at last...

First of all, I LOVE that song.

Second of all, I have been trying to finish this blog (which has been in progress) for like the last two weeks. ah. at last....

Since it has been a month or so since my last blog, I have to go a ways back... The house Stephen and I found that I moved into is in a historic district and there is a lot of Spanish influence in Jacksonville in general and in our historic area even more so. Here is a pretty picture from a church about two blocks away.

Ah, Florida. Such prettyness... when it's not raining... or 105 degrees. But nice to look at in 2-D for sure.

Then about three weeks ago, Stephen and I went down to DeLand and I went to my friend Kate's bridal shower. I was in charge of making the bouquet out of ribbons and bows. It actually was pretty fun and I guess I had a lot of pent up creative energy or something because It came out pretty fancy. :-)

Then, the next day we went to Steve's brother, Evan's house for the Keller family birthday celebration. A bunch of the boys have their birthday really close together (like in the same week) so they usually just try and get everyone together for one big weekend. Especially with five brothers, it's kind of a challenge to get them all in the same place at the same time.

After dinner, Stephen's niece, Madison, and nephew, Camden, had some fun with sparklers.

Here are the five Keller boys in their brotherly glory. And the second generation, Camden. He is wearing a huge shirt from Evan's tree service. Clockwise from the bottom left we have, Rob, Steve, Dani, Jeremy, Evan and cute little Camden.

The following weekend, we returned to DeLand to spend time with family honoring the life of my cousin's grandpa who passed away, Gene Wilkins. It was a nice time with family (under the circumstances) and the star of the weekend (besides Popso) was my cousin, Ginny's new puppy, Murphy! He is sooo cute and we had tons of fun playing with him.

Stephen and Murphy, sharing some love. Aww......

Hard to imagine, Ginny used to be crazy-terrified of dogs- hooray for progress! And cute dogs!

Me and Steve at Aunt Susan's house, yay!

Then, Sunday night we went over to see some long-time family friends, the Candetos. AND we were happily surprised to find them baby-sitting their grandson, TJ. He was so fun and cute... and he thought we were hysterical!

Also, I spent some time with my friend Sam and her daughter, Emily. She is a fine girl. :-)

THEN, the following Thursday I went with the 6th grade class from the school I work at on their annual Pathfinder retreat to a campground about an hour and a half away. We had a crazy storm come through Thursday night, but Friday morning was quite pretty.



Of course, wherever there are 12 year-olds, you can imagine much silliness was to follow. This was during a skit that happened after breakfast. I'm not sure what the skit was about, though.... hehe...



This was a fun trust activity involving putting your hand on a mouse trap. The thing is, if you put your hand straight down, quickly, you put pressure on the trigger and it won't snap until you pull your hand safely away. The kids were pretty psyched out at first, but most of them did end up doing it. It was pretty fun.

Okay, well I guess that's it for now. I feel like so much more has happened... but hopefully that was at least somewhat informative if not super-entertaining. Anyways... onward!