Gorgeous weekend and family pics!!

What an awesome weekend! I will just start at the beginning...

Thursday we bought a Wii. This is something that we have been planning for a while and wanted to get it before Drew's birthday. It is basically his present from us although it is certainly something for the entire family and not just for him. Thursday night Jim and I stayed up until 11pm playing it! Drew had not even seen it yet at this point. I went to the store and purchased it after he went to bed. Needless to say, we are all enjoying it quite a bit!!

Friday Drew was just crazy, excited about getting home to play it. After school he had to run an errand with mom though. We went out to a specialty running store in Memphis for me to have them look at my feet and determine what type of running shoe I need. It was a great experience and I got just what I needed at a reasonable price. Drew was very well behaved while we were there. I was really impressed with him. After the trip to the shoe store we picked up JC and headed home. Jim was home when we got there preparing to grill out some deer steaks wrapped in peppercorn bacon! YUMMO! I love it when he grills these for us. So we had a great supper and played Wii until late that night.

Saturday morning we had an appointment to get pictures made at a new studio in Southaven. I had received an Pre-Grand Opening Invitation. On the invite it said that we would have the photo session and receive 3 sheets each of 6 different poses plus 2 10 x 13 portraits with specialty touches, and a cd of all the photos taken all for FREE! Yes, you read that right, FREE! In addition we would actually get our portraits there at the time of the session because they print them in house. I really thought it was too good to be true when I read the flyer but I figured I would give it a shot and see if we could get an appointment. So our appointment was at 10:10 Saturday morning. We were running a little late, but when we arrived I immediately saw that it did not matter because they were absolutely mobbed with people! I was prepared for the whole thing to go bad from here because of the huge crowd. But, I am happy to say it was really a wonderful experience. We were only there slightly more than an hour. We picked out our portraits and they said it would take about 15 minutes to print, so we took the kids for some lunch and came back. They had our portraits waiting when I returned and they are so great! I am including a slide show of all the pics taken. I did include all of them because some of the kids expressions are hilarious! As I made the slide show I just laughed remembering how silly they were through the entire process. Taking pictures of a nearly 2 year old is interesting at best! The photographer was excellent though and she had someone helping her the entire time working to make them laugh, smile, and be still!

Saturday evening Jim and I got to have a date night! We had actually been planning to do this the week prior when Drew ended up getting the stomach bug too. My sister actually kept the boys over night. We got to go out to dinner at the Chophouse. It was wonderful, as always! I got Duck Breast and Jim had Quail. The service there is impeccable! We have never had a bad experience at this restaurant. After our dinner we went shopping for Jim. His clothes had started looking pretty bad! We went to Kohls because I had a 20% off coupon that had come in the mail. So we did all our shopping and got him lots of new clothes, a new wallet, and even some new frames for all our new pictures. We got to the register and the lady in front of us was buying several houseware items. The bag they had just put her stuff in had a big rip down the side that Jim saw. He stopped her and told her about the rip and they rebagged the items. She then turned and ask us if we had a 30% off coupon. I told her the one I had gotten in the mail was for 20%. She said that we could use her coupon and she would wait for us to check out so they could scan her ad. WOW! That was so super nice and it ended up knocking $115 off our total bill! We were both very thankful for this little blessing that God passed our way! Jim looked very nice leaving for work today in his new duds!

Well here is the slide show of the portraits. I have them all cut and ready to go out to family, so the next time I see you we will have your pics with us!

Picture slideshow generated with Smilebox