Christmas Sweater Party

We had a Christmas sweater party with our class from church last night. It was sooo much fun. We ate lots of great appetizers and desserts and gave out prizes for a few different categories. I ended up buying a Christmas dress a Goodwill (which is very unflattering) and Marcus wore what I'm pretty sure is a womens sweater that he found on the men's rack at another thrift store. We're looking forward to heading to Arkansas later this week.

art

We've finally been hanging up more things around the house. I thought I'd share.

Marcus painted these canvases. They are hanging above our couch. He is way more crafty than I am!

I had some pictures from Mexico and Jamaica blown up in black and white. I was happy with how they turned out.

New curtains-they've been up for a month or so.

my first razorback game

Yesterday Marcus and I drove over to Fayetteville with another couple from church, Scott and Ashley, for the Arkansas/South Carolina game. It was so much fun and the weather was perfect. The boys had second row seats and Ashley and I sat up higher, but still had a good view. After the game we went to one of the best sushi places I have ever been to. Things were great until we hit a deer on the way home. We were in Ashley's Jeep and it was pretty damaged and undriveable. We were stuck in Inola, OK (middle of nowhere) for an hour or two. Thankfully, another friend came to pick us all up.
P.S. When it comes to basketball, Kentucky is still my favorite team!

Happy Fall!

Fall is my absolute favorite time of year! The pretty leaves make me so happy and I just love Halloween and Thanksgiving. We had our Trunk of Treats at church last week and my parents and brother came this weekend. It was their second trip to Tulsa and we had a great time. Our trunk-it was thrown together at the last minute.

Dad and meYou guessed it-Dad, Mom, and me

Kind of random, but I love to change the placemats for different seasons.

I love this fall sign!

this week

This week has not been the most fun. My dad called me last Thursday and told me that my Grandmother wasn't doing well at all. She ended up passing away on Friday night. Even though she was 88 and in a nursing home, this was still really hard for me. She was a wonderful Christian lady and one of the best influences I've ever known. I know that she is really happy now though. Marcus and I traveled to KY (a 10 hour drive) on Sunday and came back to Tulsa on Tuesday. It was really really good to see family that I hadn't seen since our wedding. I hadn't seen my parents since Memorial Day, so seeing them was wonderful too. Please keep my family in your prayers!

Dallas Weekend

We went to Dallas with some friends from church last weekend. Marcus and I were able to have dinner with my college roommate and her husband friday night. Saturday we went to an outlet mall and to my one of my favorite stores ever-Sam Moon....I am obsessed with that place! That night we went to a Rangers game. It was my first major league game and was alot of fun. I spent most of the time playing with our friends' kids. : ) We finished out the weekend with a trip to IKEA on Sunday. Marcus and I have been traveling so much lately. We don't have any other trips planned until we go to Arkansas for Thanksgiving. It will be nice to have some time at home. I've been terrible about blogging lately. Most weeks I just don't have much to write about. I'll try to get better about it though.

Mexico Pictures

We've been home for two weeks and I am just getting around to posting pictures from our trip. The resort was beautiful and very relaxing. We just sat at the pool everyday. I read three books and Marcus slept alot. We did get massages one day and Marcus learned how to sail a little Hobie Cat sailboat. He was really good at it, by the way. I was quite proud. The food here was great too. We loved the Asian restaurant and ate there 3 times! It was fun celebrating Marcus' birthday at the resort. The housekeepers put rose petals all over our room and made a little towel man. Later that evening they brought him some chocolate cake. Here are some of my favorite pictures.

Ok, our internet is not cooperating and this is taking a long time.... More pics to come at a later date!

swap party

Last night was the swap party that I mentioned in the last post. The rules were like this: Everyone's clothes were mixed into a pile and divided into numbered bags. Each person drew a number and got to look through that bag first. Then we put what we didn't want into a pile on the floor and everyone just grabbed what they wanted. All of the clothes that were left at the end were donated. For accessories, all the purses, shoes, and jewelry were laid out on the table. We used our numbers again and just took turns choosing things. I ended up with some great things including a winter coat, a shirt from Loft that still had tags on it, and a sparkly summer purse. I highly recommend this as an inexpensive and very very fun girls' night activity!

what we've been up to

Here's a quick update on what's been happening in the Short household: We had the "Marriage Matters" seminar at church last sunday-wednesday. We went to the same seminar at Marcus' mom's church while we were engaged and it was great to go back. The weekend has been pretty laid back. We had some friends over for dinner last night. I made Paula Deen's meatloaf and homemade mac and cheese. It was SO unhealthy, but it was a good meal. We just love having people over and it's so much more convenient now that we are in a house. Marcus and I have been teaching the three year olds at church since June and just have a few more weeks. They are adorable and at such a fun age. I LOVE teaching class with Marcus and it really impresses me how well he explains the Bible stories to the kids.

This week, I am going to a swap party where you take a shopping bag of old clothes, jewelry, purses and accessories and trade with friends. I am super excited about getting some cute new stuff for free.

In two weeks, we are going to Mexico for an end-of-summer vacation. It's a different resort, but in the same area, Puerto Morales. I know it sounds crazy since we just went in the spring, but we got an amazing deal after the swine flu outbreak. It was cheaper than flying somewhere in the US for a 3-4 day trip. We'll also get to celebrate Marcus' 29th birthday while we're there.

procrastination

I've picked up a bad habit over the past few months. Now that we have a third bedroom and an extra bed, I throw all the laundry on it when I don't feel like putting it away. It becomes an hour- long process by the end of the week (or two weeks) to move it all to our bed, fold it, and put it away. Here's what 7 loads looks like.

***Marcus helped me with this particular batch and from start to finish it was just over 30 minutes.

girls' weekend

Last weekend I flew to Dallas for the 2nd annual girls' reunion weekend with some friends from college. We were all sad because Kim didn't get to come this year because of work stuff, but we had a new addition to the group-Sarah's baby Miss Camryn. It was a nice, relaxing weekend. I also got to hang out with my aunt Lura on sunday. She took me on my first trip to IKEA. Wow! I loved it and could have spent hours in there. I didn't take a ton of pictures of the weekend, but here are a few.

Camryn

Calling Kim to catch up on things

We played this fun game called squint...
The directions said that it's helpful if you squint while you play.

the 3rd and 4th of july

Well, the third of July was actually more eventful for us than the fourth. We were both off on friday, the third, and had a fun day together. That night some of our friends from church got together for a cookout and went to see fireworks in a small town outside of Tulsa, called Keifer. I had never even heard of this town, but the fireworks were really impressive. Saturday, Marcus made ribs in his smoker and we had a few friends over and played games. We weren't planning to go to any other fireworks displays, but there was one at a nearby golf course that we could see from our driveway. Nice!

Marcus remembered to buy my favorite flavor sno-cone, wedding cake, while we waited for it to get dark. What a nice surprise! : )

visitors!

We recently had some great houseguests. Michael and Ashleigh brought the boys to Tulsa for the first time. We went to the aquarium and of course, went to some yummy restaurants. What a fun weekend! Asher is such a happy and loving baby- he's pretty photogenic too!

Marcus isn't really sleeping, but I told him to pretend. : )

John Mark got to feed the turtles, but his favorite thing at the aquarium was the hand that was coming down from above, cleaning a tank.

really behind!

I'm so behind on blogging. I really haven't fallen off the face of the earth. Hopefully in the next few days I'll post about Marcus' new smoking habit (smoking meats, that is), one year of living in Tulsa, and a visit from our nephews.

Happy Fathers' Day to my wonderful dad! He's the best and we always have so much fun together. I wanted to put up a picture of us, but I don't have a good one on my camera. :(

We LOVE the ice cream man!

Marcus' first words when he came home from work monday night were, "ice cream man, ice cream man, ice cream man." I had just looked out the window and seen the festive van stopped a few houses down. I grabbed my wallet and we power walked/jogged down the street. The group of ice cream buyers consisted of us and two eight year old boys. We paid four dollars for a bomb pop and a strawberry sundae crunch. The kids were asking the ice cream man, "Are you coming back tomorrow?" I was kind of hoping he would, but haven't seen him since.

Happy Mother's Day!

I am so lucky to have a fantastic mom. Here's my favorite picture of us. This was the morning before my wedding. Hope everyone has a great mother's day!

babysitting night

Marcus came up with a fun idea this week. He sent an evite to our class at church and offered for us to babysit kids friday night so parents could go on a date, run errands, etc. Potentially we could have had like 15 kids, but we ended up with 5. There were two 1 year olds, two 2 year olds, and a five year old. We ate chicken nuggets, watched Cars, read books, and played elefun. My therapy toys always come in handy when kids come over. They were very well-behaved and it was alot of fun. I told Marcus that we could definitely handle having five kids. HA. Maybe more like 2, but it was great for one night.

Marcus captured everyone's attention with "Lilly the Lamb".

Ethan was quite a fan of my ABC book. He is so cute and loves letters.
One of the moms, Becky, brought Elefun. It was a big hit!
Little Lorelai is adorable. She makes me want a baby. She gives kisses and does all kinds of cute little tricks. She thought the butterflies in the game were hairbows.
Marcus taught Alex and Landon how to wii fish.

Elijah was content hanging out on the couch and watching Cars.

the past month or so

I just haven't had much to blog about lately. Here's a quick rundown of the past few weeks.
Good things:
-The highlight of the past month was definitely our trip to AR for Easter.
-Another good thing lately has been a girls' bible study that I've been going to every other monday. It is a great way to start off the week and I love the book that we are reading.
-My allergies have not been acting up. No stuffy nose in the spring is a very good thing!

Not good:
-We had to pay a yucky amount of taxes and then a week later had to have Marcus' car towed and repaired after a simple "do it yourself" job went bad.
-We have termites (hundreds) in our house. It is really gross, but at least since we are renting we don't have to pay for getting rid of them. I took pictures, but I won't post them-that might be kind of weird.

So now you see how boring my life is and why I don't have much to blog about....
Tomorrow we are having a (very small) kentucky derby party. I just might post pictures if anything exciting happens.

Easter Weekend

Last weekend we were able to visit our families in Arkansas for Easter. It was so nice to have a long weekend to just hang out with everyone. We got to meet our new nephew Asher(who was so sweet and cuddly!) and spend some time with John Mark. John Mark is so funny and smart. Here are a few pictures:

Marcus is so good with babies. I love it!

John Mark is quite the entertainer. He was singing a song about Easter.

lots of snow = a sad and boring weekend

I knew it was supposed to snow today, but not this much. We got up early to head to Fayetteville and it was snowing, but we were hoping it wouldn't stick. About 45 minutes into our trip, we nearly went into the ditch and it was getting worse so we turned around. Last time I checked it was still snowing really hard. So much for a fun spring day with our sweet little nephews! We'll get to see them in two weeks for Easter though. I've been wanting to buy Easter decorations. Maybe with enough pastel stuff and bunnies around the house, the snow will go away!

This is what the road looked like a few minutes outside of Tulsa. It got alot worse.

I don't think our poor flowers are going to make it.

Marcus posing for me in the driveway

Me - being sad

spring-ish

I was planning to do a post about things I like in the Spring. Since it's about 40 degrees and the forecast is calling for snow, I'll hold off on that.

The people who lived in our house before us planted lots of flowers and they are so pretty. I took some pictures of them the other day and am hoping they don't die in the snow. It's the first time we've had a yard, so we are pretty excited. We used a Lowe's giftcard we received for our wedding to buy a rake, a hummingbird feeder, and two mini herb gardens. The herb gardens will actually stay inside, but they are really cool. One has 3 types of hot peppers and the other has 3 Italian herbs. I think I could really get into gardening.

This weekend we are going to Fayetteville to meet our new nephew baby Asher. He will be there, along with his parents and John Mark, visiting family. It's not a bad drive at all from Tulsa. We can't wait to see him!

Mexico Pics: Tulum

We decided to leave the resort and visit some Mayan ruins one day. It sounded like a good idea and we chose Tulum, which were the smaller ruins but closer to our resort. The man at the tour desk said it was a 45 minute to 1 hour trip each way. It was actually two, meaning that we spent 4 hours on the van that day. The ruins were pretty and the water there was amazing. They are the only Mayan ruins that are right on the ocean. Our tour guide was passionate about the ruins and talked about them for around an hour, but it was hard to understand him and I kind of tuned him out after awhile. Marcus did too... We really can't tell you much about these pictures, but I think they turned out pretty well. Marcus took most of them. He is definitely the better photographer in our family.

We like to call this picture "ancient Mayan lawnmower".

This iguana was huge...probably 2 1/2 feet long. There were even more iguanas at Tulum than at the resort's pool!

Say a prayer for Marcus. He hasn't been feeling well. His stomach was hurting really badly and he was up sick all night last night. I took him to the doctor and they think it's just a virus. He seems to be feeling a little better tonight.