Dallas Here I Come!!!

So, I know I'm in the middle (or actually still at the beginning) of telling about my trip to London and Ireland. But I keep forgetting to get the cord for the video camera to share the video from day 1!! Grr!! Tomorrow. Tomorrow I'm going to remember the cord!!!

BUT I have something SO SO SO exciting to share! Now, if you follow Caroline's blog, don't judge me that my blog isn't nearly as cute as hers!!

But here's the news....my wonderful friend Courtney shared with me a couple of months ago a blog by this crazy Texas girl named Caroline.

After checking out her blog, I was like, WOAH. We are living the same flippin life!!!! Seriously. The same life. SOOO, Caroline and I started chatting via email and I asked her if she would want to do Beth Moore's summer Bible Study with me. And she said yes! YAY!

So, we planned to do our fun little study via phone, email, whatever. Then I had this great idea! Thanks to not-so-great men from Dallas, I have a free plane ticket sitting around waiting for me to use it. Since Caroline is a teacher, too, I knew she had the summer off. How fun would it be if we could do our first week of Bible Study together instead of from a distance?! So guess where I'm going tomorrow!! You guessed it!!

To see my friend Caroline in Dallas!!

YAY!! I'm am fairly confident that there will be LOTS of fun pictures to share after the weekend!

Arriving in London

Wow it's been a while since I've posted!!  Since we've returned from our trip to London and Southern Ireland, I have had to hit the ground running!!  Tomorrow is (thankfully!) my last night of grad school for the summer, and I've spent the last few days preparing for my school law and personnel finals.  I am so over it all!

As I downloaded all of my pictures from our trip (I think I'm upwards of 200 pictures), I got a little overwhelmed with the volume of pictures I had to sort through and so I put off posting or sorting or anything that had to do with pictures and instead took a little dip at the pool.  :-)

And since I can't ignore the mass of pictures for forever, I've come up with a plan of how to attack this HUGE project.  I've decided instead of one MASSIVE post, I'll make several smaller posts and won't feel quite as overwhelmed with the crazy amount of pictures!!  So, here's post #1.

Leaving KC and Arriving in London

As we left Kansas City Airport for London (actually for Chicago, then Toronto, then London).  Our flight was at 7:30am.  Needless to say, we were up EARLY!!!

After the flight to Chicago, Dad decided he was jealous of my neck pillow and bought one of his own.  And Meredith likes to harass him.

We finally made it to Toronto where Meredith and I received our very first passport stamp!!  WOO HOO!

After an already full day of flying, we FINALLY boarded our flight to LONDON!!  Can you tell that the girls are just a little more excited than dad?  He wasn't happy about not being in business class.  

He decided he could be okay.  

By the time we arrived in London, it was 6:30am their time....12:30am our time.  Needless to say, we were EXHAUSTED!!  So we found our hotel, took a nap for a couple of hours and were off to the tube to begin our first tour of London.  

We started by hitting up those oh-so-famous red double-decker buses.

Here are some things we saw from the bus.  London is B-E-A-U-T-I-F-U-L!!

We hopped off the bus and headed to Trafalgar Square where we searched for a place to eat and sadly ended up in a tourist trap.  Thankfully for our tired bodies, it was time to call it a night and head back to the hotel to CRASH!!

Day 2 in London will have to wait for another day.  :-)

PS

Forgive the constant background changes!! I can't find one that I like on blogger, and when I find a background on another website, I can't apply it without wiping out all of my posts!! So, forgive me while I experiment. :-)

A Busy Weekend

You would think that since school got out last Tuesday (the kids had a half day) that my life would be the epitome of relaxing.  You would think.  Things have only gotten CRAZIER! since school has been out.  Here's the somewhat-reader's digest version of it all.

Like I said, school finished Tuesday but teachers had a work day on Wednesday.  I was perfectly fine with that work day because I was still trying to pack up the music room (I'm trying to not call it "my" room) and move things down to room 103 (I can't call it "my" room yet).  I spent ALLLLL day Wednesday working on the move and had to get to grad class by 5:00.  So, Thursday I went back up to school to organize the absolute MESS that was in 103.  I spent literally the entire day at school.  My first day of summer vacation, and I'm cleaning up the new classroom.  But it had to get done and thankfully I finished by about 3:30.  I'm so mad at myself because I have a great picture of my classroom....I mean....the music room in all it's glory, and I can't find it!!  But here's what it looks like when it's sad that I'm leaving it. 

Here's the last time my name will be listed as the music teacher.(Can you tell I was getting a little emotional??)

So, I left Thursday to meet up with my grad school girls to get working on the MOUNTAINS of papers and projects I have to get done before we leave on Thursday.  Karen and I hit the tennis courts for some much needed bashing of balls against rackets.  :-)

Friday I spent most of the day working on grad school.  AND THEN I went to get my hair done by the fabulous Jennifer Nold.  My mom and I had tickets to Jazzoo which is a black tie benefit for the Kansas City zoo.  We'd never been before and were very excited!! (At least I was excited!)  And I might possibly be the only one in the world who demands pictures of her hair, but when it's cute I need documentation!! 

Soo....here's the hair!!  Cute, right?!

And then it was a quick photo shoot before we headed off to the zoo!

White wine and ice cream.  I'm in heaven!!!!

We had a fun fun time except that we were pretty disappointed in the quality of music.  I know I've never gone before, but would you assume the Jazzoo to have jazz music?!?  There wasn't a drop of jazz....or anything of any quality.  I think that qualifies as false advertising!  BOO!  But we sure looked cute!! :-)

This weekend my mom also ran the Alex's Lemonade Stand at the Raytown Hy-Vee.  If you haven't heard about this fundraiser, you have got to check out the link!!  

This little girl is AMAZING! www.alexslemonade.org

Meredith and I spent part of the afternoon on Saturday volunteering at the stand as well.  Meredith is great at asking (more like demanding) people for money, and I am really good at pouring lemonade.  :-)  We all have our own gifts, right?!   So here's a little lemonade pose.  I'm not sure what happened to this darn picture, but it's cute all the same.

WHEW!!!  It's been busy!!  In between all of those things I've been writing multiple 10+ papers, reports, court case briefs, reflections, blah, blah, blah.  I need to get all of my grad school junk finished before I leave for vacation because it's all due while I'm gone!  Only a few more busy busy days until I leave for my VERY FIRST overseas travel experience!  Please be praying for the whole traveling aspect.  I'm getting a little anxious about flying for so many hours! 

I'm off to start my Code of Ethics paper for my School Law class.  I really want to just turn in my Bible and say, "This is my code of ethics."  And be done.  But I'm not sure my professor would be crazy about that one.  :-)