while you were sleeping...

Josh and I celebrated our 3rd Anniversary in Aswan Egypt this year, so I forgot to complete the annual super sappy blog post---so here it goes...don't worry, I'll keep it short. 

  I couldn't be happier to be married to such a wonderful, smart, loving, sweet, athletic, funny, adventurous, intelligent, hard working, dang-good looking, righteous man.   I can honestly say that I have never loved him more than I do right now.  What a lucky girl I am to wake up next to his sweet face every morning.  I love you my dear Joshua.

You Make My Dreams Come True

I dedicate this song (and dance) to my Joshua...

dairy goodness. . .

One thing I've learned about the South is that Georgians LOVE festivals.  And naturally as a Georgian, I do too!  Of the several festivals that Josh and I have attended our favorite is the Putnam County Dairy Festival in Eatanton Georgia.  We have attended all three summers that we've been in Athens.  We got back from our vacation to Egypt and the middle east the day prior to the festival and thought we probably wouldn't make it this year.  Wide eyed and severely jet lagged Josh and I both decided  at  3 am, we couldn't sleep any longer and we couldn't miss the dairy festival this year.  As running in the 10k was not an option for us after taking 3 weeks off, we decided to just enjoy this fabulous event and cheer on our friends who were running and spike Josh's blood sugar.

I know you are wondering why the dairy festival is so wonderful.  The answer is simple it incorporates all of my favorite things....

1) Running (Torture trail 10k)

2) Friends

3) a beautiful location--with beautiful historic homes and an adorable downtown.

4) The giant mayfield dairy cow

5) my husband (he loves this festival as much as I do, chances are you'll find him there every year)

6) last but not least UNLIMITED icecream and milk! 

Thank you Putnam Country Dairy festival.  We will see you next year!

kuwaiti camels

One of my favorite experiences in Kuwait was playing with the camels!  

Driving on the highway, we spot our friends....

How to get to them?  Off roading of course!

Little did we know we'd be trying her milk next.  

The camel herder was so nice to us!  He allowed us to pet and play with his camels and gave us camels milk.

This camel was not too happy that Jonny hopped on his back, the entire time he was hissing.

Learning the tricks of the trade

Josh's turn next...

 

I was actually pretty nervous about tasting warm camels milk--but to my surpise the milk was sweet and very good.  I was happy that the herder read my mind and gave me a bowl :)

This baby camel loved Josh, she kept on nestling his arm, licking his elbow and chewing his shirt. I thought it was pretty tender.  This was quite different because most of the camels ignored us once they realized that we weren't going to feed them the bread that we brought with us.

If Josh and I ever own a pet, I think it'll have to be a baby camel. I love these beautiful creatures :)

spring already sprung and summer has started

We're back! Josh and I returned from our wonderful trip last Friday morning at 1 am and both of us had to go to work hours later. Luckily, I only had to work until 3, but poor jet lagged Joshua had to put in a 16 hour day at work to prepare for a week full of court cases. Five days later we feel that we are finally back to our regular routine.

I cannot wait to share pictures and experiences. But before I indulge, I decided I cannot neglect to share about a few of the things that have been occupying our lives for the past 4 months.

• Eternal Marriage class—(every married couple should take this class and read the manual cover to cover)
• Sports Trivia (Josh is a machine, oh and Krunk isn’t so bad either –I usually don’t participate)
• Basketball (well, until the deadly crash that left Josh with a broken elbow—hence the next bullet)
• Doctors Appointments—additionally, Josh has a tendency to attract viruses
• Running every morning before sunrise = thank you Josh for waking up, thank you Dawan for putting up with us every day.
• Organization meetings—if Josh got paid for all of the hours of leadership in all of his professional and political associations I think we could both retire from our jobs today.
• Nashville Country Music Marathon—an adventure and a race that I'll never forget.  Josh and I had a wonderful time with Steph, Ashley and Christina.  But the real drama happened happened after these girls finished their half and Josh and I continued for the full marathon. To make a very very long story short. There were severe storm and tornado warnings in Nashville. The first hour or two the weather was surprisingly perfect. I had a wonderful race, even in the horrible conditions, on pace to PR, but because the pounding rain and fierce wind, officials decided shut down the race and divert all runners to the finish line, no matter where they were on the course, even me who was passing mile 23. I, along with 85% of the marathon runners did not complete the marathon :(.  I ended up running 24 miles and crossed the finish line to chaos.  Thousands of runners all finished at the same time and most of the volunteers had left, everyone was frantically running around in pouring rain trying to find food, and their families. 
• Institute Graduation—For the entire time that Josh and I have been married (except the Summer we lived in Atlanta), we have participated in institute.
• J&J's--Josh still claims that his favorite place in Athens is the J&J's Flee Market
• National cornbread festival--my first time trying cornbread salad, yum.
• Nascar Races--For Jay's Birthday (Josh's Father), we got him Nascar tickets. What a loud, windy event, but we sure had fun.
• St Patricks Day-- We went to a fabulous party at Dawan and Steph's house.  Josh won the root beer drinking tournament.
• Easter- After church we drove to Atlanta to see Josh's family. Wonderful cooking, great company and lots of sweets.
• Planning-- who thought planning a trip to Egypt, Jordan and Kuwait would be SOOO time consuming??!! I felt like I was back in school working on a never ending school project.  Most of my nights during April and May I spent researching and coordinating our trip.  Luckily, all the planning was well worth the time, our trip turned out perfect :).

M.I.A

So I know that all of you (yes, all 4 of you) have been wondering why I have been absent in the blogging world.  Well we've been busy, busy, busy and I'll have to tell you about it later.  But more importantly we are going to be MIA for a couple more weeks.  For the following 5 reasons.
1.
2.
3.
4.

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5.

{And we couldn't be more thrilled that we will end our travels with my brother Jonny and his wife Mary.} 

watch out world....

These two people {my sweet sister & my studly brother}

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were both called on missions for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  They will both report to the Mission Training Center in Provo, Utah on July 14th.  After learning how to speak spanish Emilee will serve in Paraguay and Jeffrey will serve in Dominican Republic. 

I am such a proud/thrilled sister :)

welcome to the real world.

I cannot believe that we are already to the middle of March already!  Frequently, I've found myself writting the year as 2009.  Josh and I have been really busy these past few months so, please forgive me for my lack of blogging.  We are still trying to adjust to "adult life" (aka: working and no spring breaks!). 2010 is the first year that both of us are working full time.

 This is what I was doing last week for the last 5 years:

Spring Break 2005: (Even though BYU doesn't offically have a spring break week, we managed to squeeze one in) Las Vegas with 9 lovely ladies, 1 very large suburban and lots of laughter.

Spring Break 2006:  Ft. Lauderdale, Miami, Key West Florida with my Dental Hygiene Girls. 3 Words: Brittany & Sea Otters.

Spring Break 2007: Frolicking through the streets of New York City taking engagement pictures and going to the temple for the first time in the Columbia River Washington Temple

Spring Break 2008:  New Orleans--listening to great music, eating wonderful food and attending the best parade of my life.

Spring Break 2009: Mexico: 10 days of Heaven (enough said)

Spring Break 2010 = no break.  Some how I agreed to working through my lunch most days last week because our schedule was so overbooked.  It's a good thing that I like my job and I love my patients.

my valentine

My beautiful sister, Emilee, flew all the way to Georgia to be my valentine. We had such a perfect weekend together.

We spent it:

1)Relieved that her flight landed--the Atlanta airport cancelled 12,000 flights due to unexpected snow fall. Although it took us double the time to drive there and it affected some of our plans, we were so happy to pick up Emilee safe and sound.

2) Not hiking--we planned to hike up Stone Mountain, but it was closed to hikers due to a sheet of ice covering the entire mountain, instead we observed the mountain, looked at the Museum and Josh gave us a history lesson on the civil war.

3) Eating a real southern breakfast. Friday night we planned to go to the Atlanta Ballet but because of the snow we ended up watching the Olympics by the fire at the Findlays. Saturday morning we woke up to a perfectly made breakfast by Josh's mother; biscuits and gravy with cheese grits.

4) In beautiful Madison--I think I've taken almost every single visitor we've had to Madison. It is a beautiful historic Southern town. One of the few that wasn't burned to the ground during the Civil war.

5) Andy Worhol--In the Madison Cultural Events Center they had a wonderful exhibit of about 40 pieces by Andy Worhol. I love Andy Worhol and when I read about the exhibit in Southern Living Magazine, I knew that I'd be taking sweet Emilee with me when she came.

6) Botiquing--I don't think that is a word, but that is what we did her last few hours in Georgia. We walked around downtown Athens window shopping at the adorable clothing boutiques. We also toured the beautiful and historic North Campus.

7) Valentines day in the Kitchen-- We didn't originally plan it to be this way, but we spent Sunday at church, then exchanging valentines then the next 5 hours cooking our Valentines Dinner Feast and Baking cookies. Emilee and I baked 3 batches of sugar cookies and afterwards spent several hours frosting and decorating while Josh spent several hours eating them :). Emilee and I had a lot of fun trying to be domestic.

8) Eating-- We took Emilee to Mama's Boy, one of our favorite southern restaurants where Emilee tried fried green tomatoes, fried catfish, sweet potato soufflé and okra among several other southern dishes. We also went to our favorite Thai restaurant, Thai Spoon....yum.

9) Pillow talking--my favorite part of having Emilee here was just talking and spending time with her. Emilee and I haven't had girl time in SOO long. Each night we stayed up late giggling and talking in bed. Josh so generously slept on the couch Saturday night. Sunday night I missed having him close so we all slept in the same bed, my sweet sister on my left and my sweet husband on the right.. I wish I could sleep like that every night, we had so much fun.

10) Converting--I think we successfully converted Emilee to all of the Southern ways, from Josh giving Emilee a Georgia Bulldogs shirt for Valentines Day, to feeding her every fried food imagined in a quick 64 hours, I think Emilee left with a twang  and may have said Ya'll once or twice.

Please visit again soon Emilee.  I miss you already.  Here are a few of the pictures that Josh took while Emilee was here.  Sadly, I didn't take any pictures Emilee's last day.  I will post a few more when I get them from Emilee.