The maxi dress.

I have only 1 maxi dress people, but I'm telling you I love it. I wore my black maxi to church this morning with a long necklace and my denim jacket because believe it or not it's actually cool enough to warrant a jacket...if you consider 75 and breezy cool enough :-) My outfit this morning got me thinking about the Florida "Fall and Winter" options in my wardrobe and honestly I don't think I have enough. It's hard to imagine that considering the offensive amount of clothing in my closet but as I prepare to put away some blatantly summer clothing this evening (like my white or lemon sorbet shorts) I have come to find that I have no "inbetweener" outfits. I have summer clothes, Old Navy fleece jackets to put over my summer clothes for the fall and then I have stuff for winter. And I'm talking tights, wool skirts, heavy sweaters, and suede boots. These are fun pieces that I intend to keep...for my trip to Kentucky in December. But otherwise I find that 7 years in Kentucky has killed my Florida "Fall and Winter" wardrobe. I need light weight clothes that match the color palette expectations of the later seasons and lightweight layers to add some depth to those outfits.

So to my decision I have come...

In the spring and summer I liiiivvveee in sundresses and wedges so in the fall and winter I plan to live in maxi dresses and cardigans.  Look at some of the fun options I found- Enjoy!

target

target

mod cloth

mod cloth

There is my black maxi that I love so dearly- and Kasey's cute maxi too :-)

Ok so there they are my new fall orders, all worn in my classroom with a cardi of course. What are you planning to wear this fall? (In Florida or further north!)

Love & Peace

Wedding Photo Highlights :-)

Just a few of my favorite wedding pictures :-) Thanks for following the blog!

Love & Peace.

The pink candle burned brightly for our sweet niece, Annabelle Elizabeth Walton.

Thank you to all of our friends and family for joining us on this wonderful day. We really can't tell you how much we appreciate your understanding of our heavy hearts as we were still grieving the loss of our sweet niece only 2 weeks before. We look back on this day with glad and grateful hearts.

God Bless my husband.

HI!!!!! Sorry I suck. I'm back...for now :-)

I am coming up for air because today is our first day off of the 2012-2013 school year!!!! Hooray, I say! The 1st quarter ended yesterday after what was a hellacious 3 weeks for me. I worked 12 hour days for 15 straight days which included 3 district trainings, 14 parent teacher conferences, 3 unit test, 15 end of quarter assessments, 6 DRA's and formal observation from my Principal.  Please allow me to mention that is is also still football season and that on Thursday and Friday nights I have been attending Armwood Hawk JV and Varsity football games without fail. While I am tired, there is no exhaustion that compares to what my husband must be feeling...without one single complaint. Brace yourselves, I'm getting ready to brag....

As a first year coach on this team, the Coach's job has been to basically learn the ins and outs of their program and so while I'm not getting to see him in action as much as I'd like on Friday nights, I really love to see him elbow deep in the JV team on Thursdays. This is his 6th season as a high school football coach and I love the way I have seen him develop as a true teacher of the game.  Coach gets home from football between 7 and 7:30 every night after having woken up at 5:45am and teaching junior and senior ESE (special education) English all day. We eat dinner together and then he spends his evening either working on his projects for graduate school, or grading English papers until he goes to bed at 10pm. On Thursday nights he's never home from a JV game before 11pm and on Friday's we're never home before midnight. He gets up by 8am on Saturday mornings from meetings and practice that last until noon or 1pm, then he comes home and mows the lawn, washes both cars, and usually starts the laundry.

And I thought I was tired!!!

The best part of all of this is the JOY that my husband carries in his heart. With steady hands and broad shoulders he carries the burden of his every day life with enough room in his heart for my needs and wants. This morning (before he left for an extra day of football practice) he talked with me at length about last nights game and our plans for the weekend and our plans for the future and anything that I felt like chatting about. Did he want to talk to me at 8am after getting home after 1am? No, probably not. But he did :-)

He is such an inspiration to me. His positive, loving presence is a reminder to me NOT to complain. He reminds me every day how hard workers always persevere and how really good men DO still exist.

God Bless my husbands, God Bless him.

 

https://www.facebook.com/lizevans#!/saraGphotography?fref=ts

Love & Peace.

Almost 3.

The Walton's came to visit this weekend and it was really nice to spend some time with my Sister, Amanda and her little family. Saturday night was the first varsity game of the high school football season so they wanted make sure they made it to Coach Faust's first game as an Armwood Hawk.

Cute boy who is ALMOST 3!

That's the Coach in the white hat doing his thing with the Offensive Line

And then on Sunday we swam at my parents pool. Here's a little video of  Grant doing his swim thing :-) P.S. he does own swim trunks, they just got left at home in Orlando so please excuse the swim diaper alone.

 

Love & Peace.

Being pregnant means you actually have to have a baby...

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I have to be really honest with you. Neither of these things sound all the appealing to me. Most likely because I'm selfish. I love my time with my husband and my kindle and I love to shop and I love to eat what I want, when I want. And that my friends, means I am not ready to have a baby.
I follow a couple of blogs where the women have recently become pregnant and they all look lovely. Really, they're simply glowing. But still, no. I even have a few friends who have just had babies and that is sooooo great...for them.

I spent a huge amount of time on TheBump.com last night. I read about prenatal diets and 1st trimester ups and downs. I read about nausea and hemorrhoids and sex during pregnancy. I read about ideal ways to conceive and the joys of sonograms. I read about sleep patterns and feeding schedules and here's what I have to say about that:

Newsflash: If you get pregnant you actually have to have that baby. That baby will become a child and that child is your one true responsibility. You can no longer choose to go to the gym after work instead of waiting until your originally planned time because you have to pick up your baby at daycare by 5 or you'll be charged obscenely, you can't stop at Sonic on your way home from work and buy whatever you want to drink during Happy Hour because you're going to be on a budget, you can't have drinks with your coworkers on Thursday night, you can't ignore laundry, you can't tell your baby that "dinner's on your own" and most of all you can not under any circumstances see yourself as #1 anymore. And all of that is A-OK, if you want it. There is no room to be selfish with a baby.

I can't really tell you how many of my students are picked up from school and plopped in front of a TV until bedtime. Last year, I asked my 26 kindergarten students if they ate dinner with their families. Would you believe that only 1 student raised their hand?? 1 student.

It took me years and years to prepare myself for marriage. I read hundreds of blogs and books and I prayed and consulted married friends all because I wanted to be sure that I was ready when the time came, to give up a piece of myself for someone else.

When it comes to having a baby....to creating a new life, I believe that as much, if not more rigor must be applied to the process. We are asked to give up all of ourselves for that child- if you're doing it right, that is. We all owe it to our babies to be really, really ready. To know that we will gladly give up Sonic and spontaneous, selfish things in our lives so that we can bring a person into this world the right way.

Sometimes you may feel old or lonely or sad that your marriage is not as perfect as you imagined. But let me tell you friends those are not reasons to have a baby. Make the right choice. Get pregnant and raise a child for the right reasons.

Love & Peace.

lost & found.

I have been pretty much ignoring this blog and I'm really sorry. This has been a very conflicting summer for me and I've been struggling to find the words I need. The loss of my niece has led me to feel as if this was the worst summer I can remember. But I can't really bring myself to say that because as you know so much of my joy has come from marrying the Coach this summer, and moving home to Tampa and both of us getting the jobs we prayed and prayed we would get. Those things make me believe that this is the most wonderful summer I can remember. And so I keep wondering how this contradiction can be. How can one summer be so deeply painful and yet so very magical at the same time.

I think the answer to all of this can be found in the scripture but I'm not sure where to look. I know that God asks us to use our gifts but also asks us to step outside of our comfort zones so that we can GROW. I wonder if this contradiction is the same. Did God give us the joys of this summer because we had to come out of our comfort zones when we lost Annabelle? What is it that God is asking from us by taking away my sister's 9 month old child? I believe that God is asking us to glorify him through the loss of Annabelle. And I think we may have served him well the weekend of my wedding. I hope that God was pleased by the way we all handled that weekend. But what about now? How do I continue to let her death and her LIFE shape me? How do I continue in a way that does not allow her to be forgotten and a way that allows me to share how the sadness of  her death brought me back to a loving and faithful God that I had all but ignoring in recent years.

I've decided to make the joy and vibrancy that Annabelle brought into my life a permanent piece of me, a lifelong, physical, artistic expression of the way her life and her death shaped me and will continue to shape me as long as I live. On September 8th, her birthday, I'll be having her beautiful name tattooed on my foot. I know it sounds cliche' but to me it's more that body art. I never understood people who tattooed faces and angel wings and dates of death on their body until now. By writing her name on my living, breathing body where anyone can see it, I am creating a tangible reminder that she was here, she did exist. And when people see the small script on my bare foot I hope they will ask me about it so that I can tell them about my niece, and my sister and her husband and the way that they clung tightly to God when she passed away and the way that God filled my heart with love and hope not anger or hate. I hope that by reading her name on my skin, on my temple of God, that I can share with them the importance of my salvation. And I can tell them how my pain would have been so completely different if I did not know the peace and purpose that comes with being a follower of Jesus Christ. And I hope most of all, that this tattoo will shine on the world, just a fraction of the warmth that we all saw and felt in that little baby's smile.

I really do hope that you've all had good summers and I hope to get back into writing regularly as soon as school starts and I'm in a routine. But until then, Love & Peace.

Annabelle with my Dad when she was only a month old.

Pitch Perfect.

If you've been to a movie in the last couple of weeks then you may have seen this trailer. (Click the image for the trailer.)

This movie looks like Bridesmaids meets Glee. And while I LOOOOVE Bridesmaids, I'm not in love with Glee.

Have any of you all seen this preview/trailer? What are you thinking about this?

Love & Peace.