If you can't beat 'em, join 'em

One of my favorite home cooked meals is my mom's Beef and Noodles. I have never tried to recreate it, because it could never measure up to hers. But today, I decided to. I cooked a beef roast for 3 hours and in the meantime made a batch of homemade noodles. After about 4 hours of cooking, Brad and I finally enjoyed a bowl of delectable noodle soup! Here is a picture of the noodles as they were hardening for 2 hours.


I am also posting two other cute pictures. One of Bonnie as I was doing laundry and the other of my "flowers for the week".

Nails: Part Deux

I used the gift certificate Brad gave me for Valentine's Day and got my nails done. It felt so nice to sit and relax and be pampered. I chose the color "fruity sangria". I wish I could have a glass of that at the same time as getting my nails done. Afterward, I ran some errands and did some laundry. Bonnie also got a nice long walk today in the beautiful spring weather.


P.S. I had to stop by work to drop something off and while I was there I got a call - at 5:30 on a Saturday. Anyway, it was a weird woman who wanted me to bring 4 residents to an all day comedy shoot for a Beyonce dance video spoof. She wanted me to have them wear black undergarments, a black leotard, and black heels. She said they would pick them up at 9:15 and they would be there all day. I hope you all are making the same face I was as she was telling me this. Can you see 80 and 90 year old - old south classic women, who use wheel chairs and walkers dancing all day to Beyonce in black leotards and heels? Sheesh, I almost asked her what planet she was on.

South Africa

So... the popular radio station here partnered with a museum and was giving away a trip for 2 on an all inclusive trip to South Africa. As soon as I heard that this week I knew I had to try to win it. I had a feeling... woke up in the middle of the night thinking about this trip - gosh I could taste it. Well, we went to the event tonight and watched on as the DJ of the party won the trip. Can you believe that rip off? How can the DJ win while the rest of the paying customers get turned away? He didn't even look excited. Brad and I think it was all a huge scheme that we fell for. I am such a sucker. haha

I am bummed but will try to consider this a seized opportunity. Better luck next time. "Mwr Mwh"- Debbie Downer, with the face and all.

Dog school

We started Wyatt in puppy kindergarten this week. Since he is going to be HUGE, we decided it would be good to make sure we can control him while he is little. We actually saw a girl there who had a Rhodesian Ridgeback (which is Wyatt's breed) who was born on the SAME day and Wyatt was 15 pounds heavier already. Yikes. Anyway, its not a great pic, but it was kind of awkward taking a pic during class. It was funny because every time the trainer had Jimmy and Wyatt do an example, Wyatt would never listen. We are headed to a cabin with some friends to some skiing. Jimmys sweet fam is keeping the pup. Our first weekend away from our "kid". See you all Sunday!

Engagement Ring

So I think you all know that Kelli, Brad's sister, got engaged over Thanksgiving - and she's getting married August 7th! So had to get her ring resized, so I went with her last night to Jared's to pick it up :) It was fun to get to spend some one-on-one time with her, since we don't do that very often. Then we went to Olive Garden for dinner, but I forgot to take a picture!

MY TWO FAV'S

So simply put I love these two.

Nails

Hey y'all!!   I've decided to grow out my nails!  I don't know if you all remember that i've always bitten them, but i'm trying to stop.  Don't really know why...i just decided to a few weeks ago and here are the results!  So far, its been about 3 weeks!!  i'm pretty proud if you can't tell :-)  I've been showing everyone so I thought I definitely needed to take a pic and show you all too :-)  hope you are having a great day!  

LOVE YOU

PS...the youth visions night last Friday went AMAZING!!!  It was soooooooo great and we all had so much fun together!!  We ended up playing boys vs. girls DVD family feud!  remember when we used to play that too?!?  Anyway, thanks for asking and for praying!  Can't wait for the next event with them :-)

Choco Chip and Simon

So I actually left work today at 5:30. I can't remember the last time that happened. I made tortilla soup(which I probably make once a week ..haha) and relaxed. Then when Brad came home he made some mean choco chip cookies from scratch and I tried to keep up with Simon tonight. I thought the girls did a million times better than the guys, but I did feel like Simon was brutal tonight.

OK so I have to admit - I like Ellen as a judge. The person who is killing me is Kara. Oh my word she is annoying the heck out of me. I wish wish wish Paula was back and I can't believe I am saying that.

Who are your fav's? I have too many to name...

MIA

Sorry I've been MIA for the last several days. The 24 hour stomach bug has successfully worked its way through the Duncan home in 72 hours, and I spent the day today lysoling my entire home! Thankfully, we are all out of the woods now, and Elijah and I are gearing up for our big trip to Florida! We fly out tomorrow morning...prayers for a happy baby on the plane would be appreciated :). I will try to update while I'm there, but I'm not sure what the computer situation will be.

To update on the big news in our lives (which there isn't really BIG news), our friends from Bible Study, Tony and Casey, just welcomed their little girl Sophie on Thursday afternoon! Kirk, E, and I headed over to the hospital on Friday to meet her. I have never held someone so small in my life...she was only 5lbs 14 oz but she is precious!

Anyway, here is a picture of me and the cutie.

Vine and Branches

I was meeting with Cindy (the woman who's been mentoring me for a few years) tonight along with 2 other gals who are in a small group together. We're studying Nancy Leigh DeMoss's Lies Women Believe. We had a great discussion on our priorities, as well as the role God has given us as women. Along with the study, Cindy is having us memorize John 15 bit by bit. So far we've done the first 8 verses. The beginning of the chapter is a familiar passage: Jesus is the vine; we are the branches. What's really stood out to me lately is how we are utterly incapable without Jesus. In the end of verse 5, He says, "Apart from me you can do NOTHING." In our human nature we long for independency, but the truth-of-the-matter is we're desperately dependent on the Lord for everything we do. What a simultaneously humbling and marvelous thought that is.

Can't think of a title

Yay for American Idol starting - I definitely have some fav's. and I do wish we could watch it together with some coke and puppy chow!

When I got home from work, Brad made spaghetti with spicy sausage sauce. He has a little spaghetti trick to make it taste better in my opinion. So once the pasta is al dente (bite the middle of the noodle and make sure there is still a tiny bit of white in the center) you drain and return it back to the empty pot with some butter and about a 1/4 cup of the spaghetti sauce you are using. Keep the pot on heat and stir the spaghetti with the butter and sauce until all the noodles are coated and now look orange-ish. This will make the sauce stick better and the noodles taste better -- in my opinion. P.S. use "Newman's Own" Tomato and Basil sauce with some sauteed spicy Italian sausage - yummy.

My pictures are of Bonnie and her Valentine's toy dog. She has basically ripped everything out of it - the noisemaker and the stuffing. I thought these pics were cute.

Rock Bottom (Brewery...not emotionally!)

Sorry it's been awhile since I've posted!! But the most exciting thing that has happened recently, is that Brad passed his thesis defense on Friday!!! Yay!!! So now he just has to go to class on Monday nights this semester, and he graduates in May! We are almost there....

So anyway, I took him out to dinner on Friday night (Kelli was kind enough to watch Max for us). We went to a restaurant in Indy called Rock Bottom Brewery...it was AMAZING! Now, I was incredibly hungry, so that might have impacted this next comment, but it was the BEST BURGER I HAVE EVER HAD! So good. And just fun to go out and celebrate :)

Boots

In anticipation of the junior high winter retreat this coming weekend, I decided I had better look for some winter boots. Sadly, my old ones kicked-the-bucket when the zipper completely broke off of one of them. I needed some odds-and-ends at Target, so I thought for sure they'd have some boots to buy. No such luck. They had flip-flops and sandals instead. Wal-Mart was on my way home, so I prayed as I pulled into the parking lot that God would enable me to find a pair of boots that were inexpensive and that were in my size. And wouldn't you know, the first shelf of shoes I laid eyes on was full of rain boots, with this one, lone, oddball pair of gray boots. But what were the chances they were in my size? When I looked at the tag, I knew my prayer had been answered...size 6...$6.

Now, they're certainly not the fasionable Uggs that everyone and her mother and child and sister and aunt wears around here...but they make me think of Napoleon Dynamite...and that makes me really happy:) And if they're anything like the tan slip-on shoes I bought from Wal-Mart my sophomore year at Taylor (which I just wore today, in fact), they'll get many years of good use. Sigh...God is so good!

Pics from last week

Shame on me ... I didn't really take any pictures today to share something worthwhile. BUt I wanted to share these Mardi Gras party pics with you from my work's mardi gras party. We had a jazz player and made masks and wore beads!

Something's Fishy

Welcome to my Sunday afternoon "tradition". Since we get the Sunday paper, I like to go through all the coupon booklets and clip, clip, clip. Ahh, the sweet sound of savings!

Next, I thumb through the "Rainbow" (that's the name of the grocery we shop at) ad and circle the items on sale that will eventually make it to a written list. So today there I was, sitting on the couch, doin' my thing, mindin' my own business, when I turned the page and spotted this:

Pink Salmon in a pink can. Yuck! I don't care if it's 16 cents cheaper this week, that makes me feel sick to my stomach. Perhaps you ladies can prove me wrong...maybe you've had salmon from a can and it's just dandy. I just couldn't get past the mere thought of it. I don't think it helps that it's the store's off-brand..."Roundy's". Ha. Needless to say that's $2.29 I'll be saving this week:)

Springtime is coming!

We opened the windows and balcony door and let all that fresh spring air come in. Today was a nice relaxing day, for me anyways. Brad had to write an essay for class and hang up my curtains.


I made him PB & J sushi to thank him.


And then got my weekly flowers.


I like doing this and it really does make my apt feel more homey and smell fresh. I miss having Colts on Sunday afternoons, but I made up for it by watching Untold Stories of the ER.

Weekends

Dallas came in for the weekend to hang out. We went to the Hershey choc. factory (doesnt that bring back memories), into central market and watched some movies. It was fun. She also becamed obsessed with herrs chips, so we went to the grocery store and I stocked her up before she went home. Then, today we had lunch with the Hess side of the family and I just had to take a pic of Riley and Sophie cause they were being hilarious. They look like best friends.

Rub a Dub Buggy and Bonnie

The weather today was quite incredible. It was sunny and 61 degrees. It gave that nice feeling of springtime and hope. We took Bonnie to get her last puppy shots and a haircut and wash. She was getting pretty shaggy. I think the people cut her hair too short - all of her curl is gone, but she smells amazing and my hope is that her hair will grow out soon.

We also ran some errands, including take the good old Acura to the Cactus Car Wash. Okay so I drive past this place all the time and laugh the a car wash place is called "Cactus", but we needed to spruce up the inside and outside of our car. Being in an apartment makes it hard to wash and vacuum your car. We pulled in and you would have thought they were giving out money. Soooo many cars were there and soooo many workers. They had this incredible system set up and I was amazed with the efficientness of the place. We live in a pretty "up"-ity neighborhood and people were getting their mercedes, porsches, lexus, all kinds washed and detailed. Some of the wash prices were $200 bucks.

Our buggy left all shiny and clean. Free of winter's dirt and salt. (I realize these pictures aren't all that interesting, but I was trying to capture all the workers and cars to show the magnitude of this car wash place. )

Tom & Judy

We were over at Tom and Judy's (Brian's folks) recently sold house this afternoon to help move a couple pieces of furniture, as well as to go through some of the things they are giving away. I'm not quite sure how they've done in, but they have worked their tails off to get their home of 30 years ridded of stuff and their new apartment fixed in an adorable fashion. Speaking of their apartment, here is the outside of the building they're in. I forgot to take the camera inside, so the best I could do was a quick shot out the car door window as we left tonight. Pretty, isn't it?

Curtains

We still have quite a lot of projects to do on our house. We hit a wall after working OVERTIME in the first month and so we totally stopped for a while. Recently I got the urge to press on and we hung curtains! I didn;t take a before shot of the one room, but we put them up in our family room and the living room.

"Poe"trait

Tonight Brad and I went to the Center for Puppetry Arts in downtown ATL. It has a sweet museum of Jim Henson muppets, Fraggle Rock, Ernie, and a real life Big Bird. So we got to see all of that and then we went to a puppet show called "Tales of Edgar Allen Poe". When I say puppet I mean like real handcrafted spitting images of Poe about 2 and half feet tall. The actors put their hands through the sleeves of the puppet so it looked like Poe had real human hands. Gosh the puppet aspect of it was incredible. A true creative show. They had a sweet sound effects dude too. The content of the show was disturbing because that is how Poe's poems are. But we had some good laughs taking these funny pictures.

Tennis Tournament!

Hello again!

I hope you all are having a great week!  My week has been pretty good actually.  Even though "Valentine's week" isn't necessarily one of my favorite weeks of the year (ha!) ...I did manage to enjoy it anyway.  Kelly, I saw the Valentine's Day movie...I loved it and i "raised the roof" in my seat when that part came on when they talked about "muncie indiana"...booyah!  Something else that came to my mind this week during "valentine's week" was a little reminder from a card Darla gave me last year for Valentine's day....Darla, you encouraged me to remember how loved I am by Christ even though I might not necessarily have a "valentine" for the holiday and it just really blessed me alot last year and as I remembered that this year......so double thank you! 

Something you all could maybe pray about today for me and work if you think about it is tonight our youth group has a special get-to-know-you event with another youth group in Memphis from an organization called "Youth Visions".  This other youth group is from the inner city of Memphis and is predominately African American, and both of our youth group's leadership teams are getting together tonight for a cookout and game night in order to get to know each other better!  (sidenote: our kids are definitely HIGHer priviledged white kids that ALL but few go to private schools here that are unbelievable)  Anyway, the reason we are having this get-to know-you event is because eventually we are looking to partner with this youth group for the next 3 to 5 years in doing service projects together in Memphis.  Normally, our group participates in some sort of service project in Memphis once a month, but this year the Lord has put it on all our staff's hearts to also work on bringing more racial reconciliation to Memphis (b/c its still a major issue here) through our youth group AS we service...  soooo we have found this other AMAZING youth group and we want to do service TOGETHER!  It is sooooooo cool and we are all soooooo excited about it...but it is all still in the beginning stages...and we are just taking our time in order to let the Lord lead b/c we want it to be ALL through Him.  The things you could maybe pray for is that the high school leadership team has already had a few events with Youth Visions already, but tonight will be the 1st time for the Junior High to get a chance to start forming relationships with them.   (which the jr. high is who I work with)....so if you could just pray that the Holy Spirit would be present with us and that we would have just a great time in fellowship together in spite of there maybe being a few moments of ackwardness.  :-)  Ahhh...i'm excited though! 

The pictures I wanted to share with you all today are from a tennis tournament that I had a chance to go to yesterday on my day off...WOOT WOOT!  Every year Memphis has a pretty major tennis tournament that a lot of "big names" come to and yesterday one of my good friends from work randomly got 3 free box seat tickets and she invited me and amanda to come with her!  Sooo fun!  I've never been to anything like it...it was REALLY intense...but i absolutely loved it!  We saw part of a guys double match, and then we watched a 17 year old american girl (her name is melanie something) play a woman from sweden.  Also, another really cool thing is that ALOT of our students (from youth group) belong to tennis clubs and such here and were "ball kids" during these games...crazy, huh?  Anyway, here are the pics...  

LOVE YOU ALL!  

BD2

I feel lame for not posting yesterday since everybody else did, so I figured I better get on it first today :).  Since Kelly mentioned the Baby bump, I decided to post some pictures.  It sort of happened all of the sudden this week...but it is definitely there.  I sometimes refer to this baby as BD2 (baby Duncan 2), hence the title of the post!

Hi, baby!

I can only imagine how big I am going to get if this is what I already look like!

Sisters

Okay, so when we were little girls, my sister Dee Ann created a "club" (of sorts) that only the 3 of us Stults girls belonged to. It was called the Pal-Pal-Association (affectionately known as "The PPA"). To this day, we call each other "Pal" and have sort of a strange way of talking to each other. Well, a few years ago Dee Ann declared February 22 as "PPA Day"...so we've been sending each other gifts ever since.

Specifically for Dee Ann this year, I decided to retell a memory in a story form...when we were little girls, playing with our other siblings and some distant relatives who lived just across the street from us. While we were playing, I remembered that Dee Ann and I had placed Tang (you know, the yummy orange flavored drink) in the freezer the day before...and that it would now be a frozen delight. So I came up with some lame excuse for why Dee Ann and I had to go home. We grabbed our cups of Tang and sat out the big wooden swing in the front lawn enjoying our tasty treat. We could still see our playdates playing...not sure if they could see us. We felt pretty sneaky:) Ha ha. Oh boy. So, here are some of the pictures I drew for the little booklet I made her. Dee Ann is actually in the slums of India right now, treating those with medical ailments. She won't return to the States until March 26...so PPA Day will come a little later this year:)

Dee Ann and I really had these outfits. My Grandma made them for us. Mine was bright pink with frogs all over it...Dee Ann's just had some teal/green lines and zigzags. No, Dee Ann is not flipping you off in the picture...that's just me not being able to make hands very well.

Here's when we came up with our brilliant plan.

Off to the freezer!

Ahh, the sweet taste of victory!

Happy Birthday Mom!

Happy Birthday to my Mom! An hour and half left of birthday wishes...

Chrissie and E

So Chrissie and I don't see each other nearly as often as we should, considering we live an hour apart, but today was one of those special days when Max and I got to spend time with her and E! We also went to McAlister's (sp?) Deli for lunch, which is always good. Our time together was short, as I had to get back for work and the boys needed to nap, but it was still so great to see them. Elijah is getting so big! And walking around like such a little man. Oh, and I'm kicking myself all over that I didn't get a shot of her "baby bump," because girls, it's definitely there!

I wish we all were closer together so I could see all of you, too, but am thankful for Chrissie being so close :) What a huge blessing you all are in my life. And Jacki, I can't tell you how glad I am you thought of this blog!!!

Love Kelly

(this one of Elijah CRACKS me up!)