50th Anniversary

After months of playing event planner the big day finally arrived. Friday was spent getting last minute food for about 100 people and Sat. I spent all day baking and decorating the cake, cutting up bread and cooking a small portion of the meatballs and hot dogs.
Our menu was meatballs, hot dogs, chicken salad sandwiches, pimento cheese sandwiches, cucumber sandwiches,potato salad & punch. Sunday morning Joel and I left early to get everything set up before the Oliver's arrived. We managed to pull it off and I had time to go practice for our duet that Ashley (pastors daughter) and I were doing.
During Sunday School several ladies, Joel and I got to work putting the sandwiches together and then during church service another group of us decorated as well as finished up the food.

Brenda, the Oliver's daughter managed get copies of the wedding pictures so that we could post them for everyone to see.

We did manage to surprise them right down to the end.

2 poems were read which turned out really great!

It was time to cut the cake and they thoroughly enjoyed the cake. The base cake was almond and the top

cake for them to take home was raspberry. Surprisingly there was not a drop left of the base cake.

The party was a huge success and those of us planning could take a huge breath of relief that it was finally over. I loved being the event planner and caterer but it was a lot of work and I was completely exhausted by the time we got home. On the way home Joel treated me to my favorite sweet tea and he got a Starbucks!

Busy time

It's hard to believe it's already June. This summer has started off pretty busy for Joel. He's been getting a lot done on his project and I've been busy doing a few cakes here and there but no trips for us since we went to the Sloan's for the surprise. Our weekends are usually spent trying to recover from the week, if they're not spent running around in church activities or school related things.
The weather has taken a turn of lot's of rain, hot and humid. I will be very glad when Joel can take a break and we can go on a relaxing vacation - we are both very ready for a quiet secluded few days of doing nothing :)

Successfull surprise!

The siblings decided that for the Sloan's 40th wedding anniversary that we'd all surprise them by showing up Thursday afternoon. The plan was for all of us to meet at Grandmother Sloan's house & wait until they were home and then we'd all drive around the driveway blowing our horns.

Joel and I arrived a little after 4:30. I had forgotten how hot it got in Richmond and when I opened the door it was like walking into a hot oven. uh sooo hot! All of us arrived safely at Grandmothers house and patiently waited. Well Joel's dad came home and then left then his mom ended up doing some errands in town until 6:00 so we all held our breath hoping that they'd come home and not go out to dinner since dinner was ready to take over to the house. They did come home and stay and we all showed up in a long caravan and blew our horns and made quite a great surprise!

Thursday evening we had dinner made by Grandmother Sloan.



Friday morning we headed out to the Moyers lake and went fishing and the kids swam. This was such a perfect day. Not too hot, great fishing and the kids had a great place to swim.

Anna discovered the slide!

Joshua enjoyed swimming around the slide.

Emma found some tubes that she could float on.

Lucy enjoy playing in the sand!

Here was my big catch of the day! I had gotten several nibbles and caught a small large mouth bass but I was dying to catch the big one and here it is!

My large mouth bass weighed a little over 3 1/2 pounds! Man was I tickled pink! This is officially the biggest fish I've ever caught.




Joel caught his large mouth bass first. Actually Joel's first cast he caught a fish and then they just continued to jump on his line. I think it made the rest of us just work that much harder so that we would catch a fish! He's just too good :)

Then after mine came Michael's catch. He caught a doozy of a bass that weighed in over 5 pounds!

Zane ended up catching his bass right before it was time to go. We were all some pretty excited people!

Here's my Fish.

We opted to keep our fish and have it for dinner on Sunday. Joel and I made a yummy marinade and wrapped the fish in foil and grilled it with our chicken in case someone didn't like fish. The fish was a big hit from Eleanor who even ate the fish tale in the picture below!

Monday we played corn hole and the little ones watched however Joshua and Anna became good corn hole players.

Our surprise of the day was this ugly guy. The ladies were sitting under the trees watching the men play when Beth spotted something moving in the grass. It was a spider that was moving a long with its sack of baby spiders and come to find out when you looked really closely the baby spiders were crawling all over the mom. uh it's gives me the creeps just writing this. I don't do spiders!!! Ticks also became our big challenge of the weekend. I think just about everyone found at least one on them.