saying goodbye

Saying goodbye is never fun - it's actually pretty terrible - but when it involves a hillbilly party, balloons, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, a cowboy pinata, and food from the best cooks ever - Shelley and Candice - it' definitely best case scenario!



We have the best friends ever. Seriously. Ever.
Candice spent so much time and energy to give us the best party ever. We're seriously blessed.
And who doesn't love a theme?! um, so much fun!

Here's James in his awesome cowboy get-up - I love it!


And then he decided it was too hot so he went with the hillbilly/redneck...


Fun girls. love them


nice shot






Here's my sweet family. Troy looked amazing. You should totally bribe Emily into letting you see pics of him :)




Sweet girls - I'm definitely missing them!




Lee and Joy - love love them


Mel was out of town and couldn't be at the party, but she made us this amazing scrapbook! It is so sweet that I even cried and I definitely don't like crying!! She got lots of our sweet friends to write notes to us and put lots of great pictures from the past several years in it.

It means so much to James and me - we definitely cherish it.
Love you, Mel!!




Surprise birthday cake for me! I love birthdays!







The amazing hostess herself :)



Awesome decorations! Candice went all out. I love it


Grace is so talented - she can make insulation board look like this. Amazing!












We are so blessed with Godly friends who also spent time this night praying for us, this crazy adventure, and especially my lack of a job. It was so humbling to listen to their amazing prayers for us. And guess what happened 3 days later? I got a job. Definitely a God-thing. Don't you love seeing His awesome work?!

The Sunday before we left, we had some sweet times with family.


















How blessed are we? Seriously. We can't wait for many, many visits from this crew!!

lately...

Hattiesburg - enjoy your abundant amount of chinese buffets! Who knew they were a rarity?!

Apparently the people here like the sit-down chinese restaurants because there are a ton of them.
We like the more refined taste of buffets. That right. We're not even ashamed. Give us the buffets.
Well, we've been looking for a good chinese buffet since we got here on Tuesday and after driving around for 30 minutes after church today, we finally found one! It's nothing compared to Peking Garden, but it hit the spot.

Here's the interesting art sketched into the glass next to our table. Interesting, huh?


Not much else has been going on here in Chattanooga lately.
Since we're not in our apt yet and just crashing until next week while trying not to spend a lot of moolah, we've spent a lot of time watching random movies on Netflix. We've actually gotten pretty obsessed with a short-lived tv show about horses that was on abc family about 5 years ago, now on Netflix. Yep, that's how bored we are.




I've been dragging James around with me doing teacher stuff. He especially loved the gigantic teacher store. He thought their posters were quite inspiring :)



We've also been doing a lot of driving around and looking. Pictures never do the mountains justice. but here's the scene from top of one of the ranges. I hope I never get used to it!!

Normal Park

I started working on my room at school this week! Normal Park seems to be a great school - a huge arts emphasis like OG. The halls are filled with bright colors and tons of student-made art.



Here's the 'before pics' of my room - it's still a mess, but i'm loving the high ceilings, bright colors, big windows, and tons of storage!


James says the colors are pretty girly, so we'll have to work on something for the boys :)


The view from my windows - not too bad!

Love the bright colored halls!


Here is some of the art in the halls, most of it made by the kids. Love it!












I'll be back soon with the 'after' pics of my room. So excited about 2nd grade!

we made it!

Despite James having to drive in the July heat with the heater in his car on high to prevent his car from over-heating on the way up here, we have officially made it to Chattanooga! We can't move in to our apt for 2 weeks, so we're staying at Emry's house.

We've never actually met Emry and he's in Africa right now, but James talked to him on phone to ask if he had any houses available and he said we could stay with him, soooo here we are! Apparently he really likes to help people in need because his roommates didn't seem too surprised when we showed up on their porch at 10 last night even though they didn't really know we were coming.

So here's where we are:
Click on it to make it bigger, sorry about the oddly angled pics but all 3 houses are next door to each other.




We've had a great day scouting out the town. Apparently Chattanooga has more churches per capita than any other place in America and I'll believe it because there is literally a church every couple hundred yards. You gotta get really creative with some church names when there's that many around.

And in case you were worried, we've found Him... :)


Gotta love some church signs.

Tonight our soon-to-be-acrooss-the-hall-neighbors heard we were in town and came over to ask us to eat.
They took us to Greenlife Grocery which is owned by Whole Foods but has more of a "hometown vibe" (apparently).
It was awesome! They had a hot bar and salad bar, pizza, paninis, sushi, soup, coffee, gelato, and tons more. We sat at a great little place outside where a guy was playing the violin and dogs were howling along with him. We had a great time but I didn't bring the camera so I totally stole these pics off their website :)




James had a great meeting and orientation at Richmont today and we'll head up to my school tomorrow to start setting up my room. Things are going great so far! Can't wait to see what God has planned for us here!