waaa....

that was me crying and whining if you couldnt tell. this past week has been a hard one. after our crazy flight to NC i came home with a huge fever blister and the kids were all really sick. they ran fevers monday night so i took them all to the doc on tuesday. they were put on antibiotics which dont really seem like they are working at all. today is day 5 of the meds and they still have terrible coughs. so i have just been worn thin. on friday i got a call from mom saying she was taking dad to the ER because of chest pains, saturday afternoon they ended up doing single bypass surgery on him. this has been really hard for me to be this far away from him. the surgery went really well and his is recovering at a great rate which is really awesome. i am just drained. today i woke up feeling terrible. now i have the same thing the kids have. dave has been great letting me sleep pretty much all day but tomorrow is going to be killer getting back into the swing of things. please keep dad in your prayers.

sorry for my whining.

my beautiful nieces

last night i took my three nieces out for a photo shoot. SO FUN. i love taking photos and i love to tell my girls how pretty they are. i love them so much, they all are a great help with my kids an the kids love them so much. these are some great ladies and i am so happy to have them in my life. so we went to an old broken down building. all that is left standing is this back wall and cool metal door. makes for good photos.
love the colors on this wall... to bad it got their clothes all chalky
Meghan is a freshman at ETSU Katie is a junior in highschool
Sydney is in 7th grade.








love the light coming in on this one








thanks for making the time to do this with me, you guys. love ya lots!

flight to kitty hawk

a few years ago dave went to the outter banks of NC to help his uncle start up a new donut shop out there. he worked for about a week and built out two stores. the donut shops were a hit so his uncle decided to do one more. so dave went back over in jan and worked on the third store. it is just about time for tourist season over there so the new store is getting ready for its grand opening. dave and i had the opportunity to go over before the big opening and spend some time with his uncle, eat some great fresh cooked while you wait donuts and i got to see all of daves handy work on the stores. they turned out so nice. he built walls, cabinets, counter tops, shelves... lots of work and it turned out so nice. we had a great time there in the outer banks, however getting there was a different story. we had planned on flying over there. it is a 9 hour drive vs a 3 hour flight. although when flying in a small plan, you are at the mercies of the weather. we watched the weather for days making sure we would be good to go. storms came and went. by the time we were finally able to get out of town and in the air another system had come through. daves flight instructor said we should be fine so we got in the plane and took off. not more than 15 mintues into the flight the weather got really bad. we were engulfed in clouds. i have to say, DAVE IS AMAZING
and flew like a champ while i was freaking out. silently, but still freaking out. so for the next 2 1/2 hours we flew through terrible clouds , rain and turbulance. even the landing was a hard one with gusts of 23 knots.
some thing really cool about the landing is, it was right next to where the write brothers did all their test flights. we got to see the write brothers monument. it was pretty cool for dave to land there. the lord was watching out for us and daves excellent training paid off but i sure didnt want to get back in that plane for awhile.


we stayed the night in a huge house on the beach with his uncle. we didnt sleep to much that night after the flight but did get to sleep in a little in the morning. then we headed over to Duck Donuts to get some hot and fresh goodness.


After donuts we actually got BACK in the plane and flew to raleigh to spend some time with the dews. www.2dewdrops.blogspot.com
(here is a picture of the outerbanks as we took off....)
we always have a great time with them and wish we lived closer. our visits are usually super short but they are always filled with good food, lots of laughs and fun fellowship. tara a jamie have almost two year old twins. they are cuties an growing so fast. here we are enjoying some Goodberry's Frozen custurd. SO good.






super mom with both kiddos.

our flight back home from raleigh was fine but it will be awhile before dave gets me back in that plane.

baby gage

i got to spend some time with my friend emily and her cute kiddos baby gage and big sister grace last wednesday. gage is just a few weeks old so i got to get in some more newborn practice and spend some time outside with grace too. grace is just the sweetest most well behaved little girl. i loved my time with her. gage is a sweet little guy too. he was a trooper while we tried all different poses on him :) i am still having a hard time getting the lighting just right. my outdoors pics are better than my indoors. ok so here are some of the shots i got... thanks emily for letting me practice on your family.

waving to the camera

look at those blue eyes already!


emily had a cool antique wash and shave stand. i am not super happy with any of these pics. the lighting was hard, but we might try again and bring the whole piece outside and see what kind of pics we can get. emily was up for us trying anything.
sweet big sister grace.







we took a walk across the street to see grandpa and the horses.