The rest of the week

We left for our trip on Saturday night, returned on Tuesday afternoon. Wednesday, Stacy worked. Wednesday was a long rough day. Thankfully it was broken up a little bit when Ms. Cindy came to visit. The problem was while we were waiting on Ms. Cindy, Micah decided that he needed to trim my gardenia bush :( 

On Thanksgiving day Micah was excited to leave early with Stacy and help do some work in the country before lunch. Patton and I stayed home and did some cooking, some cleaning, and some playing. We rode to the country with Nut and Jerms and got there right as they were getting ready to eat. 
I was VERY surprised to see that Lacey's boyfriend and Stacy were Thanksgiving day twins! It was so crazy! I caught myself talking to Joel like he Stacy several times. Thank goodness I didn't do anything other than talk! How funny are they!?!?

Not very many people came to the lunch this year, but Micah was excited that Paige came so that he could have someone to play with. 

After lunch Paw-Paw wanted to go on a Gator ride. I decided not to go, Thank goodness, they were gone FOREVER. Plus, I was really scared to ride with Paw-Paw driving! They found several beaver dams in the creek and searched and searched for clover.

We spent the majority of the afternoon enjoy our company and the beautiful day before heading home for a restful night in preparation for Black Friday.

Because Mama had just watched our boys for several days I didn't plan to ask her to watch them while we shopped on Black Friday. We just played it by ear. And they ended up going shopping with us.... But way later than normal. Stacy ended up going out early searching for a cheap laptop, he was successful. The rest of us slept and headed out around 6 Friday morning. Patton was fine, Micah did not enjoy going to Kohl's but was looking forward to Waffle House. AS long as Stacy and I have BF shopped together, it's been our breakfast stop. I'm pretty sure, Micah had only been once before Friday. He chose a waffle and LOVED it, but was still not in the happiest of moods, can you tell?

After breakfast, we headed to the mall. Micah was more excited about the mall than Kohl's. After watching the Thanksgiving parade, he thought he should write a note to the Macy's employees thanking them for doing the parade. Micah has such a sweet heart.... He really does. He wanted to deliver his not to Macy's real bad. I let him. 

We waited in line for over 5 minutes. When we finally got to the register the young girl wouldn't even read the note. She kept asking if it was a letter to Santa. Finally I asked MIcah to read the note to her (still not sure she could even read herself) He did. She simply said thank you, and we left. I am SURE that if we had gone to a sweet old lady, it would have made her day, instead that's what we ended up with. Oh well.....
We finished shopping for everyone other than 3 people. I will be completely finished this week, with the exception of homemade gifts.

We came home early in the afternoon, decorated the tree, and relaxed. What a fun filled, busy, busy week.

Last Day

After another wonderful night of sleep we got up, ate, and headed over to The Grove Park Inn for the viewing of the gingerbread houses from the Gingerbread House Competition. I have watched the judging of these before on tv and was SO Excited to learn that I could view them in person.... on the first day of viewing at that. I'm sure that after a couple of weeks in, they start looking pitiful.... It has to be all edible after all. The Grove Park Inn was so beautiful. I LOVED all of the stones.

I thought we'd easily spend an hour to two hours looking at everything, but we actually moved through very quickly. We sure saw some neat looking things.


Here is the Grand Prize Winner. Amazing huh?!

 

We are SO thankful to have sweet Mama watch our boys while we were gone. She was worn out by the time we returned. We had a Great time but realized very quickly it was not a trip that children would enjoy at all. Thank You! Thank you Mama!

Getaway Day #2

We were able to sleep so peacefully in our room in the Vanderbilt Executive Tower :) 8:00 is what time we got up! That is unheard of in our house! A late morning is a 7:00 morning. 8:00 was a DREAM. Ahhhhh refreshing. We took out time getting ready and after eating breakfast we headed to The Biltmore House. It was Beautiful. It was HUGE, I was so excited to tour it. Can you tell?!

After a few pictures outside, we headed inside to tour the house. It was amazing. Although I couldn't take any pictures of the inside it was one of the most beautiful homes I've ever seen. It took about 2 hours to tour the inside, then we headed outside. The grounds were just as amazing. There were 8000 acres total. We enjoyed the garden, the conservatory, and even found ourselves in the woodland trail. We did our fair share of walking. Even though we had not planned to, we ended up going on quite a hike. The land was beautiful. We had a great time. 

 

By the time we finally made it back to the house we were exhausted, but far from finished. We headed to Antler Hill Village where we did a wine tasting which was included in the price.... Stacy did NOT like any that we tried. I mean, he gagged out loud! LOL It was very memorable to say the least. We took a look at the barn, animals, a couple of shops before leaving to go eat. We ended up spending just over 7 hours at the Estate and had a Wonderful day. It didn't take either of us long before we passed out that night. 

Getaway Day #1

Getaway Day #1

Stacy and I headed out on Saturday evening. We drove to Greenville for the night. While in the hotel I read about the city. I thought that it looked like a beautiful city and since we couldn't check in until 3:00 on Sunday, I thought we should check out Greenville. We headed out Sunday morning. We went downtown and had breakfast, it was such a nice city. It wasn't very crowded  and was so pretty. We parked and walked to Falls Park. It was a little chilly but we had a nice time. There were SO many beautiful spots for pics..... For a photographer, it would be a dream place!

We hung out most of the morning and then continued on our way to Asheville. We got there around lunch time. We stopped at Juicy Lucy's. Stacy had seen it on Food Network and thought it would be fun to try. After lunch we headed to Biltmore Village and spent the rest of the afternoon walking and shopping. There were so many cute little shops. We finally went to our hotel and checked in. I was much more impressed with this hotel than the last. We ended up staying in a Days Inn in Greenville.... It seriously gave me the heebie jeebies! This time we stayed at the Double Tree and it was Perfect! We even stayed in the "Vanderbilt Executive Tower" Fancy huh?