Sudoku Surprise!

This was the awesome reaction we got from Jane and Gilbert (Jonathan's parents) when we gave them a Sudoku toilet paper roll we had ordered from England! It was such a hysterical moment!! 

Merry Christmas from Mt. Juliet---#1

Merry Christmas from Mt. Juliet!! We have been here in the Nashville area since Wednesday and we will be leaving the day after Christmas and head to Kentucky. We have had a blast here with so many babies and kids running around! We have enjoyed scrapbooking, cooking many things (including extraordinary sweet potato casserole!), playing mafia, singing Christmas carols, and opening presents!! We have had four different celebrations....so we are very exhausted!









This is Jonathan's parents, Gilbert and Jane.



This is Andrew, Jonathan's youngest brother and his girlfriend, Ashley. 

Merry Christmas from Mt. Juliet--#2

This is my sister Johnna who is married to Jonathan's brother Aaron. This is their sweet baby, Catherine!












This is Jonathan's older brother Matthew and his wife Melanie. They have three children: Will, Alex, and Sophie.









This is Jonathan's younger brother Adam and his wife Melanie. (Yes, another Melanie!) They have a daughter named Grace Ann.











This is Daniel another one of Jonathan's younger brothers and his wife Christy. They adopted Hannah in February!!



What a sweet family we have!!!!!!!!!! 

Our Graph-Paper Floor Plan

I'm not sure if you can even see this or not....but this is a picture of the floor plan we drew and gave to the architectural draftsman. 

Merry Christmas--2006!!

I'm sure you all recognize this picuture from our Christmas card this year. We are standing on our 2-acre lot in Mississippi--Our future homesite in 2007!

Below are some great Christmas pictures of Andrew, Keri, and the girls......They are very fortunate to have a live-in photographer!!
We are in Mt. Juliet right now spending Christmas with Jonathan's family. Since we have DSL here, I will hopefully be blogging Christmas pictures as we make them! That will be fun for you hopefully!! I know it gets frustrating to wait on me to update this blog! (I can tell you that it is much more frustrating trying to update it on dial-up!!)

Hope you all have a very Merry Christmas!! 

An Ode to the Smiths!

Just wanted to take a moment to say how blessed we feel to be able to live with this sweet family!! Andrew, Keri, Lizzie, Anna, and Sara Kate are 5 of the craziest, funniest, and kindest people we know!! Since we have moved to their home, we have had WAY too much fun, eaten WAY too much food, and have laughed WAY too much! (Is that possible??)
We feel so blessed to be able to live with such dear, dear friends!! There is rarely a dull moment!! (Jonathan and I are certainly over-stimulated!!)

These are pictures taken during a visit to my family farm in Kentucky during our fall break in October.
Luke is in that last picuture!! He loved those girls!! 

Okay--We have changed our minds!!

On one lovely Sunday afternoon in November, Jonathan and I were driving home from my family's farm in Kentucky when we decided to stop for gas in the nearest little town--Mayfield. Getting off at the exit, I remembered that there was a pretty subdivision not too far away that had a house in it that we had loved to drive by earlier in our marriage. This house was featured in Southern Living when I was in college. We had loved it then, and I really couldn't remember what it looked like. Then we saw it. We gasped!
The house was for sale, so when we arrived back in Memphis, Jonny hopped online and found the listing. We found out that it was actually a Southern Living Home and viewed the floor plan. Initially the floor plan did not interest us. But seven sheets of graph paper later, we had sketched out a floor plan that we liked better than the first house we had loved!






Last Saturday we took our graph paper plans to an architectural draftsman. We hope to have blueprints in our hands by mid-January. This will propel us toward our goal of beginning the building process in March!

Yipee!!