Birthday Celebrations

Mine and Tommy's birthday was Wednesday (the 25th) so we stretched out the celebrations! 

On Wednesday night we met Tom and Courtney (Tommy's parents) for dinner at Happy Sumo in Dunwoody for Hibachi. We were there early so we basically had the whole restaurant to ourselves (#babyproblems) and the chef at our Hibachi table to ourselves. We enjoyed a delicious dinner and each others company. Emma is not her best from 5-7pm so she needs lots of snacks and always ends up sitting with me. Especially on days of daycare because she doesn't nap as well. I know everyone struggles with that time of day with their little ones but it's tough when they won't go to anyone but mom. Overall though she was really well behaved in the restaurant. 

Thursday (the 26th) I went to dinner with some girlfriends to celebrate. We tried out Cooks and Soldiers. I had been really wanting to try this place out after I heard they opened and were owned by the same group that owns Iberian Pig which is delicious. We had a great night. The food was fantastic and the company was even better! The grilled cheese was to die for! Thanks to these ladies for coming to celebrate with me!

Friday night we went to dinner with my family. We tried out the new Mexican resturant in Town Brookhaven called Jefe's. It was good! The twins even came back from UGA to join us which was a real treat. I really appreciate them coming home to celebrate with us especially when it's their last semester in college. The food was good and the kiddos did great! 

Tommy and I sure felt loved and celebrated last week for our birthdays. I think 28 and 29 are going to be good years for us. Looking forward to seeing what all we have in store the next year. 

Thanks for all the love from our friends and family. We are truly blessed!

Friday favorites

Today I'm linking up with Narci, Andrea and Erika for Friday favorites. 

This was my first full week of summer break so I had lots of favorites!

1. I went to visit a friend of mine from college to meet her new bundle. Rhett is almost four weeks old and Casey looks great. I was too busy catching up that I never took a picture so I stole this one from her Instagram from today! 

And I made this onesie for him for football season. 

It was great to see her and get some quality time catching up on life lately. 

2. I went to Ecco with my college girlfriends for dinner and we had a great time. Always lots of laughs with these ones!

3. A summer favorite is being able to have impromptu lunch dates with Tommy. 

4. Babysitting my nephew is always a favorite! We watched him Tuesday night so my sister and her husband could go out for their anniversary. 

5. Summer days mean being able to hang out with my mom but a bonus this week was that Bonnie is still on maternity leave and the twins are both in Athens so we drove to Athens for lunch with all my siblings and my mom. Definitely my all-time favorite!! We went to our fav route place, Last Resort! 

6. Supper club is a monthly favorite of mine. This month Christy hosted for a margarita and Mexican themed night! We had a great night just catching up and enjoying each other's company! 

7. Summer break also means I have time to meet my mom in the mornings to walk the dogs at the river. Seeing Cooper's smiling face when he gets to go swimming is the best! 

And it makes for a very tired dog the rest of the day!

8. lastly from this week, having time to enjoy embroidering things for friends. Here are a few items I did this week. 

Looking forward to spending my day with my friends Catherine and Lindsey and their little ones at my pool. Miss not having them at work with me anymore but so thankful to have kept up these friendships since they became moms. They are two of the best people! (Their kiddos are pretty great too!) 

1st Anniversary

Yesterday we celebrated our first wedding anniversary! May 31, 2014, was the best day ever! We got married at Peachtree Presbyterian Church and our reception was at Summerour Studios! It was a day filled with family and friends from near and far. I can't believe it's already been a year!

We have done so much this past year between vacations, friends weddings, becoming an aunt/uncle, thrown wedding and baby showers, changed jobs, gotten promotions and so much more. I couldn't imagine experiencing all these things without Tommy by my side. He is my best friend and brings so much love and joy into my life. I am so grateful for our relationship! 

We celebrated by going up to Dahlonega to visit the Wolf Mountain Vineyard. They have a brunch on Sunday's that changes monthly. This month's theme was sparkling white wine and seafood. The food was fantastic! We will definitely be going back. After brunch, we went to the tasting room to enjoy a flight of five wines for a tasting. The wine was good and the views were wonderful. It's set at the top of a mountain and you can see for miles. I can imagine in October it's beautiful with the colors changing. After the tasting we walked the property once the rain stopped to see what else they had to offer. We had a wonderful afternoon enjoying it just being the two of us. 

Here are some pictures from Wolf Mountain:

(Finally wore my new dress. In love!)

(View of the wedding venue they have on the property from the main building)

(It was a busy place yesterday!)

(Their wedding venue)

(Looking back up to the main restaurant and tasting room)

When we got home we spent our Sunday evening relaxing with our favorite buddy. We rented "Unbroken" and ate some of the BBQ our friend Evan sent us for our anniversary (Friday I came home to this huge box of BBQ and fixings on our doorstep. If you know my husband this was the best gift ever!). I made some banana bread with some bananas that were about to go bad and called it a night. It was a perfect day with my favorite person!

Big loaf is plain banana bread and mini loafs I added chocolate chips. Yummy!

(The drawer full of BBQ and fixings. I laughed out loud when I opened it)

And lastly, since year one is the anniversary for paper, I got tommy our first dance song typed out and framed to add to our buildings and he didn't know about the paper thing so I got some beautiful flowers. 

Excited for what God has in store for year 2 and the many years after that! 

My appreciation for my Husband

Ok I just have to do a sappy post every once in awhile and after this weekend I needed to do one about my husband, Tommy. I had my friend, Samantha, and her boyfriend, Dave, staying with me for the wedding. I was IN the wedding so I wasn't really around at ALL. He took the reigns and really filled in for me. On Friday, he ubered (not sure if that could be a word!) to Midtown and just sat in a bar waiting for me after the rehearsal making conversation with people he didn't know from the wedding family. Then on Saturday, he went to brunch with all my girlfriends and their significant others. After brunch, he took the boyfriends/husbands all around town to try Top Golf (total bust b/c of the wait) then bowling (again a total bust) and then eventually somewhere to play shuffleboard. He doesn't know the significant others very much but he entertained them for the whole day without a single complaint. It is a wonderful quality of his that I don't have to be around for him to show my friends how much they mean to not only me but to him. I am so appreciative of his understanding and help. He loves my friends and they love him back. He is just the best and I am SO lucky that he is mine! 

Weekend Recap

This was the first weekend in a LONG time we didn't have too much going on. We went to dinner across the street to eat with our new neighbors. Excited to have people similar to our age move in and are really nice people!

Yesterday I took Cooper for a swim then for a nice walk! Later I met Ansley to get our nails done (needed to get them done for the wedding next weekend). Love the white/pale pink neutral color I got. 

OPI- don't burst my bubble 

We headed to Canton Street in Roswell for a triple date plus Katherine for an early dinner/drinks at Ceviche. Followed by a nightcap at Mac McGee. It was a very relaxing night with great friends!

(Katherine flew in from Jackson, WY and came straight to dinner to join us. Poor thing got knee surgery four weeks ago and is struggling with the recovery. So great to see her!) 

Today is a very rainy day so we are taking full advantage of having a lazy day at home. The only good thing about this rain is what it has done for our yard! 

(Took this before the rain today)

View from my dining room today. So much green and blooms happening in the rain (new drapes too!) 

I have a BUSY week ahead with a make-up tennis match, standardized testing and Audrey's wedding festivities starting Thursday night. 

Friday Favorites: Spring Break 2015

Linking up with Andrea and Erika today for Friday Favorites! 

The joys of working in the education world is that you get SPRING BREAK! This year due to Tommy not getting much vacation with his new job and a new nephew I was in Atlanta the whole time. I started off my week with a bang. 

Monday: Went to the dentist which was painful fine then went to my mom's house to hang out with my sister, Collier and my grandma. We were there for one of my sister's friends to meet Collier then headed to our favorite place, Oak Street Cafe, for lunch. It's nice having my sister on maternity leave because she can join for these lunches for the time being too. I came home from lunch and did some things around the house before leaving for Roswell again to meet up with Tommy's family at Moxie Burger for dinner before his sister left town to head back to Charleston. 

Tuesday: I woke up early, ran to Starbucks to grab coffee for Bonnie and myself, then headed to hang out with Bonnie and Collier for the morning. I took Cooper with me to meet Collier for the first time. He was keeping guard and was very sweet with Collier. He gave him a nice big kiss on his ear. Cooper and Henley (Bonnie's Dog) always love playing together too. They love each other so much!

After I left Bonnie's I came home and took a quick nap with Cooper before getting right into the thick of my endorsement classwork. I am getting my leadership endorsement this year and am almost done! My portfolio is due at the end of April and I will be DONE! It was a beautiful afternoon so I sat on the porch and worked while Cooper played in the back yard. I ended my night at my weekly tennis clinic. Oh how much I love having tennis back into my routine. I have been playing with the same team now for two years and I love it. The team is made up of a bunch of my sister's friends from college and then Ansley and myself. 

Wednesday: I went to Catch Air (this indoor play place) with my friends Lindsey and Catherine. Lindsey has two boys, Woody and Gaines, and Catherine has a daughter, Gracelyn. The kids had a great time going from place to place. Around 11 there was a dance party with Mickey Mouse which was too funny. 

After playtime, we headed across the street to El Azteca for lunch and my friends Sarah joined us. It was great getting to catch up with the girls and hear about everything going on with them. The little are getting so big. It's been so much fun seeing them grow and seeing their families expand. Excited for one day joining them for play dates with my own kid. 

Wednesday night, I hosted dinner for my college friends. We try to every few weeks have dinner at one of our houses and drink a lot of wine. Life has been so hectic lately with so many bachelorette parties and weddings it hasn't happened in awhile. Since it was my spring break I figured this was the best time for me to cook a nice dinner. I made a Skinny Taste cookbook recipe for pasta with Italian sausage, kale and red peppers. It was a big hit and everyone got seconds! Enjoyed a girls night of wine and catching up. Excited to spend the weekend together for our friend's wedding as well!

Thursday: I took my time getting up and went for a morning walk with my across the street neighbor. They just moved in three months ago and had a baby the week after moving in so we haven't really gotten to know them well yet so what better way than to go for a walk with the baby and the dog. After my walk, I showered and met Tommy at BarTaco in Buckhead for lunch. I've been wanting to try this place out. The house margarita was so refreshing and the guacamole was delicious! Such a neat atmosphere inside too. After lunch I popped in at my sisters to get my Collier fill for the day and to see both my mom and Bonnie. The rest of the day consisted of grocery shopping, cleaning the house and filing our taxes (nothing quite like waiting until the last minute). This week I've gotten hooked on "Parenthood" on Netflix too.  Enjoyed my somewhat relaxing day of spring break. 

Friday: I met my mom at Goldbranch park for a walk with the dogs and for them to go swimming. It was quite eventful! We got rained on, walked with thunder and we came across two copperheads going across our walking path. Anything but relaxing! Brought the dogs back to my moms house so we could go to lunch. 

 This is my dog, Cooper, and my sisters dog, Henley, after getting soaked on our walk. 

Mom and I went to Chicken Salad Chick for lunch and then I drove Henley back to my sister's and came home for the afternoon. Just got back from grabbing a drink with one of my best friends, Kristen, and her husband, Fred, who are visiting from France for the weddings we have coming up. They are going to stay with us tonight and we are all gonna go to the wedding together tomorrow. We are finishing cleaning up the house for a cookout at our house tonight with a few couples for the Braves game. I will blog about the wedding and the rest of our weekend later. 

This Spring Break was definitely a favorite of mine because I got to spend a lot of quality time with family and friends!