Summer in the City

This past weekend was a wonderful one! We started on Friday night with a fun dinner with friends at Extra Virgin and a post-dinner rooftop drink. Saturday morning we began with Krispy Kreme doughnuts (a family favorite.) The doughnuts were just to warm the stomach up for what was to come next. For over a month a group of our friends have had tickets to Taste of Tribeca. It's a great neighborhood event where most all of the restaurants participate. They block off around 8 blocks and have live music, tastings from each restaurants, and  a kids tent with face painting, etc. The food was wonderful and we finally were able to try out some of our local neighborhood restaurants we've walked past numerous times. After we had our fill of food we moved onto the local wine stores where they were having free wine tastings. I think we all needed to sit and let our stomachs settle so we headed to the park and just sat.
 Later that night, Ben and I went to see the Broadway play Newsies for my birthday! It was one of my favorite movies as a little girl and the play definitely did not disappoint. (If you're visiting the city or live here make sure you go) It was quite hard not to sing along during the play but I managed to hold back until we were back in our apartment. I feel bad for our neighbors.
We ended the weekend with a delicious steak dinner with friends in Midtown at Quality Meats. It was so much fun to spend my birthday with such great friends! This past weekend is what makes me love living in the city.

 Ashley is planning out which food tent to try first

Take a look at all these choices from all the restaurants!

Flowers from my amazing dad!

Queen City Weekend

Well, I had another long weekend in the great state of North Carolina. This time in our previous city of Charlotte. The reason was to see our old Charlotte friends as well as our annual Chapel Hill bible study reunion. The weekend was absolutely wonderful. There really is nothing like seeing old friends to make the heart happy. (Not to mention visiting the place the Ben and I met and fell in love.)
Everyone in the group now has kids (with the exception of LB and me being pregnant) so the group has doubled in numbers and noise levels. Which only makes it that much more fun! Instead of going out to eat, we now cookout and play in the park. It's funny how life changes and somehow seems to just get better.

Love front porches with rockers!

Next year everyone will have kids in their arms and hopefully the rest of the group will be there!

Rest in the Holy Land

This past month I have felt like this blog has been my last priority, especially with all the other things going on in my life, not to mention all the traveling taking place. However, after this past weekend I couldn't wait to come home and try to write down the kind of weekend I witnessed. It started with an surprising invitation that came my way about a month and a half ago. The invitation was to attend a "Ladies Farm Forum" in Asheville, NC. This event is put on through a wonderful and generous family as well as The Trinity Forum. My sister had gone once before and Ben had gone to the "guys farm weekend" last August. Needless to say, they both loved it and have talked about it the entire year. So I was beyond excited that I got invited.
Are you asking yourself, what the heck does this "Farm Forum" thing entail? Well, it's somewhat hard to describe since I'm not sure words will do it justice. But I'll try.
To sum it up, it was about fellowship with other women who love Jesus and came together in a place of rest and yet silliness. However, it goes far and beyond just that. We all read the book, The Return of the Prodigal Son by Henri Nouwen before we arrived. We had 3 sessions on the book throughout the weekend. The rest of the weekend was about resting and listening to the words of God and then basically having a big slumber party like you did back when you didn't care about how silly you looked. It was an amazing and beautiful time of freedom, love, acceptance, peace, honesty, raw emotions, and seriously silly and fun girl time. This past weekend will go down in the history books as being one of the best! God is good.

Getting ready for a session on the book

 Their property was gorgeous

 Our setting for every incredible home-cooked meal

 How do you not rest and have fun here?

 Girls gone fishin

 The cow pasture

 We drove around the property in small cars

 Just part of their beautiful land

 Silliness with handbells?! Not even sure how this happened

 Ole!

 It was hard to leave this wonderful place

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! I cannot believe that two weeks have gone by and we've celebrated Christmas and the end of 2011. The past couple of weeks have been packed with fun events. I'm a bit sad that it all has to come to an end and we have to resume normal life again.  Ben is back at work (I've selfishly loved having him free) and I'm starting the process of revamping Spencer Morgan Designs. Stayed tuned for that news. However, I'm just now going through all the pictures from the past few weeks and they most definitely put a smile on my face.

We had a wonderful New York, New Years Eve spent with friends. It was a progressive dinner type of night beginning a few floors above in our friends apartment. Then we made our way down to our apartment for drinks, dessert, and a little dancing of The Dougie. And 30 minutes before the clock struck midnight, we moved to a bar, named Ward III a couple of blocks away. And about an hour later, now fully into 2012 we called it a night. And a great night it was! I hope you all had a wonderful New Years!

 Sitting down for our nice steak and salmon dinner

 Group shot on the balcony

 Do you think you could tell in a blind taste test which one is Andre and which is Cristal? We sadly could not. Yes, we're ashamed.

 Which one is it?!?! Answer - Andre wins

 Some serious champagne taste testing (they are the only ones that actually picked the nice champagne)

Ben demonstrating some joke between them

 It's 2012!!!

  

Carving Time

On top of all that other fun we had this weekend, I was also able to join in on some girly Halloween fun over at my friend's apartment. After brunch at PJ Clarks I dashed over to the carving madness. Julia is such an amazing hostess and had prepared some incredibly yummy cakes, sausage swirls, cookies, etc for pre-carving eats. Then the carving began! I love everything about the Fall, especially pumpkin carving and roasting pumpkin seeds! 

Julia's really getting out the goop!

Football and Food

If you looked through the mass of pictures in yesterday's blog post you probably wouldn't think we did anything this past weekend besides walk and around and take pictures. However, we did take some time to fit some football in on Saturday! We are quite the football fans and create quite the setup - well Hubs creates quite the setup with his IT skills. So after we had watched the most important SEC games we thought it would be fun to have some friends come over for the night games. However, I didn't have time to cook dinner but still wanted to have enough finger foods to replace a big dinner. I looked on Pinterest and found an easy fast ham and cheese crescent roll sandwich. I figured these sandwiches with a few other dips would do the part. These would also be great for toddlers to help with.

Our three "tvs" with 3 different games

A couple of packages of Pillsbury crescent rolls, Ham sandwich meat, slices of cheese - your choice

Roll those puppies up with the point down

And of course a blueberry pie

Lifelong Friends

Wow! I can't believe it's almost been a full week since I last posted. Its safe to say that I flat out lied when I said I would be back after last Wednesday. I full intentions on blogging as soon as I got back from my Florida travels but I think all the excitement tired me out more than I expected. I didn't realize just how excited I was until I was on the plane last Thursday. I had to fall asleep in order to just sit in my seat and not annoy the stranger sitting next to me. I can't explain how great it was to see these girls after a year in our new lives. After our days at the beach/pool chasing and playing with the little boys we came back and put the boys down for bed. That's when we "forgot" about the time and started catching up on what has happened in our lives over the past year in our new cities. It was like no time had pasted - especially not a year! It's hard to explain these types of relationships since they are so rare. We only had a little over a year with each other and yet they know my hearts desires and struggles just like someone who I've known my entire life. Through our vulnerability we're able to encourage, challenge, and rejoice with each other. You'll be reading about another one of these weekends next year but it will also include the rest of the group, husbands, and even more babies! (Did I mention that the husbands had just as much fun together on their guys weekend in Atlanta?)

Make sure you notice the adorable pregnant belly!

In case you were wondering, I have still been working and just put a few new pieces up on the website. But more on that later!

Weekend Begins

My weekend begins this afternoon! I'm leaving for a girl's getaway down in Florida while the Hubs goes on a guys getaway down to Atlanta. We're meeting up with our Chapel Hill friends. Obviously, me with the wives/babies and Hubs with the husbands. We haven't seen them since graduation about this time last year so we're both extremely excited! I can't wait to see how much those little babies have grown and catch up on life since Business school. We're all in different places now so I'm sure there will be non-stop talking.

As I'm sure you guessed, I will be making a little stop to see my family and the growing Baby O.

I won't be back until Wednesday morning, so I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!