2009 In Review

2009 was quite the year for me and Lee. Here's a little review:

January:
*I started my new job in Memphis. Lee was really sweet and cooked dinner for me that night, but he melted the bottom of the crock pot in the process :)
*We got Bruce Wayne to keep Ellie company while we were at work

April:
*Apartment gets broken into the day we were planning on going to Tuscaloosa for A-Day. We had already been planning on moving back to Alabama, and this pretty much sealed the deal. We turned in our notices at our jobs three days later.

May:
*Moved back to Alabama. Lee went back to the company he worked for before we got married, and I did the same. Life's funny like that sometimes.
*Lee turned 23
*Celebrated our one-year anniversary ♥

June:
*Went on a cruise for my dad's 60th birthday
*Bought our first house! Closed on it at the end of June

July:
*Moved into the house!

September:
*I turned 25...I don't want to talk about it
*Football season finally started! Roll Tide!
*Twin sister finds out she's pregnant!

October:
*Bought a new (to me) car. Neither of us had ever had a car payment, so this was a big deal for us. The Civic was a good car, but it was time for her to be put to rest. She's still hanging out at my parents' house.

December:
*Went to the SEC Championship Game in Atlanta and watched Bama whoop the Gators! The most fun game I've ever been to :) Alabama will be playing in the National Championship Game next month!

Clearly I've skipped a few months, because I just can't remember anything really big happening. In the fall our lives revolve mostly around football, so that's pretty much all we've done since September. I'm glad I've started the blog so I can actually remember some things!

Early Christmas

Lee and I have always done Christmas together a few days early. I guess it started because our first couple of years we were dating we were in college and didn't see each other on Christmas Day. So we gave gifts early and it just kinda stuck. We did our Christmas for this year last night. Last year we did our gifts on a Saturday so I had a lot of time to cook a lot of food, but I had to work yesterday so I cooked potato soup when I got home. It was delicous, btw.

THEN we finally opened presents! Of all the things I got Lee, I was most excited about what was in his stocking! I got him some Huey's burger seasoning. When we lived in Memphis we ate at Huey's a lot, and when we moved we went to the store and stocked up. But they don't sell it in Alabama so we've been out for a while. We had talked about ordering it online but had never gotten around to it, and then one of my co-workers had to go to Memphis last week for a meeting. I asked her if she would pick up some Huey's for me and she did so I got to give Lee some for Christmas :) I was REALLY excited! I got him a Keurig coffee maker too, so I was really excited about that. I got him a turkey fryer too, but he found it a few weeks ago, so he already knew about that one. (He wasn't looking for it...they had turned off our gas one day so he went up in the attic to look at the water heater. I had put it up there that very day, right at the top of the steps because I was going to wrap it that night. I didn't even think about it until I heard him stomping around up there. I was so mad at myself!)

Lee did a really good job this year, but he really does a good job every year. He got me xm radio, Wii Fit plus (to replace the wii fit that got stolen in April), The Blind Side (the book), a new mp3 player (because my ipod will NOT hold a charge anymore) and a couple of cd's I've been wanting. The only PROBLEM with what he gave me was that he put all of my favorite candy in my stocking. He put a big bag of Reese's Pieces, Sour Patch Kids and Cookies and Creams Hershey's. AWESOME candy, but how am I supposed to lose weight with all that around? I guess I'll have to hide it from myself!

I'm off for the rest of this week, so of course my throat's been hurting today. So instead of going to the gym this afternoon like I had planned, I slept for 2 hours. I think I'm about to go get some orange juice and spend the rest of the day cleaning up.

I hope everyone is having a great Christmas week!

So this is Christmas...

I'm finally getting around to doing a post showing all my Christmas decorations! I don't have a lot of decorations yet, but I wanted to show what we do have. I try to get a LITTLE bit every year during Christmas time, and I usually get some decorations as Christmas presents. Then it seems like I always buy a ton of ornaments after Christmas when they're like 75% off. So here goes:

Here's the tree. My mom made the bow a few years ago when I was still in college. I keep wanting to get a new angel or star to put on top, but I'm too picky and too cheap to find one. All the ones I like are WAY more than I want to spend, and when I wait until after Christmas they've all been picked over. So the bow will have to do for now.

Had to show Lee's Batman and The Joker ornaments :)

This is my little snowman family Lee's stepmom gave me for Christmas last year. I think they're adorable.

This is my nativity scene that Lee's mom gave me last year. I think it's really pretty. I still want a Willow Tree nativity set though. I asked Lee for some pieces of it for Christmas this year but I'm pretty sure he didn't get it for me :( I guess I'll have to buy it myself next year.

And here's the mantle. It was kind of hard to decorate because of the big awkward TV cutout. Our TV won't fit in there so I got this charger (which I LOVE) when we moved in. I didn't have anything Christmasy to put in there this year, but maybe I can find something next year. I was thinking maybe small tree, but our big tree is right next to it, so that might be awkward. I could always do some rearranging though. Last year I got the plain red and white stockings and attempted to put our names on them like we had when we were little, but that did NOT turn out well (no artistic ability--even just painting names on stockings!) so we got these this year. Mine is the snowman and Lee's is the Santa.

There are a few more little decorations around the house, but this is the main stuff. Can't wait to go shopping for more after Christmas this year!

Why wait until January?

I FINALLY made it back to the gym today! I haven't been since I got sick, oh, three weeks ago. Once I get out of the routine of going it is so hard to go back! But now that I did I think I'm good to go! Plus I'm only working one day next week, so that will leave me a lot of extra time to work out.

I've decided that I'm not going to wait until January to try to get back in shape. Since Lee and I got married a year and a half ago I've gained about 15 pounds. And when you're short like me it really shows! So I've decided that now's the time to start trying to lose all that weight. I'm not going to go on a major diet or anything, I just need to cut back and get back in the gym. Of course, it didn't help that I made these last night:

OMG...they were SOOO good! Somehow I had never heard of Picky Palate until yesterday, but oh man am I glad I found it! (I'm not good enough to take pictures of my own food yet, so this is from her website...plus I got in a fight with the chocolate so I couldn't drizzle any on top like she did!) These are the Crunchy Caramel Reese's Cookie Bars. They were delicious! I always have really good intentions of doing something sweet for Lee when he's not here but it seems like most of the time something keeps me from doing it. Last night he was playing poker so I decided I was going to make him these. I think he liked them :) I'm planning on making them again this weekend when I go home for Christmas. Maybe I'll get Sunny to help me :)

Note: I DID make Lee take most of these to work with him today so I wouldn't have too many at the house to tempt me!

Just One More Reason I love Chick fil A

Just a quick little story about how awesome Chick fil A is...

Lee and I have a little tradition where we always stop at Chick fil A if we're going out of town in the morning. Well really, any morning we're not going to work and we're up early...we just love Chick fil A, especially their breakfast! And they're always so nice :)

Saturday morning we stopped by Chick fil A on our way to Atlanta. We were dropping the dogs off at his mom's house since it's on the way, so they were in the back seat while we were going through the drive thru. When I got to the window they both started barking, so I told her that they loved Chick fil A too! She asked how many we had, and I thought she was just making conversation so I told her we had two. Then she bent down and came back up with two dog treats in ziploc bags! How nice is that?! It just made me so happy. They've always had good customer service, but something like that I think is just really going above and beyond. I guess they just understand how much some people love their puppy dogs :)

I've always loved Chick fil A, because I mean, it's delicious, but now I'm an even bigger fan. Thank you, Chick fil A, for being so awesome, and for making my SEC Championship day even better! :)

California, Here We Come...

Well...not me, but my beloved Alabama Crimson Tide! :) Last night we won the SEC Championship Game for our 22nd SEC Title and a spot in the CBS National Championship Game at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena!



Lee and I won't be able to go to the game since tickets are going for like $1,000, but we WERE able to go the game last night! I tried to take pictures, but my hands were so shaky (I was SO nervous, then I was SO excited!) they all turned out blurry, so all of these are from al.com.



I love Alabama football so much. Always have. I was in school at Alabama during some of the worst years in football. We had a six-game losing streak to Auburn. I was in school for five of those. We had three different head coaches while I was there. One of them never coached a real game. Mike Shula was fired during my last semester. Nick Saban was hired a couple of weeks after I graduated. Through all those years, I still loved my football team. "Roll Tide anyway" is what we said after all those losses to our rival. It feels so good to watch those boys do so well after all that. I've never met any of them, but I feel like they're my family. Sounds kinda weird, but I'm pretty sure any die-hard fans feel the same way about their teams.

I had never been to any post-season game before, so I REALLY wanted to go the game yesterday. Lee didn't really care if we went, probably because he was afraid we'd lose, but I finally convinced him to go. We paid a lot for our tickets (but not anywhere close to what we'd have to pay for National Championship tickets!), but it was worth every penny. That was the best football game I think I've ever seen. Our #2 Alabama Crimson Tide beat the #1 Florida Gators, 32-13. It was something I'll never forget. And it was really nice spending the day with Lee ♥

Here's a video from al.com of the celebration after the game. It's kinda long, and I haven't even watched the whole thing yet, but this is something I never want to forget! (Just a note though, if you do watch it, make sure your volume isn't turned all the way up...I played it with the volume turned up pretty high and just about scared my dogs to death!)

Alabama celebrates the 2009 SEC Championship win over Florida

Giveaway and cheap magazines

This'll be a pretty short post tonight...

One of my favorite blogs, Fantabulously Frugal, is hosting a pretty sweet giveaway right now. She's giving away three different gift sets with some awesome goodies. Like, REALLY good stuff. Check it out here.

You can enter every day until December 14! Even if you don't win the giveaway, this is a blog worth following. I've gotten a ton of good deals thanks to her :)

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On an unrelated note, Amazon has some good magazine subscriptions for $5 until tomorrow. I'm finally going to get that subscription to Real Simple I've been wanting for so long! I love Amazon so much!

Thankful...

This year for Thanksgiving we went down to Panama City to Lee's grandparents' house. For the past four years we've gone to Panama City and had lunch there on Thanksgiving, then turned around and gone to Eufaula and either eaten dinner there that night or lunch the next day. This year we decided we're going to start alternating where we go for Thanksgiving. So we spent Thanksgiving with Lee's family and we'll spend Christmas with mine, and next year we'll do the opposite. It was a little bit weird to not see my family on Thanksgiving, but Lee's family is awesome. I'm serious. I love his parents, brother and sister, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins. I love being around them.

We went and saw The Blind Side again while we were down there, and it really made me think about how blessed we are just to have family that loves us. I have an awesome family, and I married in to an awesome family, and I've always known that, but I don't think I've ever taken enough time to just thank God for that. I'm going to make it my goal to take a little time every day to be sure I thank God for the family I have.

(Didn't mean to get off on a tangent there, but I needed to say that.)

On Friday I did a LITTLE bit of shopping with my sister-in-law. I'm not a die-hard Black Friday shopper...it kinda scares me...plus I've been a slacker this year and didn't really have a plan of what I wanted to get ANYBODY...so we went around 9:30. It was actually not very crowded when we got to the mall. I'm a little ashamed to say that most of the shopping I did was for myself. But I did get some really good deals :) I did buy Lee a Christmas present, but then I decided to go ahead and give it to him Friday night. (It was a game and I knew he wanted to play it, so I just couldn't help myself!) So that's pretty much why I wait until the last minute to buy gifts!

We came back to Alabama yesterday afternoon. We put up the Christmas tree last night and spent most of today putting up the rest of our decorations. I still need to get a couple more things after work tomorrow, so I'll put up pictures of all my decorations later this week :)

Our Babies

About a week and half before we got married Lee told me he wanted to go ahead and tell me what he was getting me for a wedding present. It was my last day at MailSouth and Lee was coming for our shower/goodbye party. He came into work and pulled up his email on my computer and showed me a picture of what he was getting me...
That's our baby girl Ellie. We got her at the end of May 2008. It took me about eight months to find a job after we moved to Memphis, and we didn't know very many people, so for those eight months while Lee was at work it was just me and Ellie. We love her so much! We worked really hard to get her to sleep in her crate at night. It took a lot of sleepless nights, but she finally got used to it. So what did we do? We decided that after all that, we enjoyed having her sleep in the bed with us!

Here's a picture of her as a ladybug for Halloween 2008:

And one of me and my baby at Christmas last year:
I finally got a job in January of '09, and we decided we'd hate for Ellie to be alone all day after having me at home every day, so we decided to get her a friend. About the same time Lee heard from the breeder we got Ellie from letting us know that they had a little boy if we were interested. (Lee had mentioned to her that we wanted to get a boy) So of course we jumped on that! Here's a family photo (ha!) of our new addition Bruce Wayne (I let Lee name him!)
Ellie didn't know what to think about BDub at first, and she hid from him most of the night:
I took this picture of him to show how small he was. That's a size 7 shoe he's chewing on (we really should've put a stop to that earlier):
After about a day, Ellie learned to love her brother and now they're the best of friends :) They're very protective and they *THINK* they're big dogs! They're really spoiled, and that's all our fault, but they're just so stinkin' cute it's hard to get mad at them! This picture is from the day we moved into our house in July.
They think any time there's a blanket or pillow on the floor it's for them! Ellie even sits on the decorative pillows on the couch!

We've finally gotten them sleeping in their crate at night. I'm not gonna lie though, if we go somewhere after work or are gone a good part of the night they usually sleep in the bed with us. We just hate for them to stay there all day and all night!

I don't sign their names on Christmas cards or anything like that (not that I judge the people who do, I understand, they're family too!) but these are definitely our babies. Ellie was with me through some pretty hard times in Memphis. And when I'm sick, she won't leave my side. It's so sweet. And Bruce Wayne is all boy! He's so playful and just has the best little personality. I never thought I'd be one of "those" people about my dogs, and I certainly never thought Lee would become one too, but they have just completely stolen our hearts!

on the mend...

I had my second doctor visit in as many weeks today. I finally got over the walking pneumonia stuff then Thursday I started feeling like I had a sinus infection. I was feeling a little better on Friday, and a lot better yesterday, so I thought it had probably run its course. But I woke up this morning with a really bad cough so I decided to go on in to the doctor, especially since Thanksgiving is coming up. I really didn't want to be sick for Thanksgiving! Lee felt like he had a sinus infection too, so he went with me.

We went in and they tested us for the flu and neither of us have that, thank goodness. Lee has a sinus infection and I think I did too, but the doctor said I had some kind of a virus. He gave Lee a z pack and he gave me some cough medicine, so it looks like we'll be okay by Thursday :) They gave both of us steroid shots too. Last time I went they gave me a steroid shot and it hurt, but at least the nurse TRIED to take it easy on me. This shot today HURT. This girl today didn't care! Lee got his first (he actually had to get two shots) and he told me later he didn't want to say anything because he didn't want to scare me, but it really hurt him too. We could barely walk out of the office it hurt so bad!! I hate shots.

I didn't get to put up the Christmas decorations this weekend since we've been kinda sick. Lee didn't want me to put them up until after Thanksgiving, but I was going to do it anyway...looks like he got his way :)

We DID go see The Blind Side last night. I know New Moon was the big release of this weekend, but I really think everybody should go see this movie. It was one of the best movies I've seen in a while. You will be a Michael Oher fan for life! (Plus, Sandra Bullock's character hates Tennessee as much as I do! Ha!)

I'm looking forward to short week at work and spending time with family this week we don't get to see nearly enough!!

Back to Reality

I'm finally starting to feel better. For some reason I assumed I would've felt better Thursday than I did Wednesday, but I was completely wrong. I felt awful. I woke up Friday morning feeling a little better so I went in to work until about 2. Then I came home and went back to sleep. When Lee got home we went to get some food and I thought I felt good enough to go to Costco...I did not. That completely wore me out! We came back home and tried to watch a movie but I didn't last very long. I think I fell asleep around 9...then I woke up at 4 Saturday morning WIDE awake. I guess I had finally gotten enough sleep! I MADE myself go back to sleep until about 8 though.

I felt a lot better when I got up yesterday morning, but I still spent most of the day just taking it easy. I did wash some clothes, but that was about it. I'm feeling almost 100% today. We got up and went to church this morning and then we spent most of the rest of the day cleaning the house. I am DETERMINED to not let it get that messy again! Lee spent most of the day working in the computer room and he got it all organized and hung pictures on the wall and everything! It only took us four months to get pictures up in there! Now maybe someday we'll hang some pictures in the dining room...

I'm planning on starting my Christmas decorating next weekend, so I'll post some pictures if I do!

Sad News

After Lee left for work this morning he called and told me I needed to turn on our sports talk radio station because three University of Tennessee football players had been arrested for armed robbery last night. I listened to that for a while then read a few articles about it. Apparently one of the guys was in the store at the time and may not have had anything to do with it.

I obviously don't know the whole story about what happened, and I don't know if any of us ever will, but I think this is such a sad situation. There are so many talented athletes that get free rides to college and a chance to make millions playing in the NFL (or whatever professional sport they play) and then throw it all away with something like this.

It really frustrates me, too, when people make comments about all the "thugs" playing at UT. I'm not a UT fan, never have been, and I certainly don't care for their coach, but come on, there are guys who do bad things everywhere. Yes, even at my beloved University of Alabama. (Jimmy Johns, anyone?) People make mistakes. I just hope these guys can take whatever type of punishment they may get and straighten out their lives.

Okay, enough about that. I've pretty much done nothing but sleep all day. I haven't even had a shower...gross, I know, but how could I with all the sleeping I've been doing? I just hope I can sleep tonight since I have to go back to work tomorrow! I've decided I really do not like this cough medicine they've got me taking. It's disguting. It takes everything I have to take it, and I have to take it three times a day! It makes me feel more sick than I did before I took it. But if it makes me better I'll keep taking it.

I guess that's all I have for today, seeing as how I've done nothing all day :)

Here we go!

So I've decided to start another blog. I'm kinda boring, so I might not have much to blog about, but at least with it being close to Thanksgiving and Christmas I can at least blog about the holidays! I really want to do this so I can keep a record of our lives.

I started feeling really sick on the way to work today so I called in and went to the doctor. They drew my blood, swabbed my throat and my nose. When the guy came in I felt like I needed to warn him that I was not good about getting my blood drawn. I've had a couple of pretty bad experiences with needles so I always panic a little bit when I see them. But this guy was awesome! It didn't hurt at all! I had to thank him for being so good at his job :) Then they swabbed my throat and nose...I've had my throat swabbed before and it was not pleasant, but having your nose swabbed was just awful. He made it really quick, that's just not a fun experience.

So THEN, after all that, the doctor came back in with a look on his face that let me know he didn't have good news. He let me know I had walking pneumonia. (I had heard of that before, but I didn't know anything about it so I looked it up on webmd when I got home--looks like it's basically just a mild case of pneumonia) Anyway, he gave me three different prescriptions to fill and told me they were giving me a steroid shot to make me feel better--guess that one hasn't kicked in yet--but seriously, I have to see ANOTHER needle today? One a day is plenty, thanks. But I acted like a grown-up and didn't cry or anything! Ha! Baby steps. That one hurt pretty bad, but the nurse was nice so I didn't want to tell her she hurt me :)

So I had to stay home from work today and again tomorrow. I'm sure resting all day will really help, but I just HATE missing work when I haven't planned to be out. But I had a fever when I got to the doctor so they probably didn't want me there anyway.

Here's some other stuff that's been going on with us lately:
Lee and I bought our first house back in July. We're loving it so far...the homeowner's association, not so much, but that's a different story. It's so nice to have a fenced in backyard so the dogs can run around! Now if I could just keep it clean!

My brother, sister-in-law and nieces moved to Mobile last week. I hate them being so far away, but it's a really good opportunity for them. They've already sold their house and Birmingham and have found a house down there, so everything's working out great for them.

My twin sister is having a baby!! I'm so excited! I can't wait to find out if it's a boy or a girl so I can start buying clothes!