Home is Wherever I'm with You

(scrabling to find) 55 cents= 22 minutes on the downtown parking meter

$1.99 = melted bag of Reese's pieces to placate unhappy family members on the 7 block city tour at 98 degrees

Urban family photo shoot in our new city

................................Priceless

Ok, peeps, the blog has gotten a face lift and all of you google reader fans out there (Mari, Tracie!) are going to have to click on the actual blog to see it! We have a new background, new photo AND a new tag line, complements of Jason. He's been really good lately at helping me with my wording and song choices. Most people don't know but my "thing" with blogging is to use songs to inspire my blogs. If you look back, the majority of my blogs have song related titles. I always try to place the corresponding song on my playlist but it changes with each blog. The song that matches my tag line really hit home for me. It made me think of the inscription I placed in Jason's wedding ring 7 1/2 years ago.

Ruth 1:16 "Where you go, I will go and where you stay, I will stay. Let your people be my people and your God my God."

We are entering this new adventure blindly but we are TOGETHER. There is no underlying feeling of how soon he will be leaving again, or for how long. So far, it has been fantastic here but it is a smaller house and smaller income that we've ever had before. The bottom line is...

Home is wherever I'm with YOU!

It had been since Christmas that we had a family photo shoot. Once every six months is about all I can talk these people into. It was time and I had located the perfect place. Lucky for me, my personal photographer was in town for just 2 days and fit us in for a little urban photo shootin our new city! It didn't come without a few grumbles, promises and downright bribes. It took 2 days to choose our coordinating clothing and get everyone lined up and on the same page. But in just 2 hours, we had everyone dressed, in the car and heading downtown with our entourage.

With the ever increasing southern HEAT we had minutes to make this magic happen. Running into Lincoln's beloved naptime and working on borrowed parking meter time, we snapped these photos including a wardrobe change and made it back to the car melting (and melting down) but without a parking ticket.

Jason is learning to play the mandolin while we are living here. He has had it for over 6 years now and thought living in the Music City would be a fine time to learn to play. At his first lesson, he learned the first 4 chords to his favorite song "Wagon Wheel." I thought it was a great addition to our family photos. I hope he can learn to play it well enough to teach Jackson some of it too.