Now serving #21...years of wedded BLISS

Ok...maybe not the ENTIRE 21 years :-) (20 TOPS!)

Today, Thursday, December 17th is my 21st wedding anniversary. You may remember last year for our 20th, Mister M. gave me an  AMAZING gift to showcase on my left ring finger for the next 20 years :-).  So this year for our 21st, I just shined up the little beauty and continue to admire it ;).

Anyway, as in years past, we spent the day together at Jayla's Holiday breakfast and Christmas shopping for her. We always have such fun together.  And we sure do love Toys R Us :-).  Afterwards, we had Mexican food for lunch.

We will do our real anniversary celebration tomorrow night. Yep...you guessed it, we'll be dining at our favorite anniversary restaurant.  Can't wait!!  Thanks Briyanna, for watching Jayla for us :-).


1988

2009

Well, here we go...hand in hand into our future. Love you honey!

Anniversary Photo Shoot

Hello everyone!

I hope you all had a nice Father's Day weekend. Mine was nice & low key. It would've been even nicer had my dad been here. But talking to him on the phone worked too :-). My daughter, Briyanna came over and spent the weekend with us. So it was nice to have her around for Daddy's Day.

So, do you all remember the "big secret" I revealed to you back around Easter? You remember the 20th anniversary photo shoot, don't you? Well, we got the pictures back last week...and OH MY GOSH, they are AMAZING! I know some of you are on FaceBook and have seen some of them there. But for those of you who are not Facebookers, I'll post a few different ones here.

Oh, before I begin posting, know that we were given a CD of over 100 photos! So I'm gonna pick some (more) of my favs to share with you here. Enjoy!

Well, that's it! I hope you enjoyed looking at them as we did taking them. Like I said, this is just a handful of the photos that were taken. I plan to do a 20th anniversary scrapbook where I'll use ALL of the photos on the CD (that should be fun). Anyway, thank you guys for your time. Enjoy the rest of your week.

He REALLY likes me!

Hey ya'll!

As promised, this is my follow up post from Friday. Oh my, where do I begin? You remember...Mister M and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary this weekend?

Well, let's see...we went straight to the hotel and after turning down the wrong room (it had twin beds in it. Who can celebrate 20 years of marriage with twin beds? WE can't! LOL) Anyway, they took care of that for us. We got all settled in and planned to just chill out for a bit before leaving for dinner. However, as Mister M. was unloading his pockets before lying across the bed to watch a little TV, he noticed that he didn't have his wallet. Hmm, that won't work at dinner tonight! Well, you guessed it, he had to drive all the way back home to get it. Thank GOODNESS we changed our hotel reservations from the downtown location to one about 20 minutes from home. He was convinced that he'd be back in plenty of time for us to leave for dinner at 6:45 (it was about 5 minutes to 6 when he left the hotel). I watched a little TV after he left and felt myself getting a little sleepy. So I thought it might be best if I went ahead and started getting myself together. I was all dressed an ready to go around 6:30. But my "date" still hadn't made it back yet. (Our reservations were for 7:15, mind you.). Anyway, he makes it back around 10 til 7. I called the restaurant to tell them that we'd be a little late. No worries! We arrived at 7:25...that wasn't too bad, huh?

We walk right in and they've got our table ready. Oh my goodness, they had us all set up in a quaint little dark corner of the restaurant. It was BEAUTIFUL! And on the table was a card and a dozen roses. We had obviously just missed Briyanna's sneaky delivery :-). She's a sweetheart! Thanks Bri!! The card was beautiful and the roses were simply gorgeous.

How bout a photo break?

See the roses? :-)

We totally enjoyed our meal...as always. And at an almost awkward pause between bites, I feel that I can wait no longer. I'd waited almost 2 months already to give my sweetie his gift. I LOVE to surprise people. So I was actually pretty proud of myself that I'd waited as long as I did. See the little Chinese food take out box on the table? That's the box I put his gift in. So cute! And once he showed that he was extremely happy with his surprise, he said, "Well, thanks, I LOVE it, but I didn't get you anything!" :-) Then he smiled and reached into a pocket of his jacket and pulled out a black velvet box. Check out what we gave eachother...

It still just makes me smile to see these. Aren't the beautiful?? For a few years now we've talked about upgrading our wedding rings. So we figured our 20th anniversary was the perfect time to do just that. Back in May, we'd actually gone to look at rings and Mister M. picked this one out for me. I was a blubbering MESS when he surprised me and put a deposit down on it :-). I can't say that I'd totally forgotten about it. But I was STILL very surprised when I saw it on Friday night. YES...I cried...AGAIN!!! I just LOVE it. And thankfully, he loves his too. He had no idea that I'd gotten one for him. As we'd talked about getting one for him some other time. So needless to say, I was happy to be able to get it for him on my own.

Anyway, here are a few more pix from that night.

After dinner, we just drove around downtown for a while. I love this time of year. Everything is all lit up and things are just so pretty and festive. But when you have some good company, all is perfect.

Once we ran out of places to look at, we headed back to the hotel. But not to worry, I won't give details about the rest of our evening, LOL. EXCEPT to say that we had some REALLY LOUD neighbors! Oh my GOSH!! These people were like rabbits! Ok, enough about that, lol.

It was so nice to be able to sleep in on Saturday. I think we got up around 10:30 or so. I mean, we needed the sleep...our neighbors kept waking us up throughout the night :-). After we checked out, we went to breakfast and to take my ring back over to the jewelry store for sizing. Fortunately, they do everything in house. So within a few hours, I had my beautiful ring back. After breakfast we headed back downtown to walk around Atlantic Station. I'll tell ya, there's nothing like casually strolling around, hand in hand with the one you love, and with no particular place to go or be. The weather was beautiful and the crowds were minimal. We looked in a few stores and just enjoyed eachothers company.

This is the giant Christmas Tree in the center of Atlantic Station.

Anyway, the weekend was beautiful and I totally enjoyed my anniversary celebration with the man of my dreams. Can't wait to see what the next 20 years holds for us!

Toodles!!

Happy Anniversary to me....

Hey ya'll!

Guess what? TODAY is my 19th wedding anniversary. Can you believe someone has been married to ME for 19 years? :-) Sometimes I can't. But I'm so glad he chose me.

Well, we officially celebrated our special day this past Friday night. And we went to our favorite place. Here we are...

Sadly, we didn't get "our" table this year. But we were in the same area. We were actually close enough to reach over and touch it...so I'd say that still counts.

If you notice the beautiful flowers on the table...those were a special delivery from Briyanna. That sneaky daughter of mine, got to the restaurant a little after we did (we didn't see her though), and had the hostess deliver them to our table. Both me and Marque were so shocked. It was a very sweet surprise...I love flowers.

I don't think I need to mention that the food was DEElicious! So I won't :-). (but it was)

After a tasty dinner, we ordered dessert. And this is how they brought it out to us:

Aren't those lovely? You can't see my dessert from the side. But it's their Chocolate Mousse Cake. It's about 4 layers of DEElish-ness!!! One layer being white chocolate (I think). And the Mr. got the Key Lime pie. So pretty!!

Anyway, today, our actual anniversary, has been a very laid back/low key day. We had lunch from here today. During the soccer season, Marque was given a restaurant gift card. So we used it today. Very yummy! It seems like all we do is eat, doesn't it? lol

A few posts ago, I said I would share the Christmas card that I designed and mailed out. Before I show it to you, let me admit that I realize this is a very tacky way to "send out" a Christmas card. But there are SOOO many people that I want to share it with and mailing them would just be too much to take on. So for those of you who didn't receive one in the mail, please accept this online version from me and my family. (Sorry to be so tacky)

This is the front of the card.

This is the inside.

Ok, I only have one more thing to share with you all. For those of you who are scrapbookers, you'll appreciate this. I'm not really into the whole "altering" thing. But I've been wanting to make a clock for my craft room that is currently under construction. I didn't want a regular ole clock. So I bought one of the clock faces by Heidi Swapp. At Michaels, I found a 14" round piece of unfinished wood, with a hole already in it. It's actually to be use for making a clock. ANYWAY, I painted the disk black, decorated a round scrapbook layout, added the HS clock face and this is how it turned out:

You guys, I absolutely LOVE it! As you may have noticed, it doesn't have the clock hands on it yet...but it doesn't have the mechanism in the back yet either. I'll be picking those up this week. But, this is pretty much how the clock will look in it's finished state. And I may hang it up with black grossgrain ribbon. Also, the b&w damask print that you see is actually a scan of the fabric that I'll be using in the room. And the purple paper is from the Bazzill Bling line. Pretty cool, huh?

Ok, that's all I've got for today. Hopefully, over the next few days, I'll show you the rest of the pictures from our family photo shoot a few weeks ago. So until then, you guys enjoy the rest of your day. And don't forget...Be Inspired...I AM!!!