Rattlesnake tail, coyote tail, and all sorts of other vacation fun!

I haven't updated on our family in awhile.  We've been on vacation this week so here are a few things that we've been up to:

Finding ridiculous posters.  Please notice that the green cup is for the 'girl with hangover.'  I can't even...

 
Happy baby girl.

My man working hard.  Yes, even on vacation.  If there's something that needs to be done, he's going to do it.  I love that about him.  He values family time, but also doesn't expect things to just be given to him.

And we have quite an assortment of photos like this: 

 

Then we have four little monkeys jumping on the bed.

And two little monkeys not willing to share their Paw.

And this.  Sorry it's so dark, but it's pretty awesome.  This is my parents living room on any given day.  This wasn't a family reunion.  No one was invited.  It was just my siblings picking up their kids at the end of the day.  One sibling & his wife is missing, as well as Josh.  The best times are when everyone is up here, crammed in one room.  There are actually 11 people in this photo.

Doing a little work isn't so bad on vacation when this is your view!

 Three little monkeys jumping on the bed this time!  Notice the little chairs.  They brought them from the living room into this bedroom so they could climb on the bed.  All three are within 6 weeks of each other age-wise.

Love this crazy kid.

Totally not scared of anything.

Swinging with mommy!

 And mommy taught her to swing like this, too. She was a fan!

Then we went to Paw's office & he had lots of fun toys to play with.  Rattlesnake!

Sweet baby playing the ukelele!

Playing with a coyote tail.

Drinking Paw's homemade apple cider!

Not at all willing to give this saw up.

And we finished it off with a little harmonica tune.  In which she hummed into the harmonica.  :)

Then Paw took her to town & bought her a necklace!

The Craziest Frickin' Day of your Life!

Back in... February? January Josh sent me an email that he was running this race called the Warrior Dash in October.  Mmmmkay... I looked it up online and wow-- it was certainly crazy looking, but it was also only 3 miles, so my logic said, in the next 9 months, I can manage to get fit enough to run 3 miles & hit a couple of obstacles.  Worst case scenario, you can walk around (most of) the obstacles.

So I signed up, too.

Then a couple of months later we decided, what the hay, let's have kids!

So that kind of disqualified me from the race (although they don't ban pregnant women, just have you sign something saying you did, or should have, gotten clearance from your doctor beforehand).

In the end, quite a few people from Josh's office signed up for the race.  Here's the before picture:



We even came prepared with our own church tattoos!

What?  Your church doesn't have temporary tattoos of it's logo?  And if you did, you wouldn't put them randomly on your legs?  And you also wouldn't be running in this crazy race?  Well don't look at me, I didn't run, and I didn't put on a tattoo... lol.

And here's the after picture.  Don't worry, the people that are missing weren't actually missing- they were just washing all that mud off of them!

But for real, it was quite the fun race.  Heck, I had fun just watching them!  It turned out to be a 3.5 mile race with 12 obstacles... and a lot of interesting characters!

I was excited to see my husband be the first from the group to hit the finish line!  Okay, so maybe he left the rest of the pack behind because they were running together-- he still made great time!  Below, he's at the top of the ropes in the black shirt.

And jumping over fire...

Yes, there were two lines of fire!

Oh, and that whole crawling-through-a-mud-pit-under-barbed-wire thing there at the end.  Which, I suppose is kind of nice if you manage to catch yourself on fire from the last obstacle.

 Overall, it was a fun day!  And I even made a special shirt for the occasion:

I got quite a few comments on the shirt-- everyone loved it!

At the end of the race, you could donate your old shoes & they recycle them for affordable footwear for people in need around the world.  Kinda cool, especially since most racers wore the oldest dirtiest pair of shoes they had anyway!

One final picture-- I snapped it on my way out, but truthfully, all I wanted to do was see what this dude looked like at the end of the race!  Also, I wanted to ask him logistical questions like, "Did you paint your body green before or after you got here?"  "If before, is your car seat totally green?"

Weekly traditions.

In so many ways our lives have completely changed over the past 6 months.  One of them is new routines.  Our routines no longer involve our families on a weekly or monthly basis.  Sundays are the most obvious:

This is what Sundays used to be like back in NC.  Family, animals, banjo... relaxing and spending time with my family.

And lately, this is what Sundays are like:

Different, but wonderful all the same.  Making new friends that are quickly becoming like family.

It's weird going from living in the mountains where the beach is vacation, to a place where you live at the beach and the mountains are vacation!

What are some of your weekly traditions?

Dangerous Retreat.

Yesterday my husband spent some time away from the office with the other staff members at our church (where he works).  As he left, I found myself saying, "Bye sweetie, don't end up in the hospital this time."

Then I laughed a little to myself because, last time he went away with the staff at a church he was on staff at, 2 of them ended up in the emergency room for unrelated incidents.  So I dug up a post I'd written about that and thought you'd enjoy!

----------------

A week before our first anniversary, Josh went on a Pastor's Retreat with the other pastor's from our church.  He was the Creative Arts Pastor, which means he got to do all the cool stuff with design and lighting and music.  And he had a really big Mac.

This retreat was in the middle of nowhere North Carolina.

I made a handy little map so you can follow me on this crazy trip.

Here is the cast of characters:

H = main pastor = adventure (was in the Marine's)

J = my awesome husband (worship/creative arts) = adventure (but completely novice)

S = children's pastor = has a head on his shoulders

K = worship/admin = feeling a little dizzy

D & E = H's wife and daughter who visited one crazy day

H & J are all about kayaking.  A kayaking adventure is born.  Did I mention H slept in a hammock all week?  That's inside a perfectly good cabin.  *shakes head*

S is a little skeptical, but agrees to go along as long as there is a raft involved.  K is not feeling well and decides to hang out at the cabin and recuperate that day.

Fast forward to the river.  The river is the blue star on the map above.  J gets caught in the current (a good thing), flipped (a normal, expected part of kayaking), loses his paddle (not good), and reaches for it (detrimental).  The current pushes his shoulder out of socket.  He is still underwater.  He gets above water, feels like he's been shot.  Everyone stares, then gets him out of the water.

They take him a little too far away from the water and when the emergency crews for the river get there, they realize he's too far away from the water, and therefore they cannot treat him and must call the county hospital.

I couldn't make that up, y'all!

So they call the ambulance.  Meanwhile, it's just a shoulder out of socket, right?  So several skilled people try to pop it back into place.  They were all unsuccessful.

The longer a shoulder is out of socket, and the more it is messed with, the worse damage there is.

By the time the ambulance got there, J was nearly going into shock.  Maybe he did for all I know.  I'm not a medical guru.

The hospital is the green star on the map.  Not terribly close.  And they only had 2 or 3 ambulances.  Three rooms in the emergency department (from my memory).  The hospital was... well... I'll just show you a picture of it's sheer size:

Image Credit

Sooo.... it took awhile for the ambulance to get there.  That's when I got a call on my cell phone.  I was in a summer class at Western Carolina University (the pink star).

It was a strange number, so I didn't answer it.  Then the same number called back immediately, which is cell phone code for "answer this call... you don't recognize the number, but it's important."

So I answered it.  And it was J, barely making sense.  He started with "I'm ok" and quickly told the story.

He had borrowed the cell phone from the EMT treating him in the ambulance.  Is that sweet or what?

Thank you, Mr. Ambulance Guy!

He said it was another 30 minutes or so before he'd be a the hospital so I stayed for the rest of the class and then headed to the hospital.

What hospital?

I called the number back.  Ambulance guy told me which hospital.  What a great guy!

But how to get there?  I didn't have GPS!  This was 2007 y'all!  :)

So I called a dear friend who knew her way around the sticks.  She got me straight there.

Pause.  Remember K?  He wasn't feeling well so he stayed back at the cabin?  Well D & E had come by the cabin and after a little bit, K passed out.  D called an ambulance.

Remember how many ambulances this county had?

Now back to the river.  All the guys can't ride in the ambulance, so H gets them back to the truck.  He then calls his wife, D, to tell her.

In what I can only imagine to be a very confusing conversation, they both realize that they are headed to the hospital for different reasons.

Once at the hospital, we realized we were taking up most of the emergency room.  What hogs.

J & K were hopped up on amazing amounts of drugs.  We took cell phone videos.  What I wouldn't pay to still have those.  And because he was wearing a wetsuit that had dried after being wet, he stunk.  Not to mention he didn't have a change of clothes.  Or even shoes.

I can only imagine what the hospital staff thought that day.

Honey, I don't know what kind of church they are, but they sure can stir up some trouble.

--------------------

I'm glad to announce that this time, no one ended up in the hospital.  I'm not sure what they did, but it sounds like mainly meetings all day.  We did have to make a call to Josh's doctor, but it was an unrelated issue.  :)

A peek into my day to day.

Sometimes I feel that my blog life gets disconnected from my real life.  Sometimes not, but right now I feel like it is.  So here's what I've been up to the past two weeks.

Well, really longer than than... but hardcore the last few weeks.  This is actually the reason why we moved up here... for this new church campus.

I didn't take these pictures-- thankful for two ladies at the church who let me use them!

We had our grand opening yesterday and it was fabulous!  That building used to be the movie theater years and years ago, and was actually set to be demolished.  But God intervened and guess what?  Everything inside is brand spankin' new now, and our first Sunday church service will be there today!

I don't think I've mentioned it on my blog, but I actually do marketing for a local Chick-fil-A.  No, they don't know I have this blog, and definitely don't hold anything I say on here to them... (fine print: my views do not necessarily reflect theirs).  Anywho, here I am herding some cows... they're so fun!

Throughout the morning I had to switch gears from CFA employee to staff wife at church, and back again.  Here I am with this crazy bunch of people who have become like family to me... the staff at church & their families!

Check. This. Out!  I felt like I was back at home in WNC!  Full body spandex and stilts.  I loved it!  There was a girl too, and her long hair was flowing out the back of a purple leotard.  It was pretty awesome!  And yes-- their faces are covered.

A view from above. If you look in the bottom right of the pictures, you can see the purple leotard stilt walking lady!

So that was my Saturday.  Glad it went off well and can't wait to see what the future holds for this community!

High school friends.

Christy is one of my dear friends from high school.  I've found that high school friends grow sweeter over time.  Christy moved away from our hometown when she got married a few years ago.  She married her high school sweetheart.  Now that I've moved to SC, we just live a few hours apart.  And thanks to Josh's crazy music schedule, we got the chance hang out awhile back!

Isn't she gorgeous?

We had a lot of fun hanging out.  And forcing Josh to take pictures.

But we were in Columbia, which is exactly 10 degrees hotter than hell.

Roughly.

Anywho, this is pretty much what we did in high school.

We have to express ourselves, y'know?

I think we both missed our calling to acting careers.

After this sillyness we went to eat at a very magical pizza place-- it was so tasty!  And I didn't even mind that the waitress totally hit on my hubby. 

Oh Christy... always a ton of fun!  I think everyone needs a friend like her!