absence excuse

i am submitting this entry to excuse myself from my 6 week hiatus of blogging. here are my excuses:

1. laziness
2. i took no pictures in the month of november and like to post pictures with my blogs
3. practicing piano for ward choir as kicked my butt
4. i am the new young women's president and have been planning stuff for that- that's a pretty good and legitimate excuse

other than that, i've pretty much got nothing.

but i'm back- whether you've missed me or not.

state finalists!

in case you didn't hear, the seneca high school band (which matt is the band director of) made it to state finals for the first time since 1996. i am so proud of all the kids, matt, and everyone else who worked to make it happen, and so happy to say i had a small part too! it was a successful season all around. they finished first in their class at their first competition, 3rd at the 2nd, 2nd at the 3rd. here are some pictures from their first competition.

to qualify for state, you have to finish in the top half at upperstate. there were 19 bands participating, so they took the top ten and seneca managed to solidly grab spot number ten and a superior rating! upperstate was down the road at byrnes high school so my mom, dad, grandmother, evan and i all made the trip to see the show. here is evan being cute, and yes he is wearing a monkey leash. don't judge- they're awesome.

so the final competition was state finals down in batesburg-leesville. it's about a 3 hour trip from here so my mom agreed to keep evan and i traveled with the band for the day. we had a great day! the band did well, their show wasn't the best it could have been, but out of 17 bands they finished number 15 and were only .3 points behind 13! (which made the lackluster performance that much more depressing) but the kids were thrilled and so were we! next year, we plan to be there again and do even better! after the awards, the guard attacked matt with 5 bottles of glitter spray and used them up on him! he was literally COVERED in glitter. it was awesome. but i just couldn't get a good picture of it. so here is a picture of us with his drum major at state finals. we will miss this girl a lot next year!

also on this day were kentucky state finals. and i have to give a shout out to my alma mater, lafayette, who won their 17th state title since 1990! so proud of to be an alum of that band and to have worked for them for 3 years. and thanks to the lafayette band, i'm married to matt! wish i could have been at wku that day too cheering them on.

their opening set. i miss this band!

decorating pumpkins

like i said in my previous post, evan and i picked out pumpkins for the whole family at the pumpkin patch. we brought them home to decorate and had a lot of fun doing it. we had gotten a booklet of mickey mouse halloween stickers and so that's what evan decorated his pumpkin with. he picked out each sticker he wanted on there and i helped him put them on. he loves mickey mouse. he can say "mi", which is mickey and "goo" for goofy. but his very favorite sticker, and seemingly favorite thing about halloween, is the ghost sticker! he will say "boo" a thousand times in a row when he sees his pumpkin and that sticker. and he generally just walks around saying boo and "scaring" everyone.

the next night, matt and i painted our pumpkins. we have never been very good at carving, so we decided to just forgo the mess this year and pull out the paints. i was specifically asked not post who painted which one, so i will leave it for you to decide. let's just say one of us looked up a picture and copied it, the other was more... creative. and what we resulted was a bleeding sumo wrestler? not qite sure, but we had a lot of laughs over it.

we only put our 2 pumpkins outside because evan likes to carry his around the house or take it with him in the car so we decided to leave his inside

so if you come to our house, here is how you will be greeted today! happy halloween everyone!

at the pumpkin patch

last monday, my mom and i took evan to a pumpkin patch. one of the elementary schools here has a super cute and really well run little pumpkin patch in their front yard and we headed over there for evan's first chance to pick out his very own pumpkin.

first, we let him play in the big pumpkins. it was just a sea of pumpkins out there!

he really was super interested in all of the pumpkins.

but then mimi brought him a perfect little pumpkin she found for him, and he fell in love! he carried that thing around the rest of the day. (and still carries it around)

so we picked out a couple more pumpkins for matt and me, paid the nice man (who gave evan some jack-o-lantern stickers) and then saw there was a cute little place to take pictures. so we made evan "pose" for us, and this is the best one we got.

not very cooperative, but still super duper cute!

friday nights in the fall

so as many of you may have seen in my various facebook statuses on any given friday night, or as many of you may know because you too are married to a band director, i spend most of my friday nights home alone.

and what you may or may not know is i am totally okay with that!

i wouldn't like it if i had to stay the night by myself because at the age of 24 i am still scared to do that, but i like it because matt ends up home... eventually :)

so what do i do with these friday nights? if there is a home game, my parents, evan and i all go to the game to work the band store (which we began this year and the deal with matt was "that sounds like a great idea, now if you want me to do that you are going to have to work it"). we leave after the band performs at half time, which gets me home around 9. and then i do what i do on the nights without home games- i watch tlc of course! it's friday brideday!

this means i have seen all of this season of "say yes to the dress-atlanta" at least once, but i usually end up seeing each episode 2 or 3 times. i saw all of secret princes- which i totally did not mean to get into but ended up really liking. and i have loved all of this! the thing is, i don't watch a lot of tv. and matt and i have pretty different tastes in tv so i like that i can watch these shows in peace.

tonight is my last friday night where i get to enjoy the peace. i am very excited to have matt home again. and i'm glad the seneca band and tlc have both had great seasons to entertain me on my friday evenings while he was away!

the best of times

i have a lot of good days- i always have! i have an awesome life and am blessed to have awesome people all around me. but some days are just the best. so wonderful that you honestly wish they would never end. i once said to katie that i understand why kids cry when they leave disney world- it's because the day was so perfect they are honestly sad it's over. i've had days so wonderful that when they do end, i often find myself in a sobbing fit within the next day or 2 for some inexplicable reason. so, since i recently added one of those to my list, i decided to share 3 of those most treasured memories with you all. they are in no particular order and are certainly not the only days like that- just some i have been reflecting on lately.

shana and lukes wedding- which happened to be this past weekend and i will certainly blog more about this when i have some pictures to share. i'm going to be totally honest- i wasn't as excited as i normally am in preparation for this. i think because it was the longest i have ever left evan and i was a bit sad about that. but when i got there, it TOTALLY changed. it was a PERFECT weekend. okay... it had it's share of drama, but what wedding doesn't?  it's just part of it. no, in all seriousness it was a weekend all about love- the love of this new couple, the love of my sisters (from my sorority, shana is a sorority sister and 2 of the other bridesmaids were also), the love of best friends. i cried through the entire (quite literally) wedding and then a while on the way home because i was just overcome with the joy of the weekend. i can't express how thankful i am to have been a part of such an awesome occasion.

lauren and tyler's wedding. that was undoubtedly one of the best days of my life. lauren is my soul sister (one of my 3 best friends from high school) and the whole celebration- starting weeks before with showers and the bachelorette party- through the day of was absolutely perfect. when i look back on the pictures from that wedding, i am overcome with love for lauren, meredith, allison, and everyone else involved in that day. i have the best friends in the world and am so blessed to have them still so much a part of my life- for more than 13 years now!! (ladies... we are getting old :)

boa atlanta senior year. this may seem like an odd one. and maybe some of you don't even know what b.o.a. is. let's just say it's one giant marching band competition. being a member of the lafayette band was probably the single greatest experience of my life. i know that may sound ridiculous to some of you, but it has single handedly shaped most of my life. i cannot think back to my days as member without tears i miss it so much still- now 7 years later! but that competition weekend was just perfect. we won our class, came in second overall, and i just remember a feeling of accomplishment. it was my last competition as a member of the band and it just felt like i had given everything i could to that organization. i remember just celebrating with everyone- people who i would have NEVER associated with had it not been for band but who i had grown to truly cherish over the 4 years. i remember crying with my best friends that it was over and that it happened. i just remember that day being nothing but happy and joyful.

so maybe these seem random to you. maybe you expected to read about my wedding or evan's birth- of course those are on the list! but these days are ranked right up there with those. and tis the season for me to be thinking of those events specifically- weddings have been in the front of my mind lately and when shana's wedding wasn't- marching band was. i just wanted to share a little bit of my best of times with you in hopes that it may remind you of some of those days in your own life.

no... unless it's colt

since my last post about evan's vocabulary- it has grown. he can now say:

moo (very short)
oo (the sound a gorilla makes)
pa pa (poppie)
wa wa (water)
colt (our friend/adopted family member colt campbell)

and.....

NO! or no no! or no no no or another combination.

right now, it's hilarious. and we are living it up. we ask him everything we can think to ask him and the response is always a resounding "no"- head/body shake and all

well, before church yesterday, he was laying on our bed while we were putting his shoes on him, and matt decided to ask him who his favorite was. the conversation went a little like this:

matt: is mommy your favorite?
evan: no
matt: is daddy your favorite?
evan: no
matt: is mimi your favorite?
evan: no
matt: is ak your favorite?
evan: no

and so and and so on with practically every member of the family. so i said to matt "watch this" and i had this conversation with him:

me: evan, is colt your favorite?
evan: colt, colt, colt

then we get to church. colt shows up at the door. he points and points and says "colt"

we are waiting for sunday school to start, matt and colt are standing outside of the door and he is pointing to colt and repeatedly saying "colt"

so today, at my yw presidency meeting, i decided to see if he would perform for everyone. here is how that conversation went:

me: is mommy your favorite?
evan: no
me: is daddy your favorite?
evan: colt, colt

he didn't even wait for me to get to colt- he just went there on his own! so colt now has a fan club. with at least one member in it. although he's only 13 months, he seems pretty committed.