There's a new man in my life...

Benjamin Paul Neilson. Is he the most handsome thing you've ever seen or what?

The happy Neilson family!


Seriously. He's a stud.

All I Can Say

And didn't You see me cry'n?
And didn't You hear me call Your name?
Wasn't it You I gave my heart to?
I wish You'd remember
Where you set it down

This is all that I can say right now
This is all that I can give

I didn't notice You were standing here
I didn't know that
That was You holding me
I didn't notice You were cry'n too
I didn't know that
That was You washing my feet

And this is all that I can say right now
And I know it's not much
And this is all that I can give
That's my everything

-All I Can Say, David Crowder Band

Love. It.

Aruba, Jamaica, ooh I wanna take ya...

... on vacation!!

Patrick and I took a very nice trip last week. We went to Orlando (ish) first to see my grandparents. They actually live in a very nice 55 and up neighborhood outside of Orlando. Then we spent the week at the beach in Gulf Shores, AL with my parents and sister.

It rained the day we had planned on going to this really neat wildlife park, but then there was a pretty rainbow!

This is me and Geemom. (Patrick has more pictures from this part of the trip that I'll post later.)

Our condo at the beach!

The balcony where wet sat and ate breakfast every morning.




View from our balcony

More of the condo grounds

Our room

Patrick went golfing four times while we were on this trip. Here's me driving the cart the one time I joined him.

Such a pro.

Reading on the beach

Patrick was a boogie board champ!

Pool time! This is the fam.

I missed the 'spitting water at you' photo opp. But I got close.

Packed to leave. :-(

We had SUCH a good time, and it was such a relaxing vacation. We're not settled in for long... Patrick leaves on the 16th for Philadelphia to do some training and I will be joining him up there on the 26th (10 days later... ugh) for some fun and extended family time! Have I mentioned I love summer?!

Pray!

I don't know these people, but they need your prayers badly.

Please watch and pray.

http://bit.ly/dAMli

Seriously Major Congratulations to the Lands!!!

Brice and Jeni's sweet Baby Ellie has made her entrance into the world.


Isn't she beautiful (mother AND daughter)?


I'm praying for God to scoot Kentucky a little closer to Texas so I can get a better look at her. :-)

Patrick's comment after we were both late to work so we could check out her pictures this morning: "It feels good to be an uncle." :-)

Congratulations, Lands!

PS Jeni has some amazing blogging/picture posting commitment. Pictures of them waiting in the hospital were posted before Ellie came, and pictures of Ellie after she was born came quickly. So exciting for those who are following! We love you!

Warning: This is going to be one of my girly, rambling posts. Mostly because we watched a girly movie tonight and then I read a girly blog and Patrick is upstairs so I have taken over the entire downstairs level with estrogen and his testosterone is therefore confined to the upstairs leaving me forced to write all things girly. (Insert a comment from my husband about me being "slightly dramatic.")

I find that the older I get, the more I crave "girl time." Not that I DON'T crave husband time, I definitely do. I can't imagine not having that time, but you know the whole living together thing does tend to encourage togetherness. Hooray for that... I love my husband and thoroughly enjoy living with him and being the lucky girl who gets to get up and go to bed with him daily. That being said... the further we go, the more I realize how much God has created in me a need for girls. I think part of it is my desire to feel needed. You know... how it feels nice when someone is going through something and needs someone to be there and they call you. Love to feel needed.

Tonight, we watched a movie and ate Twizzlers and Milk Duds, which takes me to a number of times that I did that with a friend who I no longer have a relationship with. I don't let go of things like that easily. I don't mean that I stay angry for a long time because I really don't... I am terrible at staying mad. I mean that I don't let go well. I really dislike change, and I don't do well letting go of people or places or things or traditions or ways of doing things or really anything at all. That's also not to say that this is something I'm constantly dwelling on; just something that's crossing my mind tonight.

On a completely different note, I'd like to get some outdoor dishes to go with our new (to us) outdoor furniture. I figured this would be primetime for that, but everywhere I've looked doesn't have a full set of anything. Just like 2 plates of one thing, two bowls of another, etc. So if anyone happens to know of a place with cute outdoor dishes that aren't crazy expensive, I'd love to hear about it!

Also, how is it that weekends go by SO fast?! (Thanks to my sweet husband for spending a lot of it running errands with me that I know wouldn't have been his first choice, fully engaged the whole time!)

That's enough for now.

Patrick-FULL week!!

He's home. :-)

Well ok, he's been home since Saturday (almost a FULL day earlier than expected, super exciting for me!) but it's still nice.

And in celebration of being back to normal, I have cooked the last two nights. Seriously! I know, it doesn't seem like something exciting to those of you cook-ers. But I'm not one of you, and for the most part cooking frustrates me because I get home from work tired and not at all in the mood for making a meal. But I have cooked twice, one incredibly successful, one not too bad.

I turned the always-a-favorite chicken crescent roll-ups into a casserole on Monday night. Patrick hasn't stopped talking about it since. He's got a weird obsession with casseroles, and when I turned his favorite food into a casserole well... he was excited, to say the least. I have to agree, it was good. We just finished it up at lunch today.

Because I know you were dying to hear, my perception of casserole is slightly different. I was discussing this with a friend on Friday night, and casseroles weird me out a bit. I guess if they're my own it's fine because I know what's in them. But a stranger's casserole... there's no telling. I don't love biting into a casserole trying to guess what's in there. Plus, the idea of throwing whatever we have in the pantry in an oven-safe dish and covering it in cheese until it bakes golden on the top and then calling it a meal is something that he is much more comfortable with than I am. But anyway, I digress. (For a humorous casserole blog entry of someone much funnier than I am, click here.)

Speaking of lunch... Patrick's working really close to home right now and he's come home for lunch three days in a row!!! (For those of you who don't know, I live about 2 minutes from where I work so I'm home for lunch fairly often.) The only problem with that is that I get used to it and when he moves projects it's really a bummer that he can't come home anymore. But for now, lunches at home are excellent. Especially when they are yummy leftovers.

I am in baby shower (for other people, NOT myself) whirlwind mode. Baby shower one of five (four of which I am contributing to throwing) is coming up in a couple weeks, and we have a lot done for it. I'm pumped! Everything is so cute and tiny! (Well ok, it's baby shower 2 of 6. But Jeni's came way earlier. Check out her post.. isn't she such a cute, glowing pregnant lady??)

Oh, and I'm a couple days late, but here's a shout out to my sweet cousins/flower girls whose birthday was a few days ago.

Happy birthday Erin and Jamie!!!

(PS They have grown a ton since last year but I couldn't get any new pictures to work. Aren't they cute?!)

Have a fantastic rest of the week!!

Becky