekend by eating at one of Chris' faves, Noodles & Co. YUM! YUM!


Hope you all had a wonderful VDay weekend, too! Love you!

St. Valentine's Weekend

So generally I make quite a big deal about VDay to my husband because, though he is a wonderful hubby, he is not very romantic (which is something I knew before I married him). And the past 2 VDay's that we have had together, he has done a GREAT job. I mean GREAT! And, as usual, this year, I have been talking about VDay alot and going on and on about it so he wouldn't forget about it and would do something exciting again. BUT then I have been talking to a bunch of my girlfriends who are planning fun and romantic stuff for their hubbies for VDay, and I guess I was convicted about how selfish I was being about VDay being a time where only Chris needed to do something for ME! And obviously we do not have lotsa money to be doing anything really spectacular, but I do have a few lil things up my sleeve for the weekend. And so not to ruin any surprises, though I do not even think Chris knows the address of "our" blog or anything, I will only tell you the things I have already done and not the things to come. But I have a few LIL things planned throughout the entire weekend, and I am SO EXCITED to "reveal" them to Chris a lil at a time!
So, last night was the beginning of the celebratory weekend, and I gave Chris his VDay card and made him some of his fave cookies...the holiday ones from Pillsbury. He ate them up and LOVED it! And he even shared a few with me, too! hahaha

And this morning, he is off doing editing stuff at home, so I got his coffee ready to go for him, when he wakes up AND left him a lil postcard saying that he gets to enjoy a Nag-free weekend of NASCAR. You see, my hubby is a huge NASCAR fan (yuck, I know, but this, too is something I knew about him before I married him), and the silly sport of NASCAR always begins its new season over VDay weekend. So my biggest gift to Chris this weekend is that he gets to watch all the NASCAR he wants to, and I will not say a word about it!
Well, thanks for "listening" today, and I will fill you in on the other surprises later. I'm just so excited about getting to surprise Chris with a few lil things that I wanted to share it with SOMEONE! So, like I said, thanks for "listening!"
Happy VDay to all of you!!!!!!

1/3 of a Reunion

So after almost 3 years (and many life events), Krista & I got to see each other again. So, I hadn't met either of her precious boys, and she had not yet met Chris. And actually no one that I lived with in Cali at Mission Year had met Chris, so it was very exciting for Krista to meet him! I also got to see Krista's youngest and newly married and expecting sis, Alisa and meet her hubby. So, though they have been and will be here all week for a Landscaping thing in Downtown Denver, we only got to see each other for 2 hours at dinner last night! But those 2 hours were amazing, and honestly, it felt like no time had passed at all since I last saw my lil dreamer!!! We met at the Rock Bottom Brewery and talked and talked and laughed and got to know everyone better and reminisced about the past, and well, it was a very short time, which was sad, but I am so thankful that we got the time together!!!! So, here are a few pics...
Krista, Justin, Spencer & sleeping Jackson

DeGroot & Bartlett clans

Spence's scowl, which we saw a lot of :)

Alisa, Miguel & Baby (coming soon) Rivera

Krista Lynn, I love you and cherish your friendship and am so thankful to be blessed with such wonderful friends who love the Lord! Thank you for coming to see me, and hopefully we can do it again sometime sooner than another 3 years! xoxoxoxo

Super Bowl

Well, congrats to the Saints! I guess it's always good when someone who's never won, wins the big game! Obviously, I had no one to root for since my Cowboys got beat out in the second round by the stupid Vikings (hissssssss), but it was a pretty decent game anyways!

We went over to the Bauers house (we know them from church and LOVE them, and we went there last year for SB too) and had a great time! Anyways, I hope all of you had a great SB weekend, and here are some pics from ours...

Chris wrestling with the lil Bauers :)



It's hard to tell at times, but I THINK Chris won...

The Johnsons: Erica & Chad...

and Isaac chowing down...

and Isaac again, here he is training to be a Jedi Knight!

"Uncle" Rich & Isaac

(note: lotsa others not pictured including myself, our hosts and our other friends, The Storms...oops, i guess got a lil into the game...sorry!!!). :)

News....

Hhhhmmmm, have you guessed it yet? Well, the above picture is one of the place Chris and I will be staying at when we go to Mexico from Feb 21-25!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now for those of you who know our current financial situation, do not be alarmed....no, we are not taking our savings and going to Mexico because we just got sick of saving and scrimping the past few years! :) The Lord blessed us with an amazing opportunity that we just could not pass up. Our friends from my job were already going to this Timeshare property in Puerto Vallarta and had an extra room, and it is Justin's (their names are Justin & TiAn) parents' timeshare, and they so graciously asked us to come along and stay for FREE! Yep, I said for free! wow! So, Chris and I have been putting back more money for this trip, and we hit an amazing airfare sale through Frontier, AND his parents paid for one of our plane tickets as our birthday presents. wow! Are we so blessed, or what? So anyways, we get to go to Mexico and FINALLY have a honeymoon (sorta). For those of you who don't know, Chris and I met and got married in a matter of 4 months and never got to take a honeymoon. And every year, we looked at trips, but every year, we decided it just wasn't wise to spend money on something so extravagant at that point. But now, for a very small price, we actually get to take a vacation together, on the beach, away from work, the house, etc. And we are so excited! But we also just wanna give all the glory and praise to Him for providing this opportunity.
So that's the news....I told you it was exciting, huh? :) So now that you know that, I do have a couple prayer requests related to Mexico...the first is obvious and is for safety during our trip. The second is that He would use us in our relationships with Justin & TiAn. These are great, fun, kind people, but they do not know the Lord, so my prayer is that He would use us to show Him to them.
Ok, people, that's it for this post! Hope you all have a wonderful weekend. Oh, and oh my goodness, speaking of the weekend, I totally forgot to tell you that Chris got his very first video job for the year tonight. he will be taping a concert up in Ft Colllins tonight, and I am soooooo excited that this has broken open that door for more business, hopefully! But you can pray for me, because I have to go a whole Friday night without my hubby tonight! ;) Ok, NOW I'm really done! Love you all!!!!!

Job Stuff

Happy Hump Day everyone! So, as you can tell, I'm still not in the phase of regularly blogging again, and mostly that is due to the fact that our days have just been pretty busy and there's just not much to tell. I will tell ya, though, that Chris ended up taking a part-time position with All Phase and has continued to work for them pretty much 40+ hours per week. It's such a blessing because now he has more of a regular income AND he even has a small life insurance policy through them, too! So, thank you, Lord AGAIN and as always, for your constant provisions!

He has still had NADA going on through the biz and more and more we are both just questioning where to go from here as far as the biz is concerned. We're just praying for guidance there!

Also, I'm happy to report that one of my best friends in the whole world, Krista, who I spent a year with in inner-city Oakland after college, is, Lord-willing, going to be able to come to Denver next week with her hubby and 2 kids (neither of whom I have yet met). So, I am just thanking the Lord for that time...I cannot wait t0 see her, AND she will be the very first person of my 5 roommies from Cali that gets to meet Chris, FINALLY! So, I am really looking fwd to that special time next week! And hopefully we will take lotsa pics and I can post them later!

So, just to end with a cliffhanger...heehee...I have some exciting news to tell you but did not wanna do it this post. So stay tuned for that! Oh, and as much as I would like to let your minds run wild with the possibilities, I WILL say, that No, the news has nothing to do with a baby! :) LOL!