Brown Eyed Girl & Her Beau

2011 Motto

One weekend while Aaron and I were doing some shopping in a quaint little area near our house, I stumbled across the sign below. I actually saw several signs with all sorts of sayings. But this one really stuck with me. I browsed the store for a while, falling in love with most of it, but kept going back to this sign. It was exactly what I needed to read at the time. So I bought it and decided that I would bring it to work and hang it in my office so I could be reminded of it daily. I spend most of my time here anyway, so it made sense. I look at it every single day. Over and over.

"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for."

How true is that?? I feel like I spend so much time wanting more and more. The new style, the new shoes, the new bag, etc. Without even focusing on what I have and realizing that at one time, I wanted all these things. And now I have them. In my closet, in my house, in my marriage, even in my garage. The sign isn't extremely profound, but it is a great reminder for me to be grateful of all the things I've been blessed with. Be content with my life NOW. Stop focusing on the future and the "wants" of the world. It's easy to lose sight of how good we have it sometimes. It's easy to compare our lives with what we see on other blogs, tv, or what our friends and family have. But in reality, we all have it pretty good.

So I resolve to make this quote my 2011 motto. To be thankful and content with what I have in my life now.

Happy new year friends!

Best adventure of 2010

The year is coming to a close and the new year is quickly approaching...very quickly, so I figured it would be nice to do a recap of one of the most wonderful family vacations I've been on. The most wonderful place I've been period.

We are so fortunate that my parents asked us to tag along for their 30th anniversary trip. That's just like them too. They would rather have us all together, as one big family, then on a trip just the two of them. I think this trip brought us all closer and made us all realize how blessed we are to have been placed in this family. It's always hard to come back from a trip with loved ones. I miss waking up in the morning, walking down stairs and seeing everyone's faces sitting at the table, sipping coffee, Chelsea making her famous spicy scrambled eggs, giving each one a good morning hug. It was just so perfect.

It was a great 7 days together. In paradise. We couldn't have asked for more. The food was delicious, views were breathtaking and the company was out of this world!

All in all, between my dad, sister and I, we took a good 2,000 pictures. Obviously I won't be posting all of them but I will do my best to give a recap in one post. We'll see how long it is when it's all said and done...

Starfish Beach and lunch at Rum point (almost daily occurrence..)

Best. Night. Ever. Dinner on the beach followed by dance party!

Margaritaville (Georgetown), 7 Mile Beach, topped off with best incredible dinner at Edoardo's

Turtle farm, Smith's Cove (amazing snorkeling) and a little BTHO t.u. from the hubs :)

Lunch at Cracked Conch, mmmm.., Hell!, and my boo driving our sweet ride

Sting ray city, Rum Point, photo ops and more eating

Ahhh, just going through the pics is making me relive it all! We had such a great time and rumor is, there's plans to go back soon. Very soon! :) Thank you mom and dad for letting us tag along!

This year has been a whirlwind from the start with Aaron being laid off in January and slowly recovering from all that came along with it. But in the end, it has been an incredible year and we have been TRULY blessed. It was nice to finish the year off on a positive note and with the ones who mean the most! Can't wait to see what 2011 holds for us all. No matter what is thrown at us I know we will be able to make it through and come out on top!

Hitting the Islands, Mon!

Ladies and gentlemen (well, dad and Aaron) we are Grand Cayman Islands bound! I could not be more excited!! My lovely, amazing, wonderful parents are taking the kids and their SO's with them to celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary! How cool is that? My parents are such a great example to my sisters and I and we could not be happier for them. We're heading out this weekend and will be gone all week. (Holla for no Thanksgiving family drama of who's house we spent more time at...) It's going to be incredible.

My parents have rented a house on the beach. Our backyard is sand and ocean. Heavenly! Apparently, courtesy of double J (sister's boyfriend) our backyard backs up to some pretty sweet coral and marine life. The house has a pool too, you know, in case you get tired of frolicking in these crystal blue waters...

We will also be hitting up Stingray city. Sister sent us the stingray down low in hopes to alleviate any fears. I'm not sure if it worked or not but I will attempt to swim with the little devils!

We will also make our trek to Hell. Eek! You heard it right. The fam is going to Hell...well, at least the Caymans version of Hell.

Next up is Rum Point! It's walking distance from our lovely little house. That way we can stumble home as opposed to driving :)

I can't wait to come back and post pictures of our amazing family vacation!! Let's hope I come home with a tan. We also plan to take our Christmas card pics on the beach in santa hats :) Sooo excited!!

I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving. Remember all the things to be thankful for. It's been a crazy year in our household but it's also been a very blessed year.

Pumpkin Overload?

What better way to come off a month+ long blogging break than to talk about pumpkins?!? I mean, we all love pumpkins and tis the season for the round orange balls of cuteness.

Well I think this year I might have gone a little overboard with my orange decor. And we haven't even done our annual pumpkin patch pickin'. Aaron is going to start tossing the pumpkins out the door if I bring anymore in the house so I'll be stuck to decorating the outside.

Fall is definitely my favorite time of the year. I wish it felt more like Fall today...high of 90 doesn't really scream October by any means but that's what we get for living in Texas, right? Also, it's worth mentioning that I glittered the pumpkins below. Yep, yours truly. Found this little craft idea on Martha Stewart, as well as all over twitter world, and they were super easy! I have about 4 more to glitter this week too. I might be taking them down to the neighbors as I don't seem to have any more open spots for pumpkins!

Happy Fall!

Gym, Tan, Laundry...or just Laundry (pups pics!)

Update: Prints below are from Etsy sellers K9ArtGallery and DogArtStudio. Love!

For a while now I have been wanting to add a little something to our laundry room. I figure it's the cheapest room to update for the time being. I don't know if that's how it will end up but that is the plan! I wanted a room in our house to be bright and cheery. And I think my little laundry room is probably the only room I could make bright and cheery without Aaron thinking I'm trying to "girlify" our house too much!

So my first step to this process was to search for some fun and unique art prints of our dogs. I turned to my old faithful for this task: Etsy. You can pretty much find whatever you are looking for there! I immediately began searching "white Labradoodle prints" and "golden retriever prints". Lo and behold I found 2 perfect matches! I put them in my basket, checked out and the rest is history.

I got them a few days later and fell in love! They were so perfect. Next was the task of finding the perfect frame. Now, I'm still doing this on the cheap so I was going to have to do a little searching. I wasn't about to take these prints that were all of $12.50 each and pay in the upper $100's for frames! So after church last Sunday, the hubs and I went to Garden Ridge. After searching all 4 aisles up and down and again we finally found 2 frames that matched! Do you know how hard it is to find two matching frames on 4 aisles of mismatched frames thrown everywhere?? Gotta give it to my hubs, he was a trooper the whole time! He was slinging frames left and right! Of course, the one frame I liked was the one that was the hardest to find.

Ahhh well, it paid off! Each frame was $14.99. The total of this little project was under $60 for both prints and frames. Not too bad!

And now for the final project!!!!

Next step will be picking a color for the walls, thinking a light acqua blue or a yellow. Maybe even orange? I think we'll have several options painted in little squares on our walls! That is our project for the next weekend or two. The final touch will be to add cabinets above our washer and dryer. I've seen them pre-built at Lowe's and Home Depot. Super easy and not too expensive either!

It's funny because I had chosen this as my Summer project and the Summer is at an end and here I am just beginning... I guess we will shoot for mid Fall?

nPort Resort

Ahhh, what a weekend I had! I spent Saturday in the lap of luxury. It was amazing. My two fave girls came to my area and we had a spa day at an Aveda institute! We started off with facials which were incredible and ended with mani/pedi's. We were all so extremely relaxed after our facials. It was such an experience. But the mani/pedi's were a bit on the awful side. Something that should have taken an hour for both, at most, took 2+ hours! I was tempted to grab the dang polish and start painting my own nails! My patience level is not cut out for that apparently...We all agreed that we will stick with our little ladies at the regular nail salons. But it was still so much fun to spend time with these girls for the morning!

After our spa day we hit up Lauren's parents new house. Or shall I say resort? It was amazing! Her mom has spent so much time designing their home and the detail was out of this world. It's incredible. I was in awe as I walked from room to room. My favorite room had to be the kitchen and the beautiful back splash. Hand painted tiles from Italy! Ahhh, it is even more gorgeous in person. Now I didn't go around taking tons of pics because I wanted to actually be asked back, but Lauren has some pretty awesome pics here I didn't want to leave to be honest. It was a great escape from reality and Lauren's mom had a delicious lunch ready for us along with mango margaritas! Perfect day!

And guess what?? We are going back this weekend too! More pool time and a dinner to boot. How sweet is that?

St. Arnold's Brewery

So it's been a while, eh? I know, I know. It's been 2 months actually - this is what my wonderful friend Lauren pointed out to me today. I'm a horrible blogger! Little did I know people were actually reading this thing and were expecting me to post more than once every 2 months. Sorry, mom! I will be better. I hope. And I have so much to catch up on! But for now, we will talk about beer. Because, let's face it, alcohol is always a friendly subject.

We live in H-town, and we have a brewery and apparently it's the place to be these days. We've been now twice - two weekends in a row! No, we don't normally visit breweries two weekends in a row but it was a special month I guess. When we first arrived we saw kids carrying fold out chairs, pizza boxes and their own personal beer glasses. Immediately we knew we had screwed up but we made our way inside. It was a blast but I wouldn't recommend going on an empty stomach... The chairs people were bringing in were due to the fact that the place was jammed packed and unless you got there 3 hours before the tours started, you weren't going to be sitting down unless you had your own sweet fold out chair with the color of either maroon or burnt orange...

That was our first experience. We went back the next weekend and this time we actually brought some food. Good ole' KFC came to the rescue. Still, no chairs though. But we had a sweet zebra blanket, courtesy of my sister, Chels.

Here are some pics from the exciting weekend! They had a Rolls Royce painted with the brewery's logo. So, of course we were all over that.

The whole group in front of their big metal tanks that housed the beer. There's a better term but I've had some wine and can't remember what it is

I wasn't going to post this because my legs look ridiculously white and frog-like compared to my black sister - I must say that Chels had just gotten back from Aruba, so of course she's freaking tan!

Ballin' in the Rolls Royce. Take that P.Diddy!

If anyone has stuck through this 2 month gap and is still reading, I appreciate it! If it's just my mom and friends, then that's OK too. I'm going to keep it going because I truly have missed this little blog :)