When I was about twelve, my sister, my best friend and I would spend HOURS…calling in on "Country from the Heart" on our local radio station. Dedicating songs to the "men of our dreams" (who have long since been forgotten!) and then listening for the songs to get played along with the little "to you, from me" announcement.
It was really dorky. There's just no other word for it. That's what it was.
And yet, much to my shame I have not completely matured beyond that dorkiness.
If there were a radio station for me to make a dedication on right now, I'd be calling in.
I heard this song for the first time this morning, via this girl's blog.
And of course, because it's the easiest thing in the world to do, it made me cry.
And now I have to post it here… for the man of my life. The one who really IS the man of my dreams.
But, we've actually been having so much fun this fall that there hasn't been time to think about the dreaded cold that will be here soon.
Here are a few highlights:
We grew our own pumpkins this year, for the first time ever. It was so exciting watching them grow and turn their bright shades of orange. And we ended up with one for each of us, so it was perfect!
We spent an afternoon at the county fair with some friends. Here Miss A is getting a spinning lesson.
My goal when attending the fair is to find every possible simple, old-fashioned thing I can for my girls to enjoy. This year we skipped the carnival completely. The fun thing was afterwards hearing the girls brag about the best part of the fair being the hayride.
In the livestock building at the fair there was a cute little farm set up where the kids could harvest a bunch of produce. Then they each got "farmer for a day" ribbons. Super fun!
One of the biggest highlights of fall…picking apples at Grammy's house.
Getting to enjoy an apple pie for dessert afterwards is also a great treat.
We also got to attend a local fall festival that had an Indian village. The girls were very impressed by that. Unfortunately we were too cheap to pay ten dollars for a picture with the Indian chief (who I feel the need to point out was extremely Caucasian!).
So that's some of what we've been up to lately. More to come soon….
We are starting to feel recovered from our sweet southern getaway, and I'm finally getting around to sorting all of the pictures I took. (I think I literally had a camera in my hands almost the entire trip. I just couldn't take the chance on missing something.)
SO many aspects of our vacation were amazing. We were totally blessed in every way. But of course, the thing that made it so richly satisfying was getting to spend time with some wonderful people.
Do you have any friends that you can just be with, and it doesn't matter if you haven't been together for years, you are still the same kind of friends, and you don't even really have to catch up, you're just together again and it's perfect? Those are the kind of people we got to spend our time with.
We were able to join some friends from high school at their church while we were visiting, which was a very fun treat.
The majority of our trip was spent with some very dear friends, the ones who had invited us to Austin in the first place.
I can't even begin to tell you all of the ways they poured out their love on us while we were there. They were amazing hosts and made sure we got to see and enjoy everything Austin had to offer. And in the meantime we got to just enjoy being together again, and our kids all had a blast together. We loved all of our time with them so much, and all of us miss them terribly now that we're back home. Guess we'll have to make our way back there sometime!
And a special highlight of the trip for me was taking a (kind of big) detour to spend some time with my great aunt.
She met me when I was a baby, and was sweet enough to be my pen pal when I was a little girl. I was so excited to really meet her, and to introduce her to my family. She welcomed us into her home and fed us her famous homemade tamales. I'm so thankful for the time we were able to spend getting to know her.
As great as every other part of our trip was, the time spent getting to love and be loved by so many wonderful people is definitely what I'm most thankful for.
