Just A Few Days Left

In a few short days, Caleb will return to teaching and summer will officially be over for us. :(

Although I'm in LOVE with Fall, this year I'm not happy to see summer end.

Even though Caleb is a teacher, he works full-time painting houses in the summer so he doesn't exactly have the whole summer off. So, aside from our cruise and other short vacations, he really only had the last two weeks completely off.

Since this was the first summer that I wasn't working, we planned to cram in as much fun, family time as possible. Over the past week, we went swimming a few times, we had a picnic in the mountains, and we just enjoyed playing with Ellie. She especially loved playing in the backyard with our small pool and slide. Actually, she loved doing anything that involved all three of us.







I've said it many times before, but Caleb is an amazing Dad, and Elliana adores him. Their relationship is so sweet! Elliana is going to be absolutely heartbroken when Caleb returns to teaching this week. I think she'll ask for him like 100,000 times a day. Poor girl.

I'm going to miss him so much too. We'll just have to visit him for lunch as much as possible. :) Plus, I can't wait to see how Ellie does watching his Volleyball team this year.

I guess life must go on, and since we're going into my favorite time of year, Ellie and I are going to have tons of fun doing many fall things.

My Amazing Husband

I'm going to try and make this a quick post since we're packing up to leave for Arizona in a few hours for my Uncle's funeral. Yeah, we're going in a 15 passenger van with my WHOLE family, including 4 kids. We'll be in the van for at least 16 hours. Should be fun, Right?!

Frankly, this whole week has been CRAZY. That's why I haven't had a chance to blog until now.

I had a wonderful Valentine's Day weekend. My amazing husband had a surprise planned for me for several weeks. He did a great job hiding the surprise from me because I was totally clueless that anything was up.

After church last Sunday he brought Elliana to me and said "say goodbye" and then proceeded to hand her off to his parents. My first thought was, where are we going, and my second thought was, how are we paying for this(Ever since I've been home full time we've had to watch our budget closer).

I'm happy to say you can have a lot of fun without spending very much money.

Caleb took us up to his family cabin for an overnight stay. It was my first night away from Elliana. We had an absolute amazing time. He really thought things through. He had packed everything Elliana needed for a night away, my bag and everything I would need, a delicious dinner for the two of us complete with sparkling cider and our wedding champagne glasses, dessert, and even a few chick flicks. He is good!

Here are some great pictures from our time away.

Doesn't this fireplace look cozy?



We took a short walk outside. There were many beutiful views. Don't be fooled by the sunny sky, it was still very cold outside.





Here is our amazing dinner. Doesn't it look delicious?





We always toast with these champagne glasses. These are the same glasses we had at our wedding almost 5 years ago.



Here we are cozying up after dinner.



Here we are on the deck the next morning. Isn't the view from the deck beautiful?!





Needless to say, I'm very thankful for the family cabin and for grandparents that were willing to keep Elliana overnight.

I hope you all have a great weekend. I already know it's going to be a tough one for our family for many reasons.

Where To Start

For the first time in a long time, I find myself with so many topics to blog about that I don't even know where to start! Life has been good, and quite busy lately.

First of all, we just took our little Elliana in for a follow up appointment with the Dr. The Dr. said she looks great! She is still fighting a cold and is a little congested, but it's not in her lungs and she's breathing really well. Praise God!

On a side note, the Dr. did tell us that Ellie is getting a lot of teeth. I wasn't at all surprised considering she was showing lots of signs of teething lately.

In very exciting news, I'm happy to announce the "birth" of a new blog! When you get a chance, take a look at our new blog, What's For Dinner.



I think Courtney did the best job of describing how the idea came about in her blog. Once the idea was born, all four of us sisters got excited and worked on it together.

Jenn, my oldest sister and blog designer, did most of the designing. Alli, Courtney and I helped though. :) By helped, I mean we gave our opinions as to what we did and did not like. Ha ha, we're opinionated like that.

Although we may not all be great cooks, we come from a family of amazing cooks! We have lots of delicious family recipes from over many years on this blog. Even if we four sisters don't come up with anything new and delicious, I promise you, our old family recipes are oh so yummy! Check them out!



Caleb is on Fall break this week so we were able to get away as a family. We spent Monday and Tuesday at our new mountain get away. His parents had been dreaming of a family cabin for many years. They bought some land a few summers ago and this summer they finally got to see their dream come true! This is the beautiful new cabin that was built over the summer.



We had a wonderful time and we hope to have many family memories at the cabin!





Doesn't the sight of that fire make you feel all warm inside? :)



Ha ha, from the look of these pictures, I don't think Elliana enjoyed our little hike.



Finally, last but definitely NOT least, I am SOOOOOO excited for the upcoming weeks watching Caleb and his volleyball team! They're regular season is officially over and they won their league!

This has been one of his best teams for sure and they are so fun to watch this year! Friday they play in Districts, then the week after that is Regionals, and the week after that is STATE. They are definitely expected to not only be at state this year, but to do really well.

I'm going to be spending the next few weeks nervously watching and routing them on. GO COUGARS!





Sorry, these pictures aren't that great because I scanned them from the newspaper.

Whew! That was a long one.