indoor s'mores

as amazing as s'mores are, it's way to hot in ms to sit around a bonfire. so my mom came up with these indoor smores.

mini graham cracker crusts, and couple pieces of hershey's chocolate in the bottom, and a ginormous marshmallow on top (have you seen these? they're amazing!) pop 'em in the oven for a couple minutes and eat up. i tried to shave some chocolate on top to make them pretty, but it just melted into chocolate strips. oh well.

so good and a lot cooler than sitting outside by a fire. yum.

look what i got...

an iphone!

oh happy day.

i might have jumped up and down in the store and yelled,
'this is the best day of my life!'

maybe.

james might have done the same dance because now he won't have to 'share' his with me anymore.

thanks poppy and james. ahhhmazing bday present :)

a summer skirt

guess what.
i actually sewed something.
imagine that.

it was kinda annoying me that my favorite skirt at old navy never goes on sale because, even though it's just $15, i always feel better about buying things on sale. and then i saw this skirt at anthropologie which is really just the same skirt, but longer and thought i might like that better. so first round of this skirt was a long, black version. but i've actually never worn it. i think it holds the mississippi humidity in and who wants that. not me.


so for round two, i used less than 2 yards of cheap jersey from the hancocks sale table. gotta love piles of sale fabric.



first, i doubled my fabric over, laid my favorite old navy skirt on it, and cut it out, leaving a couple inches around it.



i serged up the edges to make a triangular - tube.



for the waist band, i cut out a rectangle twice as high as i actually wanted it to be on my waist (b/c we're going to fold it over in a minute) and wide enough to fit around my waist pretty snug.



i folded it over, hamburger style for all you kindergarten teachers, and serged up the edge to make a tube.



ok, this is kinda hard to explain - we want the serged edges to be covered up, so i took one of the edges and folded it over to meet the other raw edge. make sense? probably not...



now the tube is only half as tall with one smooth side and one side with 2 raw edges



now to put it all together - i definitely messed this up twice. on the 2nd skirt i did. ugh.
with the skirt still inside out, i lined put the tube over the top of the skirt, lining up all the raw edges



serged all around it



and walah! super comfortable summer skirt with a fold over band. gotta love jersey for the summer.

rock city

if you drive anywhere remotely close to chattanooga, you'll start seeing the big red signs that say 'see rock city.' it's one of the biggest tourist attractions in chattanooga. i had never been but when we worked at summer camps on lookout mtn in college, james brought his alpine guys to see rock city lots of times, so he wasn't just dying to see it. but he's really sweet and knows how i love experiences, so he insisted that we go see it our last saturday in chattanooga.




even though it's all pretty much man-made and very touristy, we had lots of fun walking through the paths of trees and rocks and squeezing through spots like these




at the top, there's a great view and a pretty waterfall


he's not really stuck :)

check out this cool swing that's a whole tree carved out

there was also a great little bluegrass band at the top



rock city's claim to fame is that you can see 7 states from the top. you might need to squint a little to those 120 miles




the rope bridge was my favorite part. i loooove heights. we waited until nobody else was on it and james jumped up and down to make it swing a lot while i hung on for dear life. oh how i love a thrill


overall, it was a great experience and now i can say i've seen it

of course, we couldn't leave without proof with the famous 'see rock city' birdhouses

and now our sightseeing is complete

the aquarium

last summer before we moved to chattanooga, our awesome h'burg friends gave us gift certificates to the aquarium and the imax at this great cowboy themed par-tay


needless to say, but we had a blast using them up. the imax is so awesome. we ended up going to both documentaries out right now - one about surfing some ginormous waves and one about the cutest rescued baby elephants and baby chimpanzees. plus you get to wear these awesome glasses and who doesn't look cool in these.



obviously, we do :)



we asked joy and jason to help us use our aquarium tickets and jayden definitely made the trip lots more fun.






the amount of fish they have is really amazing. and lots of them are so pretty, although we were kinda surprised at how many of them were really ugly.



the penguins were especially cute


and petting the sting rays was fun (but slimy)


the boys kept talking about fishing strategies (how terrible is that! in the aquarium!)


we really had a blast and mostly had the aquarium to ourselves on a weeknight


thanks so much, candice and friends, for such a great gift! we had a blast using it!

4 years! {plus 3 weeks}

i was going to post this 3 weeks ago on our actual anniversary but our internet wasn't working and by 'our internet,' i really mean our neighbors which we 'borrowed' so there wasn't actually anything we could do to fix it, so without further ado (adu? adue? spell check is not helping me here...)

when i was in 6th grade, my mom taught the 8th grade sunday school at church and there were the 2 cutest boys in her class. every sunday after my class was out, i would race to her room to sit casually outside, waiting on them to get out. one of the boys was way too cool and ignored me, but the other boy (the cuter one) would give me the "i'm-a-cool-8th-grader-but-i'll-still-notice-6th-graders" head nod and even an occasional wave.

oh be still my beating heart.

10 years later and 4 years (plus 3 weeks) ago, i got to marry that boy.




we celebrated with a movie at the $3 theatre, the best italian in chattanooga, and some coffee at rembrandt's.




do you ever get those "i'm so glad i married him" feelings? i've had a lot of those lately. he's my calm and laughter in the middle of crazy life-changing decisions, interviews, traveling, packing, and moving. i'm so glad i married him.