Party, Pool, Pictionary, Pizza & Putt-Putt

Whoa that's a lot of things in one weekend that start with a "P!" Makes naming this post pretty easy :) So, I'm feeling a bit tired today, but (as weird as this sounds) it's a good kind of tired, because I started off my day and my week with a 2.5-mile run this morning! My legs are now tired and sore, but I'm feeling good about it, and definitely glad I got up and did it! Week 5 of 5K training is underway. And now of course, let's rewind the past few days and do a bit of weekend recapping. Well, the weekend plus a Thursday recap as well...

THURSDAY
Pizza and putt-putt with the fiance, the twins, Lacey, Josh and Danielle at Fun Station! Their awesome Thursday-night deal is: buy a large pizza for $3.99, and get four games of putt-putt for free! Holy crap that's just too good to pass up, am I right?

FRIDAY
Tried out a new pizza place here in town, Uncle Maddio's Pizza Joint, and it was so freaking delicious! I had a Portobello Pesto Pizza, and I loved it. Sooo yummy. And there were so many other options I wanted to try, so I can't wait to go back and get something different. Then we did some shopping at Walmart to get ready for the twins' birthday party the next day, and even found us all matching shirts to go with the party theme - get ready for pictures of those from Saturday :)

SATURDAY
Birthday party day for the twins! It was actually about a week and a half ago, but we waited until we could work it out the best, and it ended up being a great day for a party at the park! We had a Superman theme, so there was red and blue everywhere, and the four of us all wore matching Superman tshirts we found at Walmart!

After the party, we spent quite a few hours enjoying the beautiful sunshine at the pool, then cooked dinner at Josh & Lacey's house. Then while the kids all watched a movie, we played a couple rounds of our favorite game - Pictionary! One round of couple vs couple, and one round of boys vs girls. Always lots and lots of fun when we play Pictionary!

Picture of ALL the kids at the pool ;)

SUNDAY
The usual morning of hurch and lunch with my parents, then my Mama and I went wedding shoe shopping for me at DSW. Unfortunately, we didn't find anything, so I'm still on the hunt for shoes. Turning my search online now to see what I can find! Then Jeff and the boys and I enjoyed movie rest time for a bit, before the boys finally got restless and forced us back into action. We made a trip to Target (I bought a new dress, in a smaller size!!), then grabbed food from a new-ish place called Zacadoo's - where thanks to a coupon and kids meals being cheaper past 4 pm, all four of us ate dinner for a mere $8.94, and it was really good too! Score!

I then went to Kohl's while Jeff bathed the boys and got them ready for bed. I found a new dress for one of my upcoming wedding showers, and a potential leaving-the-wedding-dress. I just want to try it one with the proper undergarments (*ahem* my Spanks slip....) and see how it looks. I also got two cute, soft v-neck t-shirts, and since I had a coupon, and a couple gift cards, I only paid $4 for two dresses and two shirts. I love when stuff like that happens!

Now it's Monday morning, and I've got two full days ahead of me at work. I've been in training for the last three weeks, just sitting in my supervisor's office learning and watching. Today and tomorrow however, she's out of the office so I finally get to do some work on my own! It's a big responsibility, but I'm ready for it, and I'm ready to just do some hands-on training of my own. So wish me luck as I work on my own the next two days! Happy Monday morning, and happy start to a new week!

Oh, and here's my current mani, which I kinda love! This is the first time I've tried the free-hand painted clouds, but I think I did a decent job, and I will definitely be trying again sometime. Jeff also likes them, and says they remind him of the clouds from Mario (the video game), and I think he's right!

A bit chipped, because this is four days after I first painted them last Thursday...

Much Love,
Halie

*P.S. - This week I'm linking up with Glitter & Gloss, Sami's Shenanigans and Synfully Delicious.*

Putt-Putt On A Friday Night

This Monday morning is kinda off to a rough start (I mean, I just misspelled/mistyped 'Monday' about 5 times...). I was just so dang sleepy this morning! I overslept my early alarms, and by the time I woke up, it was too late for my early morning 5k training run. I felt bad I skipped it, but it might be good I got an extra hour of sleep today. I wish I could have gotten another hour actually! But I think it's all just due to a great weekend spent with my fiance, the twins and some great friends!

FRIDAY
Took the boys to Fun Station for some arcade games, pizza and putt-putt! We found a good deal, used some coupons and found some leftover arcade money from a couple of months ago, and so the four of us had a great little family night out, and did it pretty inexpensively. Score! Afterwards, we even treated ourselves to some delicious frozen yogurt, with coupons of course ;) After some cuddling and snuggling before the boys went to sleep, I then went home and stayed up watching a movie until 2:30 am! I was living on the edge that night...

SATURDAY
Did a bit of cleaning and laundry around the house (cleaned out under my sink, so I get to cross that off from my summer bucket list), then went over to Jeff's house. We all cuddled up together and watched 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame,' and the boys were just being so sweet and loving, and it was just nice to cuddle and rest a bit more. Then once the sun had come out, we went to the pool for a few hours with some friends. Later that afternoon, we went to a belated wedding shower in honor of Jeff's younger brother, who got married in Texas in the beginning of June. Back at home that night, we had a late dinner and then all cuddled up to watch a movie before the boys went to sleep. Then I stayed up kinda late again at my house watching a movie!

SUNDAY
After church, we had lunch with Jeff's family, then quickly got read to head back to the pool again. But first, we made a pit stop to look at a little house we're interested in renting. It's currently getting some work done (painting the guest bathroom, put new laminate wood floors in the bedrooms, new faucets & outlets...), but overall, we really liked it a lot! We're still thinking about it, but it's got some potential. Then we went to the pool to meet friends again, and we enjoyed a great afternoon of sunshine - finally!! We then went over to Josh and Lacey's house, and the boys grilled hamburgers, hot dogs and pork loin, while Lacey and I made the rest of dinner in the kitchen!

We're looking at the left side of this little duplex/townhouse, the purple one! :)

This was Jeff's plate - I tried to eat a little less than this as to not ruin all my hard work. 

We seriously had a great weekend over the past few days. I just felt so lucky and in love and my heart was so very full getting to spend so much quality time with Jeff and the boys. I am so in love with this man, and with his precious children, and I can't wait to get married (in less than 70 days now!), and become a little family. I'm so thankful for this blessing in my life!

I'm already looking forward to another fun weekend, and I can't wait to spend more time with these sweet little boys, and of course Jeff too! Just have to get through five days of work first, unfortunately... So let's just get to it and get it over with!

And here's my weekly mani, that I created to be sunny and summery, in order to add some sun in my life last week while the rains were just steady pouring down. And I think it worked, because we had a beautiful weekend finally of blue skies and bright sunshine!

Hope y'all's Monday mornings are off to a better start than mine. And hopefully I can pull myself together and get this Monday on the right track! Tonight my Mama and I are going to our wedding site to have a meeting with the florist, so I'm pretty excited for that. I'm still not entirely sure what I want, flower-wise, so I'm really hoping she can give lots of good advice and ideas, and help steer me in a more specific direction. Can't wait to see what she might come up with!

Much Love,
Halie

*Linking up with Glitter & Gloss, Sami's Shenanigans and Synfully Delicious*

Promo's, Proposals & Letters

Dear Weekend: It's so nice to see you. Think you can work out a special deal with Mr. Sun for us here in Florida? It's now rained 21 out of the last 24 days, and that's wayyyy more than enough. Move on. So let's have a nice, bright, warm, blue-skied weekend for once this summer? How does that sound, hmmm?!?

Dear Nike Running: Looks like your GPS was pretty accurate this morning - finally. And I like the overall feel and use of the app so far. So I'll test you out with a few more runs and see how everything is. If all goes well, looks like I'll have my new running app! (Oh, and week 3 of 5K training is now done!) The problem will be when I get back to bike rides though, because then I'll need a new app for that. Any cyclists out there with a great app recommendation to track bike rides?

Dear Mama: I hope you find a mother-of-the-bride dress this weekend on your trip to Atlanta! I'll be keeping my fingers crossed, and sending lots of good vibes up your way :)

Dear Shutterfly: Thanks for awesome, random promo codes that allow me to make an awesome photo book for 50% off. Now we will have a super cute photo book to use as our wedding guest book, and I can't wait to see how it turns out! Send me that bright orange package quick, because I'm so excited to see it!

Dear Lacey & Josh: I'm so excited for you guys - and I'm so glad I was able to be there to witness the proposal! Happy to have friends like y'all to share special times with!

Dear Angie, Jenni & Lacey: We need to come up with a team name for The Color Run! I want something cute or awesome or funny, or just something really cool - but I have no idea yet what that will be. Y'all have any ideas? Anyone else have any ideas? As soon as we come up with a team name, then we need to get ourselves registered before it get's full, so let's get moving on this!

Dear Work Day: Let's scoot through this as fast as possible, if you don't mind. It's nothing personal, I'd just really like to be done with you sooner rather than later. So don't just linger on and on for no reason. Feel free to just fly on by faster than a fancy car on the Autobahn. Thanks so much for your cooperation.

Dear Readers: I love y'all and wish you the best Friday, and an even more best weekend. Happy smiles and internet hugs to all of you! :)

Much Love,
Halie

Pleasant & Patriotic 4-Day Weekend

Well, I've been out of work and out of the blogging routine for the past four days, and it's been great. I mean seriously - super long holiday weekends are amazing, and definitely necessary for your sanity, and I enjoyed every single bit of it. What about y'all? And since I had such a long amazing weekend, there's a ton to catch up on, so today's post will once again be very picture heavy, and kinda light on the writing.

Let's back it up all the way to Thursday, for the 4th of July!

Actually first of all, let me just show off our dinner from Wednesday night that we made ourselves. Super yummy Turkey Santa Fe Stuffed Peppers. Sooo good. I'll be sharing the recipe tomorrow!

THURSDAY
I was house/dog-sitting all last week for my friend Lacey, and for some strange reason I woke up before 8 a.m. without an alarm. What is wrong with that picture? So I took the dog out and fed her, then I was quite productive for a few hours. I did some dishes, loaded and started the dishwasher, started a load of laundry, swept the house, uploaded and edited some pictures, bought new music on iTunes, made a new running playlist, and finally made my new playlist for the summer (another check from my summer bucket list!). And I did all that before 10 a.m. Impressive right?

Jeff came over around lunch time, and we made turkey taco lettuce wraps with the leftovers from our stuffed peppers the night before, then just lounged around for a bit watching National Treasure 2 on TV. We then went out and attempted to find cute matching shirts to wear, but no such luck. So we came back to the house and made our mac and cheese to take to family dinner.

My Granddaddy - the Birthday Boy!

My Mama made these super cute eagles as her surprise dessert treat!

My sister made these patriotic themed cupcakes, which were delicious.

We played a giant game of 12-person Farkle, and my Granddaddy-the-birthday-boy won!

And of course my sister and I had to take an unnecessary amount of goofy pictures, just like we always do...

The problem was however, that Florida couldn't get it's crap together to stop raining long enough to do any fireworks. Thanks a lot. So I didn't get to see any this year. What a sad 4th of July with no fireworks, right?! Oh well, Jeff and I already decided that next year, we're definitely heading back to St. George Island beach for July 4th festivities, and that will be awesome.

FRIDAY
I am honestly having a hard time remembering what we did on Friday...I know it was still raining, so I think we ran errands and stuff around town. Oh yeah - we went to Hobby Lobby and priced some silk floral stems for wedding purposes, bought a few cute glass jars, raided an awesome new thrift store of all their vintage books and a giant empty wooden picture frame, and a couple of other random things. And I got a wonderful little package in the mail from one of my friends from college. She lives in Tennessee now, and it's been a looong time since I've seen her. But she sent me the cutest little things! Later, we got Tropical Smoothie for dinner, and then went to Jeff's church to help decorate for Vacation Bible School, which is this week.

Set of fold-out, vintage Florida postcards, a wrap bracelet, hand-painted (by her!) cards, & a super sweet note.

SATURDAY
It was still raining (for about the billionth day in a row now...), so we did some more running around and found another cool new thrift store, where we scored this really cool wicker-basket-trunk-thing for only $15. The top of it is messed up, so we are going to try to figure out a way to redo it to make it look nice. We also shopped around town for what we want Jeff and his groomsmen to wear for the wedding.  The rest of the afternoon was low-key and boring, but then we went out for date night on a budget. We used coupons at Black Bean (local Cuban place Jeff hadn't ever been to before), then finally saw 'Fast 6' at the cheap theater here in town. And that movie was awesome!

We needed a pick-me-up after so much shopping. He got a Mocha, I got a Peach Green Tea Lemonade. Yum.

SUNDAY
Church and lunch with my parents, then Jeff and I spent the afternoon driving around town looking for 'For Rent' signs for our future place! We drove around for like three hours, took down about 30 addresses and numbers, and then started calling almost all of them last night. We're so excited about finding a place to live now, and hopefully the process won't be too obnoxious and difficult.

OK, so I think that about wraps everything up now, finally! Hopefully I didn't bore you all to death, and you're still interested in reading my blog again after all this... But even more than that, I hope each one of y'all had a great weekend too! I wish we could have had less rain and more sunshine, but hey, not every day can be perfect, so we just live with it and move on. And in the meantime, we just hope for sunny days and better weather in the future! The weekend was still good, despite the crazy amount of rainfall, and I had a great four days off of work.

Oooh, and one more thing - this morning I officially started using Hal Higdon's novice 5K training plan, to get ready to run my first 5K race this coming September! So follow along with me as I get ready for that! I'll be sharing my usual collages on Instagram, and logging it all with RunKeeper.

Happy Monday, y'all! And I almost forgot - here's the nails I did for my 4th of July festivities! (I did them like 2 days before I took the picture though, so that's why they're a little chipped already...)

Much love,

Halie

Peaches, Purses & Parties - Weekend Recap

Well first of all, I'm pretty irrated with Google/Blogger/the internets right now...I had this post about 80% done, with pictures placed in and everything formatted the way I wanted it, and then something freaked out, and the whole dadgum thing got deleted. Not cool Blogger, not cool at all.

So since I'm annoyed at this point, we're gonna let the pictures handle everything again this Monday (just like last Monday pretty much), with just occasional narration from yours truly. And for this recap, we're actually taking it all the way back to Thursday, so let's get to it, shall we?

THURSDAY

Dance recital for Lacey's daughter, then dinner all together to celebrate Lacey's birthday.

FRIDAY
Drove to middle Georgia to spend the night with Jeff's brother, before taking the boys back to their mom the next morning. Ate a quick dinner at Burger King, and we all enjoyed ice cream cones for dessert. Stopped at a gas station, and the sky looked gorgeous, so of course I grabbed my camera to snap a couple pictures.

SATURDAY
Drove a couple more hours to meet the boys' mom, ate lunch, and headed our own way. We took our time and slowly made our way back to Tally. First, we stopped at fruit stand and bought a basket of peaches; then we wandered around downtown Macon for a while; ate dinner at Cracker Barrell eventually; and spent a few hours catching up with old family friends of his who just moved back to Tifton; finally made it back to town around midnight.

Bumped his head getting out of the car, and a nice worker-lady who saw it gave us ice :)

SUNDAY

Church. Lunch with family. Laundry. Game time with Jeff and my parents. Bought a pretty new purse at Kohl's, with Kohl's cash and a coupon, which was an awesome combo that allowed me to get an originally $55 purse for just $11.88, with a gift card! So I didn't pay a dime. Perfect. Then a going away dinner for one of my bestest friends, who leaves on Thursday for a mission trip for 11 months, to 11 countries - called The World Race. Gonna miss this girl so much!

These 5 guys are all her brothers! Chris, Michael, Steven, Taylor & Tim. She's the oldest, & the only girl. Whoa.

It was another really great weekend, and I enjoyed it quite a bit. This week I only have a three-day work week, so of course I'm thrilled about that! Thursday is the 4th of July, and then I took Friday off as well, so I get a five-day weekend. Woohoo!! Gonna soak up some sun and do some wedding planning and hang out with friends and family, and it's gonna be so great.

And here's some super exciting news - I just found out that the interview I mentioned a month ago, finally resulted in a new job for me!! It's actually still at the same place I work now, but it's in a new section, and I get to move from OPS (hourly, no benefits) to Career Service (salary, benefits, better pay)!!!! I'm so stinking excited about this folks. Like over the moon on this Monday morning. I start on July 15th, so I've got to train someone else in my current position until then. I don't know what kind of blogging I'll be able to do once I start my new position, but we'll just see how that goes once we get there. I'm just so excited to be starting something new! (And I aint upset about a bigger pay check either...) Here's to a new chapter!

Hope y'all had a great weekend, and that your Monday is off to a good start as well. TTFN! Which stands for, "Ta-ta for now," as Tigger would say. (I really have no idea why that just popped into my head right now - I think it's just because my brain is going at a million miles per second from the excitement of my news, so everything's just swirling around like crazy in there...just go with it ladies.)