a quick bit of catch up...

Man, oh man! i can not believe that it has been so long since i wrote! let me do this by family member: It is so much easier to follow me on FACEBOOK..... first off the above picture is of my mom and her new husband, Dean Nix. they married Feb. 5, 2009. He is a wonderful man and such a blessing to be added to our family!!

Drew - first year of high school has been awesome for him. he is a great student and athlete. he just recently made the JV baseball team. he is the starting 3rd baseman and he pitches some too. 2 weeks ago he was hit in the face with a ball and broke his nose. Thankfully he had spring break to recover before games resume! He was put on the DL for 2 weeks! that was when he cried! He also got his learner's permit at the beginning of March. He has been driving some. He does a pretty good job. He drove for the first time on the interstate over the Easter weekend!

Ashley - almost out of middle school! On the same day Drew broke his nose she fell off the top of a desk at school and got a concussion. We seriously spent the entire day in the hospital! She recently auditioned for AMTC - http://www.amtcworld.com/ and was called back for acting, singing and commercial print. She will compete at the competition this summer in Orlando. She is very excited!

Griffin - same old, same old! Work, church, spending all his free time with us! AT&T threatening going on strike has his work schedule a little bent out of shape....but we are just so thankful that he has a job!

Connie - worked seasonal work for Lifetouch Portrait Studios. Was a lot of fun. But starting in jan, I began teaching piano at a local music store. I now have 21 students. We are having a blast! the economy is just not what it needs to be to hire personal professional photographers!

8-5-08

School will be starting next week. Hopefully i wil have more time to get to my blog! Drew will be in 9th grade this year. He is playing quarterback for the 9th grade team at his high school. He is excited and nervous about starting high school this year. Ashley starts 8th grade. Her last year in middle school. She is excited. She also holds the candle for drama last year, so she is very excited about the drama year! And she is a cheerleader this year. She is on the basketball cheer squad. I will post a picture of Drew in his uni and a pic of ash in her uni!!

even more exciting is that Ashley made a drama company for atlanta workshop players, called The Punchline Junior Company. She is very excited! She will have practices every saturday for that:-)

Okie dokie.....we will see how the week goes! Many smiles for the week prior to school!!!!

2008-07-15

we had such a great time at the beach this last week. we spent tuesday on the beach. on wednesday we spent the day walking around downtown charleston. then on wednesday night we went out to Sullivan's Island to take pictures of ourselves on the beach. they turned out so well! that day for lunch we ate at Hyman's Restaurant. griffin had to work until 4 am on wednesday night and so we slept in on thursday until almost lunch time. On thursday we just went shopping. we found ashley and griffin the shirts that they were searching for all over charleston!! plus for supper we ate at Bubba Gump's Restaurant. it was sooooo delicious! it was my favorite meal! that night it rained...okay it stormed. we were camping in our tent at a KOA site. we had never camped for more than one night before. it was so awesome to sleep with the rain hitting the tarp that we had stretched out over the roof of the tent. on friday it rained off and on. but we were able to get the last of the things we wanted to do done. then that afternoon we went putt putting and it started to rain really bad. it was a terrible storm. we were only able to get 1/2 of the course played and we had payed for unlimited! the manager was so nice to validate us for the next day too! so after we got everything packed up on saturday morning, we went to the putt-putt place and played both of the courses to the end! of course, griffin won both :-) then we drove up to clemson and my brother cooked the most amazing talapia. we had a bonfire and roasted marshmallows for gabe's birthday. i will enclose some pictures of the kids from the beach!

07-01-08

I know. It has been a long time since I was in the blog. Since school has been out for the summer it has been one thing after the other! But it has been glorious!

Drew made the high school summer baseball team! Can you believe it? I have a high schooler! We spent the month of July going to tournaments every weekend. Except for one weekend when Griffin and I went to Alabama for a photo shoot. That also happened to be our 16th wedding anniversary, so we made it a nice little get-away with work mixed in :-) It was a photo shoot for a dance company's recital. It was beautiful and so much fun! (way to go Megan!!)

Ashley has just been in tow going to all the baseball games except for one week when she stayed with my mom and helped teach the kindergartener's class for Vacation Bible School! She had so much fun!

This past weekend we went down to Piedmont Park and took some pictures. I will upload a couple to this blog, but to see them all go to www.mysplendidphoto.com/park

We are excited about an upcoming beach trip that i will definately blog about :)

4-10-08

wow was I tired from yesterday! We got up early again this morning. After eating the continental breakfast we got on the bus and rode over to the city again. We walked by Madison Square Gardens and I took a picture. we walked over to the Empire State Building. We had to stand in line. Once we got up to the top we went on the NY Skyride first. It was a virtual ride from the sky over the city showing us all the main points about the city. Then we rode the elevator on up to the 86th floor and walked around the observatory. Most of my pictures today was from the top of the Empire State Bldg. We walked down the stairs back to the 80th floor. On the last set of stairs, Drew fell down the stairs. He is fine, but his elbow was bleeding a little bit and he hurt the heel of his left foot. But was a trooper he was! He got right up and he walked the rest of the day (that happened around 11:00!) and never once complained that it was hurting! I got to walk by the Flat Iron Building which is probably my favorite building here in NY. It was bueatiful.
After that we rode the subway, which is very clean and looks just like MARTA, to The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. It was amazing!! After that we walked over to Ground Zero and saw the construction and clean up where the Twin Towers once stood. there we saw the fire station across the street. There were memorials there and at the corner. In the firehouse there was signs that had melted from the attack. it was very moving. And the firefighters we standing outside and talking to the passersby! It was moving!! We rode the subway back to Times Square and ate at the McDonald's there. It was so glitzy inside the McDonalds! After that Drew and Ashley got caricatures of them both. They are adorable! We didn't tell the man anything and he drew Ashley with a mic singing and Drew with a baseball bat swinging! It was so cool!!! Enough for today....i am exhausted! And there is so much more to see tomorrow!!!!!

4-9-08

today was a wonderful day. We started out very early. We rode a bus to the city. After getting off at the stop we walked and walked and walked! we went to Rockefeller Center and we got our tickets to the tour. Then we walked down to MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) we were actually shocked at some of the content called art there. Then we walked back to NBC to go on the tour. Our tour was cut short, but it was so cool. We saw a working studio. We stood on the set of the Nightly News with Brian Williams. We saw all the lights and the cameras. While we were at Times Square we walked over to the Museum of TV & Radio. We thought it would be a true museum, but it turned out to be more like a library. So we left and went back to Rockefeller Center and watched the ice skaters and got Subway to eat. Then we walked all the way across the City to the United Nations Building and took the tour. We then took pictures inside the Daily News Building of the large globe rotating in the lobby. then it was off to Grand Central Station! It was so beautiful! We shopped inside Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. and inside M&M World! We ate supper at a local pizza place called Ray's Pizza. The pizza was delicious! We ended the night at Madame Tousseau's wax museum. Drew was so funny because when we first got there he wanted his picture taken with Will Smith. Sitting right beside where Will Smith was standing was the Osborne's. Drew was very freaked out by the Osbornes and wanted me to take the picture really fast. My camera was acting up and taking a really long time to take the picture because my card was almost full. Well, he kept stepping out of the frame because he was terified that the Osborne's would suddenly be alive instead of just wax!!!! Finally after I walked over and put my hands on them and showed him that they really were wax, then he was cool the rest of the night! We got home really late and crashed into the bed!

4-11-08

4-11-08
I believe that today was our best day in NY! I don’t know if it was because we knew we were at the end of our adventure, or if it was just the things that we were able to see. We started out our morning a little later (that could have justified the better day too!!) and rode the bus into the City. We walked to a subway and rode the subway all the way to the Bronx! Now, let me explain something. The first 2 days that we were in NY, I didn’t understand what all the fuss was about…lack of safety. While in the City there were very few times that we felt unsafe. But our trip out to the Bronx Zoo was a little unnerving. Once at the Zoo however, the Zoo was wonderful! The layout was incredible. They had the animals in large areas that resembled their native surroundings. The tigers were out doing their training for the day so they were very close to us! The best things we saw were regular animals throughout the zoo. The picture at the top is of a regular duck that kept going under to find food. Once he put his head under the water his bottom stuck straight up!! We breezed through the Zoo in record time. We could have spent half a day there but we ended up only spending 2 hours there. We jumped back on the subway and headed to NY Yankees Stadium. We were able to walk around the stadium and take pictures. That stadium is going to be torn down after this year, they are building a brand new stadium right beside the old one, so we were able to see the new stadium too! We then got back on the subway and rode all the way back to Central Park where we got a hotdog from the street vendor. It was okay….but the wiener was really small and only ketchup and mustard?? It was purely for the experience! Then we went inside The American Museum of Natural History. IT WAS AMAZING! Again, we could have stayed in this place for a complete whole day, but we only had about 3 ½ hours there. We saw all the things we wanted to see from the movie, Night at the Museum like Gum Gum Head and Rex the Dinosaur. There was so much to see in there, I started to feel like I had information overload!
We then rode the subway down to the Port, where we saw the Statue of Liberty so that we could see the BODIES the exhibition. OKAY, well, I was anticipating this as being incredible. After having seen the exhibit, I actually think it was better than incredible, but I can’t come up with a word that is good enough to describe it. Unfortunately, it was the only place on the whole adventure that we were not able to take pictures or video. But it was unbelievable. They had human cadavers all over the place pristinely preserved. We were able to view the systems of the body. See the skeletal…how the bones were put together to function. Then we saw the muscular section and saw the different types of muscle. It made us all want to skip out on meat for awhile J They had some of the bodies set up like they were throwing a football, a discus, a baseball to show how the body moves. Then we saw the fat. It is so gross to think that that is what we look like inside. Then we saw the lungs and the heart. We saw healthy lungs and then lungs with diseases like Tuberculosis and cancer and people who smoke. It also showed us what happens when you breathe in pollutants! There was a case where they encouraged people to throw away their cigarettes! It was about ½ full!! Then we walked into the section about reproduction. It had several fetuses that had died in utero from natural causes. It was so cool to be able to show Drew and Ashley what the baby looks like even at 4-6 weeks. How it has tiny fingers and toes and a nose J it was so cool to show them the things that I had seen in school. To show them how the fallopian tubes were not connected to the ovaries. So when an egg is released only God can maneuver it into the fallopian tube. Drew, Ashley and Griffin were so in awe of how God created our body with such intricate detail, so that the body would function as He designed it to. There was one section where they put a plastic molding agent into the blood vessels, then used a chemical to burn off the muscle and skin so that only the vessels were left. It was so beautiful! I can’t say enough about the Bodies….go see it if you ever get the chance…it tours around the country.
Then on the walk back to find somewhere to eat we were caught in between 2 feuding teenage groups. We quickly found the subway and headed back to Times Square so that we could catch the bus and go back to the hotel. Once we got back to Times Square, Drew was approached by a man that said he was robbing him, and that Griffin would be his daddy now. So after that little experience we decided to head back to the hotel. We got back to the hotel rather late, but found a menu in the room for a Chinese. They delivered and it was so delicious!! We fell into our bed and slept!