Linz!!

Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday dear beautiful Lindsey
Happy Birthday to YYYOOOUUU!!!

Lindsey has been my best friend since High School, and today is her 22nd birthday. She has had a lot of laughs with me and shed a lot of tears with me. We have been there when each other started to drive (Linzer and Fannie), when we got our hearts broken, when we went off to college, and when we got married. I cannot imagine my life without her in it! She is a wonderful friend and someone that I genuinely look up to! Love ya Linz...

Love Dare

I have been reading the book "Love Dare", and it has been UH-MAZING! It just absolutely jam packed with good stuff! Let me explain to you how it works...There are fourty days worth of readings and each day has a challenge after it for you to complete the next day. The goal of the book is to teach you how to love your spouse more effectively. So far I am only on day 5, and for me it has been life changing...just ask Brad how much easier I am to live with :)....Every day when I read it I am convicted of something new, or I gain insight on better ways to love.

I would encourage ANY married couple whether you've been married for 1 month or 60 years to read it, and I feel confident it would improve your marriage. I DARE you!

Taubman

For quite some time I have been unsure how I felt about the new art museum downtown. Part of me feels like its out of place with the other buildings, but I love old buildings and the feel that they give. The other part of me tries to appreciate that it actually is a beautiful building, its just different. So, when I found out that we could go for free today, I was excited. I'm not an art person, but I wanted to see what all of this money was spent on, and to be honest I wasn't very impressed. The building looks huge from the outside, but the inside of the building is VERY small. There was not very much in the museum, and some of it was just weird (the tattoo room for example). Two rooms that I did enjoy were the room with the purse display...I LOVE purses, so of course that room was interesting to me, unfortunately it was the smallest room in the building. I also really liked the contemporary art display, there were lots of neat things in that room. This sculpture was in that room, and this is the most real looking sculpture of a human I've ever seen. There were small veins, the coloring on the skin was just right, the toes and fingers were so realistic, it truly was fantastic!

Right about now you're probably thinking, oh my gosh how did she take that picture! But don't worry although I am a little rebel, it wasn't against the rules to take pictures...as long as your flash was off and you were not in a temporary exhibit (Side note...a staff member was on me faster than I could pull my camera out of the case to inform me that I needed to turn my flash off...those guys took their job very seriously, and actually they cracked me up walking around there)

And now, not completely unrelated from art, but kind of...Thursday Jan. 15th was Brad's Dad's 53rd birthday, and I made a cake! I have really started to enjoy baking and decorating cakes, even when they don't turn out looking that great, they always taste pretty good :) Here's the cake I made for Alan...

Celebration of Six Months

So it seems like just yesterday Brad and I were saying "I Do", but it wasn't it was six months ago from Monday. Wow! I know that's not really a long time, but it seriously seems impossible to me that we've been married for half of a year now! Okay, so anyway about this celebration...
My grandparents offered for us to go to Waterfront (the place we had our reception) to eat dinner on them because everyone knows we're poor... So we made reservations, got dressed up and we drove down for our "date". This might be a good time to mention that whenever I go down there to eat I feel very uncomfortable for two reasons: one during the wedding planning the manager of the club got very snippy with me and my "Grandbud" had to take care of that problem with I'm sure a few choice words and a call to Ron Willard (who owns like all of the lake), and two you're not allowed to wear jeans to the Waterfront which I think is so dumb, so most people wear in between slacks, but I don't have in betweens only jeans and dress pants so I'm ALWAYS overdressed. But luckily for me this night the manager wasn't there and Brad and I looked pretty darn good so I didn't even care that we were in fact WAY overdressed!! We had a really nice dinner, trust me people the food is to DIE for, and we finally got to talk to each other and spend time together on a week night, unheard of! Anyway, here are some pictures
...and let's be serious we all know the real celebration started when we got home :)

Our Black Child...

The two most used words in mine and Brad's vocabulary are probably "NO!" and "LUCY!"...I bet you can guess why that is. Lucy is a black lab mix, but she has the complete personality of a lab which I have come to love and hate all at the same time. At times I feel like I have my own real life Marley (great book by the way...Emily I'm still waiting on you to see the movie!)

Let me give you a rundown of the things she has chewed which range widely in value...

• My laptop cord
• My cell phone charger cord, and multiple other cords that I lost track off
  
• A pair of Brad's dress shoes
• The corner of our couch
• The pillows on our couch
• 2 floor pillows
• Anything and everything in the trash, and she also really enjoys cat poop
  
• And she's taken a recent interest in a wardrobe that just happens to be a family heirloom

While this does total quite a large amount of money, its easy to forget all of the money she has cost us when you look into this face...

We also have been able to teach Lucy a couple of tricks...she can sit, shake, and now beg. Begging happens to be my favorite because it is really cute, and its the only trick I can claim that I taught her. I know all of this probably sounds crazy, but like I said Lucy is like a little kid since real children are in the VERY VERY distant future!