Surprise Parties!

I love a good surprise party. They are so much fun! I remember when my brother-in-law {Jeff} turned 30, my sister planned a magnificent party for him, and I helped her haul gallons of fruit punch from its hiding place under her bathroom sink to a closet a few days before the party. Isn't it weird what you remember???

Anyway. That was a few years ago. :) THIS year - just a few days ago actually, another brother-in-law had a surprise birthday party. This time we celebrated Ryan's sister's husband, Johnny, who turned 40! {Ironically, both Ryan and I have sisters named Lori, so apparently the key to getting a surprise party is marrying a Lori.}

Johnny loves all things cowboy, so the party had a cowboy theme and turned out to be a really fun evening. Lori asked if I'd take pictures, and I said yes - and then I discovered the lighting was highly conducive to atmosphere but not at all conducive to taking pictures. So I apologize now for the grainy pics.

Be still my beating heart: they made a photo booth!!!! That's a real saddle in there, and people could sit on it if they wanted to!

Delicious cupcakes...

SO much food...

Pictures of the birthday boy...

And a DJ!

While we waited for Johnny to arrive, we had fun with the photo booth. I took lots of pictures, but since I don't know any of those people, we'll stick to taking a gander at my favorite cowboy:

Sigh of love.

Oh! And we got a picture together, thanks to a really nice guest who offered to take one for us. Unfortunately the red light from the disco ball was on my face. LOL.

Some red eye is just out of control.

Ryan and his step-dad, Allen:

 Like Ryan's green nose?

Eventually Johnny showed up and ALL our pictures of his entrance are blurry, because of the lighting. {of course.} But I did especially love this one:

Ryan and Johnny had funny and serious pictures in the photo booth:

The DJ was a lot of fun and there were apparently several dance-loving folks in the crowd:

Johnny and Lori's son stole the show a few times. He was so cute!!

Ryan's niece was on her way to a winter dance and she looked stunning:

And his other niece sang a little song - did a great job!

{Looks like someone wanted to help!}

At the very end of the night, we all got to watch a video of pictures of Johnny's life. Lori worked hard on it and it lasted about 20 minutes. Well done and so fun to see the many hairstyles of Johnny! LOL!
{Bless the 80's and 90's}.

A fun night and a fun party! {And a fun disco ball!}

Anniversary #3

Yes, I know. Our anniversary was an entire week ago. But I never got to tell you what we did that day. So here I am to tell you!

Ryan doesn't get a ton of time off work, and between our vacation in October and his round of jury duty in November, he'd missed a lot lately. So we didn't really have a lot to work with when it came to time off for our anniversary. He told me he could take one day, and I could choose if he took it as part of our weekend getaway or on the actual day. I chose the actual day.

It was so nice to sleep in that morning; we needed extra rest, especially since he was fighting that silly cold. We made breakfast at home and eased our way into the day. {Easing included a workout. That part was not easy.}

We went out to run some errands {because that's so romantic!!!!} It was right about here that I began to wonder if he actually loved me at all anymore.

Yes. On our anniversary.

But, on to happier times...including hunting down a dress our niece needed for the weekend. I think it looked better on her.

 Our poor Firby tree had been sitting all naked for three days, so we came home and decorated him:

It's not finished here, but that was as far as we got that day, because it was time to go take our anniversary pictures...you remember those from yesterday!

After the pictures, we went out for dinner. A new little Thai restaurant opened in town not long ago, and we'd never been there. So we went, and it was quite tasty!!

We came home for our gift exchange. You remember Ryan's rhino, which was the unbeatable gift of all time, but did you REALLY think I could go through a whole anniversary without giving him the designated gift? {Third anniversary is leather.} I got him this leather desk caddy, which he promptly declared should be a remote boat, and I have to admit, it works really well as one!

He gave me glass jewelry, which I absolutely adore.

We curled up with coffee and cupcakes and watched/cried over our wedding video. You can guess who did what.}

It was a lovely, lovely day. Thank you, Baby, for taking off work and hanging out with me. I loved having the day with you! And I have loved these three years with you!

Anniversary Photo Love

Before I show you my pictures, I wanted to let you know that podcast, episode three is UP! {Last week the hosting site had some technical issues the same day Episode 2 went up, so if you missed it, you can still hear it.} Anyway. Click the link below the picture here and you can enjoy episode 3. Or at least we hope you enjoy it! {Trust me - there are a couple stories you don't want to miss. Sigh.}

Click here to listen

So....I know I haven't told you about our adventures ON our actual anniversary, but I gotta show you these pictures! Every year, as you may or may not remember, we recreate the same handful of wedding pictures, and then I make a little collage to show the journey of us. Normally we just use our tripod for these photo shoots, but our friend Nate had offered us a photo shoot since I helped him with his family pictures a few weeks ago. I asked if he would be willing to do the shoot for us, and he said YES. He's a friend of Ryan's from PTA school, and they have a blast together. I had to get this picture of them before we left that day.

Nate was amazing - we only had about a half hour to squeeze these pictures in between the time he got off work and the time it became too dark to take pictures. And he rushed to get them - and still paid attention to each detail of the pictures we recreated. This was my favorite. I just adore this one.

And while this one was not one of our recreated poses, I love this one too!!

Okay - so here is our collection of recreated photos! {You can click on them to make them larger if they're hard to see.}

And then I made this with all our  monthiversary pictures from 2015. We've been asked when we plan to give up celebrating monthiversaries. Uh, don't plan to!

And one more shot from the day:

92 County Tour: Allen County

We decided to merge our anniversary getaway trip with our 92 county tour and knock out Allen County while we were at it! It was challenging, actually, for two reasons. First {and foremost}, Allen County is the biggest county in the state, and it's no joke - 660 square miles! That's a lot of ground to cover! Secondly, Allen County is where I worked for four years, so Ryan and I have already traveled over a lot of it already, and I wanted to find things that were new and different to try for our trip!

Your history lesson for the day is that Allen County is named after Colonel John Allen, who was killed in the War of 1812. {Before our time.}

There is SO MUCH to do in this county, so please know this is certainly not an exhaustive list of options.

It's kind of hard to see, but my chalkboard really says Allen. :)

I told you about it already here, but we did a lot of shopping! Fort Wayne has a great mall {at least it's great in the eyes of this Grant County girl}. Actually it has two great malls. The indoor, traditional kind of mall and an outdoor shopping center. We went to both!

And of course, you can't go to Allen County without stopping at DeBrand for some chocolates. Oh my goodness. So good. DeBrand has been around since 1987 and has established quite a reputation of delicious chocolates and desserts. They have multiple locations in Fort Wayne, and at one, you can take a tour of the place, but we visited a different one, so we didn't take a tour. We did, however, eat up, and it was completely delicious!

And as you also already read, we took a trip through the Fantasy of Lights, which was delightful as well! We have a similar light display here in Marion, but it's always fun to see what other places have to offer.

The last day of our weekend in Allen County, we visited a coffee shop, just like we always do in every county! I wanted to find a shop I'd not been to before, and this was the winner: Mocha Lounge!

It was a coffee shop in a strip mall - but you guys, look what it has???

A food truck!! {Smitten.}

The inside was adorable - and much bigger than we envisioned. Our drinks came in enormous mugs that are pretty much the size mugs should be.

Delicious!! And my favorite thing was that they had a TRUCK!!!!

Once we were sufficiently caffeinated, we headed to the  St. Joe Christmas tree farm I told you about:

We didn't cover all 600 some square miles of the county with this tour, but we sure did have a blast seeing some new pieces of the land that we'd not seen before. Thanks, Allen County, for being great hosts!!