ok. so i’m babysitting ava, the cutest thing ever!!! and its great. our schedule is pretty awesome: watch 101 dalmatians, snack, play leapfrog’s leapster, snack, color, lunch [grant comes home for lunch! yay!], play hide-and-seek, snack, go to the pool, snack (you get the picture). anyway, when grant comes home, we have a great time. ava has a pretty amazing crush on him and loves to make him chase her around and pick her up, etc.

so yesterday grant and i decide to sing a camp song to teach ava–full on hand motions and butt-shaking involved. pretty sweet. in the middle of the song, ava jumps up on the bed, starts shaking her butt in a three-point position singing BABY GOT BACK! O.M.G. grant and i lost it. we couldn’t breathe when we finally peeled ourselves off the floor. and there’s ava, on the bed just shakin’ it, “i like big butts and i cannot lie, you other brothers cannot deny! mmm mmmm mmmmm mmm big thing in your face you get sprung!” it was amazing. her mom later told me that it’s on the shrek soundtrack. hehehehehhehehe. wow.

anyway. ava’s awesome.

oh, and since you asked, yes, we’ve now watched 101 dalmatians 5 times in 3 days. xoxox

ps. several small but GREAT things this week:
1. after working 2 jobs for 2 months, i have 3 DAYS TO DO NOTHING!
2. i’m making bank babysitting one of my favorite little girls a few days this week and next
3. ava (the little girl) and her parents came over last night to see our place
4. wes turner stayed with us last night! we had so much fun, cooking, telling funny stories, and repeating favorite pick-up lines… way too much fun. glad he and grant are such good buds.
5. i think i’m skipping the drop/add part of school, so i won’t start driving till august 27th instead of the 20th.
6. katrin and michael (two AWESOME friends from germany) are coming to visit and grant and i get to play with them at the lake two weeks from now
7. kelly and john and the baby are doing GREAT! so excited for them and loving that all are in good giggling health.
8. the wedding, again, was so much fun. well done.

ld

this weekend was awesome. carrie and andrew tied the knot at lake martin in a precious chapel on the lake with a lighthouse to boot! the reception was at the Willow Point Country Club, which is also where we, the wedding party, stayed. it was so beautiful and, remarkably, not oppressively hot!

we rolled in friday, checked into our “villa” at the cc–awesome! went to the rehearsal din din–great food, great company. very sweet things were said of carrie and andrew and a good time was definitely had by all. some friends i was finally reunited with include laura self (my love), julie chamberlain (introduced to me 5 years ago as “j.nasty” by her roommate carrie), garrett hill (carrie’s cousin and my former date to the deb ball 100 years ago) and many many more to play with (paige, amy, melanie, patrick, holmes, brooks, etc)! it was fantastic seeing everyone. grant and garrett finally got to hang out, which they both loved, since we shared our villa with the whole Hill clan–anna and skipper (garretts ‘rents), holmes (younger bro at clemson), earl and nancy (the grandparents, aka earl was grant’s favorite person at the wedding). it was phenom. the night ended as most successful nights do: at the pool with music and adult beveriges and lots and lots of laughter.

saturday morning came early, but grant and i (because of the time change) were definitely up an hour or more before the rest. we had a very nice breakfast at the cc, then went to carrie and andrew’s brunch at a pretty incredible house on the lake (and by house i mean mansion and by pretty incredible i mean estate). we left that to hang out with everyone pool-side until the wedding festivities commenced. At 3.30 laura and i headed to the Children’s Chapel on the Lake to watch carrie get ready and take pictures. at 4.00 i dutifully took up my job as greeter and guest book administer…? (whatever, i had to make people sign in). i helped everyone pin on their flowers (and saved mine b/c they were beautiful white roses) and get ready. carrie, of course, looked stunning in her debutante dress–an old Victorian tradition that once the young woman makes her “debut” into society, she is married in the same gown. awesome. the guys wore blue seer sucker suites (CUTE!) and the wedding was perfect.

onto the best part: the reception!! the band was awesome, the cake, delicious! and everyone danced all night long. grant and i danced all freakin night and were the last ones on the dance floor (shocker, i know). carrie and andrew left through glow sticks and bubbles to “oh, when the saints! come marching in!” (which always reminds me of kathleens alarm clock…) and are currently loving their honeymoon in colorado!! they’ll be back before carrie starts back at alabama’s grad school (with me, commuting… ughgh!) in a week or so. she has until may and i have (thank the Lord!) until december. God’s been so faithful to our friendship that He would bring us through the same seasons of love and happiness (and school) at the same time.

We had the best time this weekend. going to/ being part of a wedding after you’re married is a totally different experience. it’s a renewal of vows, a new appreciation of friendship, and an indulgence in the sweetest things: cake, wine, dancing, enjoying each other, and spending quality time as if we’re the only ones having a private conversation in the midst of a crowd. true beauty. God is so good that only He would create such a holy bond as marriage and allow such an honest and limitless love to exist between two people within that covenant. i know carrie and andrew feel the same way.

ok. so don miller is stealing my heart one page at a time. i’ve always loved blue like jazz (how many times have i read that one…) and i kinda know him through a friend of mine in oregon, though we’ve never met… [insert sigh here]. i’m currently reading (among a long list of others) through painted deserts. its freakin amazing!. if you know anything about me, my journey, or my soul, you’ll understand why mr. miller is wooing me so [fear not, grant!].

“I want to change because it’s God’s way… I want to keep my soul fertile for the changes, so things keep getting born in me, so things keep dying when it is time for things to die. I want to keep walking away from the person I was a moment ago, because a mind was made to figure things out, not to read the same page recurrently… And the closest thing I can liken life to is a book, they way it stretches out on paper, page after page, as if to trick the mind into thinking it isn’t all happening at once.”

“This is from where the story stems, the stuff of its construction lying at our feet like cut strips of philosophy. I sometimes look into the endless heavens, the cosmos of which we can’t find the edge, and ask God what it means. Did You really do all of this to dazzle us? Do You really keep it shifting, rolling round the pinions to stave off boredom? God forbid Your glory would be our distraction. And God forbid we would ignore Your glory.”

“I started wondering if life was something different than I thought it was, if there was some kind of raging beauty a person could find, that he could get caught up in the why of life. And I needed to believe beauty meant something, and I needed God to step off His self-help soap-box and be willing to say something eternally significant and intelligent and meaningful… I needed God to larger than our free-market economy, larger than our two-for-one coupons, larger than our religious ideas.”

“I wonder, though, if the good feeling will last. I do this with good things; I think joy into its coffin; I analyze too much. I don’t want to think about life anymore; I just want to live life.”

“I guess what I mean is, he isn’t one of the millions of us who are always looking for an escape, for distraction. He [paul, a character in the book] doesn’t need to be talked to, but he isn’t a recluse, and he doesn’t need to hear music all the time, but he likes music…I guess you could say he is healthy or something.”

“I guess I’m looking for what any guy is looking for. I want a companion, you know. Just someone to share life with. I want her to be my biggest fan and I want to be her biggest fan too. I want us to raise kids in a home where they know their parents are in love with each other and with them. I guess that’s all I want.”

“The way I figure, every girl is beautiful, you know. It’s our arrogance that makes us think one is better than the other.”

“Maybe when a person doesn’t buy the lies anymore, when a human stops long enough to realize the stuff people say to get us to part with our money often isn’t true, we can finally see the sunrise, smell the wetness in a Gulf-breeze, stand in awe at a downpour no less magnificent than a twenty-thousand-foot waterfall, ten square miles wide, wonder at the physics of a duck paddling itself across the surface of a pond, enjoy the reflection of the sun of the face of the moon, and know, THIS IS WHAT I WAS MADE TO DO. THIS IS WHO I WAS MADE TO BE, THAT LIFE IS BEING GIVEN TO ME AS A GIFT, THAT LIGHT IS A METAPHOR, AND GOD IS DOING THESE THINGS TO DAZZLE US.”

“Matter and thought are a canvas on which God paints, a painting with tragedy and delivery, with sin and redemption. LIFE IS A DANCE TOWARD GOD, I begin to think. And the dance is not so graceful as we might want. We learn to dance with the One who made us. And it is a difficult dance to learn, because its steps are foreign… and I think to myself, I HAVE EVERYTHING I WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE TO EXPERIENCE THE MAGNITUDE OF THIS STORY, TO DANCE WITH GOD.”

need i say more… i mean, wow. i’m only about a day into it and will finish it tmrw, only to read it several more times over the next week. don makes me think, and most contemporary prose writers don’t. anyway, just food for thought. i’m eating it up.

grant and i are looking for a bible study. if you know of anything helpful in the city, send it our way. we’re a little overwhelmed by buckhead church’s size and want to fellowship with people we’ll really live life with (see multiple times a week). we want to have or create community here. if ya got any idears, lemme know! xoxo