Pumkin Carving

We decided to bring in the fall season by hosting a pumpkin carving extravaganza with some friends. Kolby put the whole impromptu event together to continue his grandmother's annual tradition of pumpkin artistry. The evening was complete with hot apple cider, Monday night football, roasted pumpkin seeds, and awards for pumpkin-carving talent.

Cleaning out the pumpkin goopKolby hogging the Princess Pumpkin-Carving Kit tools that we bought at the grocery storeOur final products at their best: Kolby's pumpkin calling for Batman and my pumpkin just sitting there being the amazing masterpiece that it is. If this isn't a creative display of raw talent then I don't know what is! The whole gangThe pumpkin line-up
We all had a great time and Kolby and I ended the night chatting about how blessed we are with our little life here. We have wonderful friends and have jobs that let us spend time with them often. And our apartment is very old and small but we love it and that night it held 8 people carving pumpkins and smelled like yummy apple cider so what more could we possibly need?

October Twenty-Sixth

Today is the first October 26th in 7 years that we aren't celebrating as our "anniversary" anymore. We have a new one now, and although a wedding anniversary is much more official than a dating anniversary, it is a little bittersweet to be starting over. I don't think an October 26th will ever pass by without thoughts of how our story began. We were sixteen and chatting on my front porch after a school event that we had attended "as friends" when Kolby kissed me. We awkwardly didn't really speak much for a couple days afterwards and then eventually decided that we might as well start dating since we'd already kissed and I suppose that means we both like each other :). He proposed to me on that same front porch almost 6 years later.

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In other news, I presented part of my thesis research on micro-credit yesterday at the Baylor Symposium of Faith and Culture: Bottom-Up Approaches to Global Poverty. I was pretty nervous about it because it was my first time to do a presentation for anyone except other students in my classes so I was quite intimidated by the audience of professors from universities all over the country and ministry practitioners from all over the world. It went really well, though, and now it's time to get back to all of the schoolwork I've been neglecting.

Lil' Two-Five

My brother's t-shirt company has just launched a chilren's line, Lil' Two-Five. Each t-shirt purchased still provides a chicken for a poverty-stricken family in India. So, if you have any kiddos or even know any kiddos --- buy them a cool t-shirt and know you've changed the life of a family in need. Here are a couple of the designs:

Go to http://www.25cloth.com/ to buy a shirt!

A Winning Weekend

Kolby took the GRE on Saturday and knocked the socks off of it-- one of the many highlights of our weekend! Others included Texas beating Oklahoma ([college football] to Kolby this was probably a bigger deal than the GRE success), a visit from my best friend/college roommate Laura who I hadn't seen since she moved to Colorado this summer, watching Baylor win a conference football game (not a common occurrence!), and an afternoon taking care of our favorite kiddos:

Addi helped Kolby take Maya on her daily walk through campus and Jackson enjoyed our stop to visit the Baylor mascots.

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