2012

I have been reflecting this week a lot on the past year, so much has happened and I feel like the Lord has refined me in so many ways. I began a post at the end of the summer to recap but I never got around to publishing it, so part of this post is that.

When I think back on last spring one thing that pops into my mind is the amount of funerals that I had to attend. Some for people who are much older than me and one for someone who was a peer. I think it really showed me just how short life can be and I hope that my 2013 spring does not hold the same thing. I also think the Lord was preparing me for what I was to face in May, reminding me that I am not alone in my feelings.

In May, my very best friend of 13 years ended her valiant fight with cancer. I look back on that still with a heavy heart because I selfishly miss her so much. She was the most courageous, strong, faithful, Godly woman I have ever known. I learned so much from her about following your dreams and always having a positive outlook on life! Even though she let me in to some of those not so fun moments of her life, she always knew there was a light at the end of the tunnel. I am so thankful for the many evenings and summer trips we spent together in high school but even more thankful for the time we got to spend together after college in Houston. We were all grown up talking about life and boys. I keep her in my heart at all times and there hasn't been a moment since she left this earth that she's slipped my mind.

About a week later, Kory and I celebrated our 1 year anniversary. We went to the beach with our good friends Kelli and Chad which was the perfect end to a crappy few weeks :) I am so thankful for Kory, he continues to challenge me to be a better me. He supports me in all that I do and he is a wonderful leader of our family.

About a month later 2 became 2 and a dog! I still can't believe I have a dog and that I take care of him:) I still have trouble with the smelly stuff but it's good practice for having babies right? Kory is in love with the Dukester and will sometimes say "Amanda, he's a dog" and then turn around and feel bad for him... It's really sweet!

In July we took a vacation to Utah and Colorado. My favorite part was still Arches National Park! Seriously if you have a chance to go, do it! It was amazing.

At the end of July, I reached a long time goal of mine and received a 2nd grade teaching job!!

August was a very busy month for us and it ended with me having the first day of school AND our house got broken in to. Gosh that whole time just seems like  blur now but it was one more reminder that everything that was taken was just stuff. We were thankful that Duke was not hurt or stolen during the whole process. At the end of that CRAZY week my principal came to me and informed me that there was a high possibility that I would have to move to Kindergarten. On Wednesday of the 2nd week of school I was teaching 20 new kindergartens.

Whew! I am even tired after typing that. We enjoyed a wonderful fall, filled with many football games and family time. We came into the holidays just feeling very thankful for all that we had and for all that 2012 held for us.

We hope that your 2013 is filled with many happy memories!

Sight: San Angelo, TX

Last weekend my sister Sarah and I headed out of Houston for a 6.5 hour drive across Texas to San Angelo for our Great Aunts (my grandmothers aunt) 100th birthday party. We met my family there who only had like a 4 hour drive, lucky them:) We had lots of fun on our road trip and only stopped twice which was a huge feat for us. We had a wonderful weekend getting to spend time with family that we don't see very often and seeing where our Mimi grew up, went to school and many many houses.

Now, I don't know about you guys but everyone on our trip had an iPhone and none of them really knew how to use them. On Saturday we went on a "tour" of San Angelo which actually took about 3 hours, I was dubbed the person in charge of Conference calling everyone so we could hear our tour guide.

Craziness right?

It actually worked out better than I had thought once we all realized to mute our phones unless you wanted to talk. Here is a bunch of photos that I took of this cute little town.

This was the Telephone Company that many of my great uncles and maybe my great grandad worked. Those girls are my precious cousins Addison and Ainsley.

We thought this was a really cool building and I think Sarah made this
her background on her phone.

This is my Aunt Nina's house. It was so cute:)

 I got to go on the tour with my sisties, we had lots of fun!!

The reason why I am posting this picture is because of the story behind it.
My great grandparentsdied within 2 hours of each other.
 My Aunt Jane told us a story while we were here that her father had
written her a letter telling her that they prayed often that the Lord would take them together and he did.
 It is a beautiful love story:)

And finally the woman we made the long trek for my Aunt Nina. She is simply amazing, I almost have no words to describe her. She has more energy than anyone I know and remembers everything about you. I will never forget about 10 years ago the family was in Destin for my grandparents 50th wedding anniversary and we took Aunt Nina to Starbucks. She ordered a venti frappachino, got all the way to the bottom of it and noticed there was a piece of ice not blended. She walked right up to the guy and said "There is a huge piece of ice at the bottom" and he said "I'm sorry ma'am" and then she asked him "What are you going to do about it?" You know what he made her another one! It was hilarious!

Here is the whole Nicholas clan at her birthday party.

It was so much fun! On another note a big change in my life happened right before we went, I got a job teaching my own 2nd grade class. This has been a goal of mine for a few years now and I'm so excited about this new journey for me. I may not do another blog post for a while:) but I will try.

Have a wonderful Friday!

Amanda

Arches National Park

We're heading home tomorrow:( But before we do I wanted to share with you some pictures from Arches National Park. Arches is located just north of Moab, Utah and is by far my favorite part of our trip! It was the perfect amount of hiking, picture taking and soaking up the amazing landscape that God created. We started the day by filling up our water bottles at what can only be described as a faucet in the mountain, here is a pic of it.

The water comes out of the mountain and is clean enough to drink. People in Moab go there to fill up gallon water jugs as their drinking water. It was pretty cool and we needed the water before headed into Arches.

Once we got to the park we checked in at the visitors center and looked around the gift shop and what not. Then we headed down the road to see all the amazing monuments and arches that it has to offer. Like I said before, if you ever get a chance to go to Arches National Park.. DO IT.. it was one of the most amazing things I have ever seen. Canyonlands National Park is about an hour away from Moab so if you give yourself another day you can see that too, we didn't get a chance to this trip.

Anyways, hope you are having a wonderful week. We head to Dallas tomorrow for a 13 hour car ride (yuck!) and then back to Houston on Sunday! Here are some pictures from our trip to Arches.




In order from Top Left: Elephant Herd, Balance Rock,
North and South Windows and Kory and I at beginning.

Double Arch, we hiked about a 1/2 mile to get to this and then climbed inside of it, pretty awesome!

Landscape Arch, Part of this arch broke off in 1991 so I felt like it was a must to see considering if we come back it might not be there. We hiked 1.6 miles round trip to see this baby!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Amanda

Monument Valley, Utah

Hello from Colorado!

I didn't think that I would blog from our vacation but I realized as we were going along that I would have too many things to post about to NOT blog on vacation! We drove to Dallas to stay with my family on Friday so that Saturday would not be too long of a drive! After a not so fun drive trying to get out of Dallas we were on our way to Farmington, NM. 13 hours later, in one piece and still in love we made it to our first stop. Sunday morning we got up early ready to tackle our next adventure... Monument Valley, Utah. To get to this part Utah we had to go through Arizona first, our third state of the trip, it was pretty cool we got to see the start of the "monument" rock formations. On our drive to Monument Valley we saw a sign for Gouldings Landing, for those who aren't John Wayne fans like my wonderful husband, this is where a few John Wayne movies were filmed and a cabin where he stayed. Kory was pretty excited to see this and since my Dad and sister are pretty big fans I enjoyed it as well!

Kory at  Gouldings Landing

 After we left, we were finally driving through Monument Valley. Kory had told me about a famous picture there that we had to get out of the car and take the picture in the highway, I was on lookout for that particular scenery. We were lucky that we both looked behind us because we would have missed it, apparently we had to pass the whole thing before we could take "the picture."

A few things that I have learned on this trip:

1) Always look in your rear view mirror because you might miss something spectacular!
2) Self portrait landscape pictures are the best and bring on a ton of laughs.
3) I really enjoy traveling with my husband, we have a ton of fun together and we aren't worried about hitting everything or keeping to a schedule.

Here are some of the pictures we took from Monument Valley. Enjoy!

If you are ever traveling through Utah go through Monument Valley it really is an awesome sight! God is such a wonderful landscaper and I am thankful to be able to see some of the amazing sights he created.

Next post, Arches National Park.

Much love from 65 degree weather (be jealous),

Amanda and Kory

New Adventure and Upcoming Vacation!

Kory and I embarked on a new adventure this week... we got a dog! We have been discussing getting a dog since March but decided that we would not do it until after I was off for the summer and we went on vacation. God has a sense of humor because the perfect opportunity for us to get a dog came a week before we left!


Kory found the dog on Tex Ags and emailed about him, we thought it was a lost cause all throughout the weekend and then on Sunday we got an email saying that if we were still interested we could adopt the dog. We contemplated over it all day Monday and decided Monday night that this was the perfect opportunity with really bad timing but our loving families were really supportive of us and everyone pitched in to help us keep the dog while we went on vacation and what not! (Secretly I think they are excited that we took this step because the next one means grandbabies... we'll hold off a little longer on that). Anyways, Monday at 6:30 we found out if we wanted the dog we needed to meet them in Navasota (about an hour away)right then. So with no food, no kennel, no NOTHING, we headed down 290 to meet our new dog:) It was love at first sight for me and for Kory (he will say he hasn't decided yet but he rode all the way home in the back with the dog... I'll call that love).  We got it all taken care of but it was a looooong night!

We are so excited to start this adventure with our new puppy... Duke!

Me and Duke!

Kory and I are heading to Moab, Utah and Durango, Colorado for a week on Friday! We will be hiking, whitewater rafting and really enjoying some cooler weather. I can't wait to share with you what we did when we get back!

Have a great 4th of July,

Amanda

Project Tomato! Yummmm

Maybe I can jump back on this blogging thing this summer! I mean I should have more time right? I am only working half days right now:)

This spring Kory and I decided that it would be really fun to grow our own tomatoes. Next year we would like to grow more veggies in our back yard but since this was our first time to grow ANYTHING we decided to stick to tomatoes. We bought the pots and dirt at Wal-Mart and the plants and cage at Home Depot.

We DID NOT nurture our plants from seeds, if you didn't know that is a TON of work! So we went ahead and bought plants that were already growing. Kory got the Patio tomato and I got Roma tomatoes.

Our tomatoes have grown so much since we first planted them back in April, we are actually enjoying some of our tomatoes now!

This was such a wonderful project to do together, we kind of have a competition going and mine is sprouting tomatoes like crazy!

Hope you are enjoying many summer fruits and veggies!

Amanda

Upholstered Headboard Tutorial

Ya ya, I am the worst blogger ever! Here is my blog post FINALLY!

Kory and I have a bedroom in our house that for about 6 months after moving in our house it still served as a room to house boxes and other miscellaneous items! I think it drove both of us crazy but we just did not know what we wanted to do with it. We finally decided on upholstering a headboard and attaching it to a metal bed frame. The project turned out really great and we are very happy with it. So here's how we did it:

Materials Needed:

• 4x8 sheet of plywood $15
• 6 washers $2
• 2 yds upholstery fabric from JoAnns.com $50
• polyester batting $10
• button cover kit $3
• 3M Spray Glue $4
• 2x4 and bolts to attached the headboard to the bed

Step 1: When you know what size bed you will be using your headboard for cut the plywood. Decide what shape you want your headboard to be, there are so many different styles but we decided to go with a very simple one.

Step 2: Next drill the holes in the board where you want your buttons to go.  We drilled 6 holes for buttons.

Step 3: Lay the board down on the ground, spray the board with your spray glue and then carefully lay your batting down over the board making sure that there is about 2 in. of extra batting so that you can pull it over the back.

Laying batting down

After we stapled the batting to the back

Front of the headboard

Step 4: 2 yds. of fabric was definitely more than we needed, I also needed a little bit of the fabric to do the buttons and I really wanted to have enough to make a pillow for the bed. So to make sure we used our fabric wisely, we lined it up on one side with about a 2 in overlap and then cut the other side to have a 2 in over lap. Just like the batting, spray some glue over the batting and lay the fabric on top, then staple it to the back.

Fabric laying over the batting

Extra fabric before it was cut

Back of Headboard ( I cut off excess fabric when we were all done)

Front of the Headboard

Step 5: I bought a button cover pack from Jo Ann's and covered six buttons with some extra fabric. After that, we attached a washer to some thick tread and threaded the button hole so that we could pull the buttons against the back of the headboard. I feel like this is really difficult to explain and you will probably have to figure out what works best for you!

Well that is pretty much it! We attached it to the bed frame and then we were done. I am really happy with they way it turned out and as soon as the room is ready and decorated I will post pictures of the final product!

Let me know if you have any questions,

Amanda