Happy 40th Heath!

My brother in law, Heath, turned 40 last month and we surprised him with a fun weekend in Austin. They live in Dallas so we met them in Austin - a nice in the middle meeting spot. It was a much needed vacation for all of us. We floated the San Marcos river, shopped 'til we dropped, and fed our faces with WAY too much food. 

Here we are at the most delicious (& expensive) restaurant we have ever eaten at - Uchiko's. Seriously, it was the best food I have ever tried. My mouth is watering just thinking about it.  I have never eaten food of that caliber before. The best part....desert. Sweet polenta ice cream. My only regret -we shared it. I need my own next time!

 Don't mind me, I'm just cooking my  steak on my very own hot rock. 

Compliments of the San Marcos River. 

No vacation in Austin is complete without spending a whole day at the Pottery Barn outlet. Dangerous.

My most favorite find. Originally $800. My price - $190. Thank you discount! Just reaping the benefits of working there. Now I need a job at Nordstrom to make my life complete!

I've been keeping an eye out for this piece. Found it!

Thank you Hill's for such a fun vacation. Wish we lived in the same city so we can always be on vacation :)

So behind!

Can't believe I haven't blogged in almost 2 months! So much has happened. First things first, we bought a home! So exciting. We have loved every bit of it and can't wait until we're all finished moving in. The home search was quite labor intensive for us. Tyler and I take forever (and I really mean FOREVER!) to make decisions and have to check out all our options before deciding. It took us 3 months of seeing over 40 homes to finally finding the perfect one. The second we walked in the front door we knew this was the house we want. It took us a full day to really decide on the offer we wanted to put in. We finally decided and put in our offer. Sadly, the realtor immediately got back to us letting us know the sellers had already accepted another offer earlier that day! Tyler and I were crushed. We then decided we want to rent apartments for the rest of our lives! We were so sick of the home buying process. A few weeks later we received the best email ever - an email from our realtor letting us know the house we wanted went back on the market!!! Tyler and I wasted no time and immediately put in our offer. Within a few hours the sellers accepted and the house was finally ours!

Here we are signing our lives away!

WE NEED VISITORS! COME TO TEXAS!

we.love.sunday's.

Sunday game of Yahtzee by the pool. Yep, Yahtzee. You'd think we were old fogey's but that's the only 2 player game we had! Anyone have 2 player games up their sleeve? Or better yet, anyone want to come visit?! Oh and bring a camera because we need one!

Ready, Set, JUICE!

I've had it. Had it with headaches. Had it with no energy. Had it with nausea. Had it with the dizziness. Had it with just about everything! I have seriously tried everything to get rid of this pain. Seven years worth. I am convinced that it might be the food that I'm putting in my body. Ok, halfway convinced. I have been reading a lot about juicing and healing and wonder if juicing might help. So, I bought a juicer and decided to do a 10 day juice cleanse. That way I can detox my body and then add each food group slowly in to my diet. Then I can hopefully target what it is that makes my head hurt. Tyler is gracious enough to do it with me! Tomorrow is officially our first full day but we decided to do a tester tonight.

I let Tyler give it a shot....

And of course he had to give me his best face. That's why I love him. There's never a dull moment when Tyler's in the room. He makes a crappy situation in to something fun. 

I was going to post the recipe we tried but ended up not liking it. There was too much fruit. Not to mention, Tyler was in charge of reading the recipe and he left out an important ingredient - coconut water.  That would have helped it out tremendously. So with that said, I'm in charge from now on! 

Excited for day 1 tomorrow!

Caught you!

Hilarious! So the other day I wondered where Tyler went. I knew he said he was going to shave but couldn't find him in our spacious 900sqft apartment. Until I saw the light on our deck. I looked out the blinds and this is what I found! He attached my handheld mirror to a cord hanging from our storage closet! haha Pretty creative but white trash at the same time. To his credit, he said he didn't want to get hair all over our bathroom floor. Instead he decided it was better to sweep it off our deck on to our neighbors deck :) 

We love baby Amelia

I think we need one of these.

Amelia May Buhanan

Bike hunt

I have been wanting a bike for so long! It didn't have to be expensive - preferably as cheap as possible. We looked at Walmart, Target, and Academy. I ended up going with one from Target. And the best part was it was only $49! It was actually $200 but we got lucky and paid basically pennies. It's not the best quality, but hey, it works. 

Tyler wants one now, too!

Free time

What do we do in Houston when we have some free time? Yep, Croquet (or "la croix" as I once called it). We usually go to a park - either Discovery Green or Memorial Park. We don't really know all the rules but end up making them all up! We still have a lot of fun with friends and love having competitions. I love playing games! I've been wanting to play bocce ball and badminton so badly. Can't wait to have a backyard to play!

The joys of teaching

Recent student quotes:

Student: Is your husband in Italy?

Me: No, Why?

Student: Because you're happier when he's here!

Student: I am having a hard time rememberizing this song.

Me: Did you get to memorizing this song?

Student: Sort of, but some of it is still soggy.

Last week one of my cute students made this for me. Thought it was cute how she spelled my new last name. I have a feeling it will be spelled like this the rest of my life!

I was struggling with bad behavior in some of my group classes. I got fed up and asked some of the good kids what to do with those who misbehave. This what they came up with!

These little kiddos make me laugh each and every day. However, at the same time, they can sure make me lose my patience! I guess this can serve as preparation for when I have kids of my own :)

DALLAS HERE WE COME!

Tomorrow we get to go to the big-D and celebrate this silly kid's 5th birthday!

We are so excited to take a weekend getaway. No work, just all play. We have been counting down the days for months now and it's finally here! Can't wait to see my sister and her cute family. Tomorrow my dad and brother are flying in to come look at houses with us and then we'll drive straight to Dallas after that. Speaking of houses, we still haven't found a house! We are having a hard time deciding which area we want to live in and if we want to build or buy pre-owned. So many decisions around here. We have looked at 40+ homes and I'm ready for it to be over and done with. Houston is so big that it leaves us with many choices. Almost too many. Tyler and I are probably 2 of the most indecisive people in the world and we happened to marry each other. Oh dear. Someone tell us what to do!

I learn something new everyday

The other day I learned something very important...that Tyler is 32, not 31! A few months ago I blogged about his 31st birthday. Come to find out, I can't do math. I knew all along he was born in 1980 but didn't realize it was 2012. And even funnier, Tyler isn't the one who caught my mistake. It was his friend Joey! haha. Thanks, Joey for helping me learn new things about my husband. Small details.

Exhausting weekend

This past weekend was absolutely tiring! I played 3 weddings on Saturday and 2 church services on Sunday. By the time I finished all I wanted to do was go to bed. But it was 4 pm...so we decided to have a relaxing day by the pool. It was 82 degrees with no humidity. Something very unusual for Houston. We wish it was like this all year long. Everyone here thinks this summer is going to be a nightmare considering temperatures are already at a high and it's only March. Thank goodness for air conditioning!

Tyler relaxing at our pool. WE NEED VISITORS!!!

Am I the only one who feels like this?

Happy 31st Tyler!

I am so far behind on posting. It was Tyler's birthday back on January 9th. What I remember that day...

• It was raining cats and dogs. Looked like a hurricane.
• We took my car in to shop to get a new transmission.
• Tyler worked from home. Was bummed I wasn't working from home
• We had oatmeal from McDonald's for breakfast
• Then Arby's for lunch
• And then I took him to Benjy's for dinner
• I surprised him with some much needed sunglasses
• Realized I married the most handsome, sweet man out there!

Friday night craft

Don't know what it is about crafting but I absolutely love it. And to have a husband who will do it with me makes it even better! I've wanted to make a wooden vintage sign for a long time now and I finally decided to do it. We went to home depot and had a piece of wood cut to our liking. Tyler then sanded the heck out of it,

While I found a font that I liked. I printed off the font on to card stock so it would be easier to trace on to the wood. 

 We found some paint at home depot that was mixed wrong for 50 cents! It turned out to be the perfect color of gray I wanted. 

We were too impatient to wait for it to dry so we brought out the blow dryer. Worked like a champ.

Then traced our saying with pencil. 

Painting was a little time consuming

A lot of sanding

Finally done. We thought it turned out ok. Of course there were a few things I'd change or pay closer attention to but i'm sure go it's unnoticeable to anyone else's eye. 

Enjoying down time

Christmas has come and gone and 2012 is just around the corner! We spent our first Christmas together in Utah with our families. We were looking forward to the cooler weather and it didn't let us down. We were frozen the whole time and loved every bit of it. We both enjoyed seeing family and friends whether it was at a christmas party or just a lunch outing. Wish we lived closer to do that more often. 

Tyler has been working A LOT lately....or for the last 5 years, rather. I was happy to see him take some time for himself and be lazy a few days. He definitely deserves some time off. He woke up Christmas morning at 10:00 a.m. and then took a nap from 12-4! Just a few hundred more of those naps and you'll be caught up Tyler! 

Jenny b-day dinner at Macaroni Grill. It was some good company but disgusting food! Can't believe I used to like that place. Maybe it was just an off night for them. 

Dec/Jan birthday celebrations - Tyler and Hanna

Cute little Annie modeling her new yellow shirt. Watch out Jackson's, you've got a model in the house!

HAHAHA! Good old High School memories. Brian and Tyler thought it would be fun to dig up their letterman jackets and see if they still fit. Good news everyone...they do! 

Ok, so maybe they are a little too big. This is my proof that Tyler buys everything way too big.

Now here is the best and not to mention, the most stressful part of our vacation - getting home on standby AND a buddy pass. First off, I have to say traveling standby is so overrated! I have flown standby my whole life and it about gives me a heart attack every time I wait for my name to be called. Despite all of my experience, Tyler and I decided that he would use a buddy pass to get to Utah for Christmas. We left a week early to insure we'd get there for Christmas. We got on the first flight out from Houston to Salt Lake City. What a breeze! Little did we know that going home was going to be a nightmare.  We anticipated the airport to be packed due to the holiday so we arrived a few hours early. Come to find out the crowd wasn't our enemy, the buddy pass system was! Somehow Tyler had no reservation even though we talked to a Delta representative the day before for an hour, AND it was an embargo day for buddy passes. No buddy passes were allowed to fly on that day. How did I miss this!?!? I was so upset because Tyler now had to buy a one way ticket on a different airline back to Houston adding up to $500!! I knew there was some way around the system so I tried to work my magic. Just a few tears and a fib or two later the gate agent printed out this beauty....

A ticket on my same flight in First Class next to me! We couldn't believe it. We got so lucky. He flew on a buddy pass with no reservation ON embargo day! We have no idea how that ended up working out but we were so relieved. He was able to refund his one way ticket on the other airline and we had a peaceful flight back to Houston...

Holiday Concert 2011

38 kids...38 violins...38 bows...Just a little taste of what I do all day, everyday! Love these little kiddos like crazy. This was our first concert of the 2011-2012 school year. They did such a great job, especially considering some of them had only been playing for 8 weeks. 

Big Birthday Surprise!

Tyler is the sweetest most unselfish person I have every met. He is also probably the most hardworking and devoted man I have ever met. His job is extremely demanding of his time but he never fails to take some time out of his busy schedule to spend some quality time with me. Last year for my birthday, he completely took my breath away and surprised me with a skydiving trip. 

This year, he topped that with a surprise trip to New York City! I think you're in trouble Tyler...what are you going to do next year?! 

Our view from our hotel. We stayed in the financial district on the 44th floor.

We shopped our heads off. I tried talking Tyler in to getting one of these neck warmers. Somehow it didn't work. 

I've been dying to see what all the rage was about this broadway. The Book of Mormon has been on the top of Broadway for months now. Tickets are sold out for months in advance. Don't know what he did to get us tickets but whatever he did, Thank you! We had a good time seeing it. Not sure we would recommend it to everybody but glad we saw it. 

Something is wrong with this picture. Tyler is wearing my purse, getting money out of MY wallet. Shouldn't be the other way around? 

On our way to Rockefellar Center to see the tree. It was so crowded there we couldn't even get a decent picture of the tree! It was madness.  

Thank you Tyler for an unforgettable 28th birthday! You never cease to amaze me. Love you!