You Move Me

Today I have a little treat for you. As I was recapping our 5 year anniversary, I talked about the song Derek made for me. Well, apparently they made a music video for it, it just wasn't ready until about a week after our anniversary. He and the guys who wrote the song and played all the instruments got together and made a little video. They even made a band name - Bottled Water. That is their band name because they say they are refreshing. One more thing before you watch the video. The lyrics might not all make sense. It's mostly inside jokes or references to things that have happened throughout our relationship. I could explain everything but that would take a while, you can ask me if you have any questions. But mostly, just enjoy it for the goofiness that is.  So here it is, the premier of the first single by Bottled Water - "You Move Me".

Catching Up Post Part 2

Today is LCA graduation - I can't believe it's here. Our dear friends are graduating high school and in a few short months will be off to college. This morning I had my senior Bible study girls over for breakfast. We had chocolate chip pancakes, sausage and strawberries - some of them fresh from my garden - which I will give a little update on below! I got out our fancy china and cloth napkins and napkin rings, all the stuff we got as wedding gifts and don't use nearly enough, and we had a sweet little breakfast together. I gave them their gifts - stationary, so they can write me while they're away at college and journals, so they can write all about the awesome things God is teaching them and doing in their lives. I'm going to miss these girls so much. But at least we still have the summer!

Onto the garden updates. Over the past few weeks my peonies have already bloomed and died. I wish they stuck around longer. But here are a few pictures of one of the things in my yard that makes me really happy.

 

Ok, that's probably enough flower pictures. I've also got the vegetable garden planted. Last month(ish) I bought a bunch of humus, manure, and dirt and added it to my vegetable garden to add some nutrients to the soil. My mom sent me some blueberry plants {I killed all of mine last year, so we're going to give them one more shot} and I planted those as well. I have an oregano plant and some strawberry plants that come back every year and are looking good. We are eating fresh strawberries every day, which are my absolute favorite. Also, a while back I planted some sugar snap peas and spinach seeds, so those are starting to come in as well. I added to the garden cilantro and basil - the two key ingredients for great pesto, an eggplant, cucumbers, bell peppers, a jalapeno and some tomatoes. The only thing I couldn't find that I would still like to plant were zucchinis. 

I need to go pack - after graduation tonight we are heading up to a young life camp in Michigan to spend the weekend hanging out and having fun. While I'm not looking forward to the 8 hour drive overnight, I am looking forward to the rest of the weekend. Hope everyone enjoys their long weekend!

Catch Up Post Part 1

Hi bloggy friends! Life is a little crazy right now and I just haven't had much time to sit down and write out what all is going on - although I have been taking lots of pictures, so hopefully I can do more showing than telling. I found a post from a couple weeks ago that I never got around to adding pictures to, so I'm pretty backed up on recording what's been going on in our lives, so in an effort to not have one really long post, this will be broken up into 2 (or  more) parts.

First off, Mother's Day! {I told you I had a lot of updating to do} Derek had soccer games that weekend so we stayed in town Saturday, and I got to take pictures of all the craziness of soccer Saturdays. I have started editing them and am pleased with how they are turning out. Hopefully he will be able to use them for his website. I'm enjoying cropping and brigthening and making them look really good.

Sunday, we went up to visit Derek's parents to see his mom for Mothers Day. An update on Linda: She is in the middle of chemo treatments now. She should, hopefully, be finished by the end of July or early August. She gets treatments once a week, and they've found some medicine that is doing a pretty good job of managing the side effects. We're continuing to pray that the chemo gets rid of ALL of the cancer cells and that her blood counts stay high enough so she can continue her chemo schedule uninterrupted. She looked great when we saw her and had great energy. She really loves the Lord and is trusting Him with all of this, which is such an awesome thing to see.

Here are some pictures from the weekend. Fun activities include measuring Uncle Derek while Oliver watches through the window, and playing some baseball.

And here is Derek with his parents - I told you his mom looks great!

Ok, so that catches us up from Mothers Day weekend. The following weekend was our 5 year anniversary celebration, followed by the wedding of our friends Brad and Lauren {which I did not bring my camera to}, followed by the kick-off to graduation party season, which we are in the midst of right now. All of the guys in Derek's Bible study and most of the girls in mine are graduating, meaning graduation parties nearly every day, and some days multiple parties. I haven't been hungry in days, nor have I had to cook. I've had so many kinds of chicken tenders and dips and desserts, it's unbelievable. Graduation is this Friday, last night was the last baseball game. It's all coming to a close, and making me feel sad. I can't imagine how their parents feel. And most of them are going away to college next year, so we told their parents we could hang out together, because I'm not sure what we're going to do when all these kids are gone either. Of course I have no graduation party photos either. Bummer.

Finally, last item for today - I have a new office! Our office changed locations over the past weekend. So while my commute is a bit longer (15 minutes rather than 8) I love our new space and my office in particular. The way our old office was set up I got zero natural light. Now my office opens up to a wall of windows. And I can't tell you the difference it has made. I feel so much happier every day while I'm here. I took a little picture of the view from the window outside my office.

It even looks out over a signalized intersection, which is appropriate since I am a traffic engineer.  I love, love, love it! And we are super close to lots of restaurants and shopping, which is great because now I can use my lunch hour to run errands and I'm right there.

Ok, so that's it for this post. Next update post will include updates from the garden and other fun things.

5 Year Celebration - Part III

I left off this little recap with us spending the night in the Presidential Suite at the Marriott. We woke up Friday morning and Derek had a little gift bag for me to open. I opened it and found a fresh new pack of golf balls and a free guest pass to Andover Golf and Country Club. One of the guys in Derek's Bible study hooked us up with a round of golf at Andover and we had a noon tee time. Derek and I have played golf together before and we had lots of fun, but golfing is kind of expensive so it's not something we do very often. I was really excited to get to play at Andover because the course goes through some really nice neighborhoods and the scenery alone would great.

We still had some time to hang out at the hotel in the morning, and Derek got us hooked up with a free breakfast in the concierge lounge, so we headed down to get some breakfast, and walk around the hotel grounds. We checked out the pool, but unfortunately the weather was a little cool to spend the morning there. We spent a few more hours hanging out in our room, laying in the comfy bed, and just lounging around. I took a couple of pictures of the view from our room in the daylight.

While we were hanging out Derek was looking through some of the really old books that were on the bookshelves in our room, and he found a couple of little notes that people who had stayed in the room had left. He got real excited about it and decided that we needed to leave a note before we left.  He asked if I wanted to read it before he left it in the book. It didn't really matter to me, but I figured I would humor him and read the note. It said what you would expect:

Derek and Anne stayed here, May 13, 2011 for our 5 year anniversary...etc...
....Love you Annie, Love Derek
P.S. There is still one surprise left!

So I was glad I read the note and a little intrigued. We checked out of the hotel, picked up some McDonalds for lunch (fancy, right?) and headed to the golf course. I didn't bring my camera on the golf course because I didn't want to carry it around, and it was a little rainy, but we had a great time golfing, and the drive through the course was beautiful.

As for the one last surprise, that was my favorite. As we were driving to the golf course, we were listening to sports talk radio and Derek asked if that was what I wanted to listen to. I'm not a huge fan of sports talk radio, but we were almost to the golf course so I wasn't too concerned. Derek said we could listen to CD instead, and hit play. The final surprise was an 80s rock ballad with Derek singing a song he wrote for me. The first thing you have to know, is that all of the musical talent in Derek's family went to his 2 brothers. Derek doesn't play any instruments and is not the greatest singer. Derek is great with coming up with creative ways to show me he loves me, but I've never had any hopes that he would do anything musical. But he got 3 LCA guys and our friend Ben, who does all our music for young life, all together and they wrote an original song and recorded it using Garage Band. There were 2 guys who played electric guitar, one guy played acoustic guitar, and one played the keyboard and Derek sang. The instrumental part of the song was awesome, those guys are really talented, and the lyrics were hilarious, it was mostly a bunch of jokes we have together, and Derek's singing wasn't all bad, it was mostly funny as he did his best 80s rocker impression. It was really hilarious, and I loved it. And I have no idea how to put it on here, but if I can figure out a way to share it with you all I will.

Overall, it was an awesome anniversary, and I loved every bit of it and all the surprises. Derek, thank you so much for making our anniversary so memorable and for making me feel so special. It was seriously awesome. You're the best!

5 Year Celebration - Part II

Remember in this post when I said I would love to stay in the same place we spent our wedding night again sometime? Well, I didn't know it, but I was foreshadowing part of our 5 year celebration. After the dinner train, we headed out toward the interstate. I didn't know where we were going, but I was hoping that maybe we wouldn't make it all the way to the interstate, but would turn into the hotel we had our reception and spent our wedding night at. I held my breath as we approached the hotel, waiting to see if we would turn in or continue on to somewhere else. Well, right at the last second, Derek ducked into the turn lane and and made a right turn into the hotel! I was so excited I gave a double fist pump.

I walked into the lobby without Derek because he left something in the car. I was going to wait for him to check in, but the people at the desk were looking at me expectantly, so I went ahead and gave them our last name. The guy typed it in and replied, "Happy anniversary, Mrs. Warnick. I see you had your reception here 5 years ago. Happy 5 years." I tell ya, they sure do make you feel special. Then he said, "I see you have already paid for your stay with points." (Side note - we have a Marriott rewards card so we get points when we buy stuff and then get to stay at Marriotts for free - so Derek used our points to score us a free room - which made me really happy!) He then said, "We have you staying in the presidential tonight." At this point I was super excited excited. The presidential suite! At that point Derek walked in. The guy at the desk gave us our keys and said we were staying in room 722. The 7th floor is the top floor where all the suites are. Derek didn't know we had gotten the presidential suite. Apparently you can't reserve a suite with points, so Derek just reserved a regular room, and when he talked to the Marriott people he told them it was our anniversary and that we had our reception and stayed there on our wedding night, so they upgraded us to a golf course view room, and said that if there were any suites available when we checked in they would upgrade us. (He later told me to stay in a suite would be $699 for the night, so he just used the points, and I was so glad that he did. He definitely knows me well and knows that I would rather stay in a regular room for free than a suite for 700 bucks.) So when Derek saw we were on the 7th floor, he got super excited.

We headed up the elevator to our room. And it wasn't the exact same room we stayed on our wedding night - it was better! Here are some photos:

I really liked the little steps up into the bed.

I'm not sure why this next picture is so off-centered and crooked, but it's still cool :)

So there's a little tour of the presidential suite for you. After checking out how awesome the room was we sat on the balcony and talked for a while, and then exchanged gifts. The five year anniversary is supposed to be the wood anniversary, and we don't really go crazy with gifts, so I decided to get Derek a WoodWick candle.

Apparently Derek had the same idea, because we got each other the exact same thing, scent and all. We ended the evening by watching our entire wedding video. We haven't watched the entire thing for a really long time. It was so fun to watch the whole thing though, and it's crazy how much has changed in 5 years. I honestly felt a little sad at the end, I'm not really sure why, maybe just because of how time is flying by and things have changed, it was just kind of weird. But it was also really happy at the same time because I remembered how much fun I had that day.

Ok, I'm going to stop here and save the last part of our celebration for Part III. Thanks for letting me describe this 24 hours in detail :)

5 Year Celebration - Part I

In my last post I mentioned that Derek had big plans for our 5 year anniversary celebration, and wow, he did not disappoint. If you've ever seen the movie You, Me and Dupree, you know how Owen Wilson's character talks about throwing "7 different kinds of smoke"? Well that's what Derek kept saying that's what he was going to do, throw seven different kinds of smoke at me, so I would never know what to expect next and always be on my toes. And I would say he succeeded at that.

Because I am not good at being concise, and I have lots of fun pictures, I'll probably break this up into a few parts. You will probably be sick of hearing about all this soon, but I want to write it all down while it's fresh in my memory, because this anniversary celebration is probably one of my favorite memories together. I felt so well loved, and I don't want to forget any of the details. So here goes part one.

The celebration started with Derek telling me I needed to be ready to go by 10 til 5 on Thursday. He told me to wear a nice dress, and that was it. I got home from work around 4:15 to get ready and our bag was already packed. He packed everything I would need for me, and told me to give him whatever toiletries I would need. I proceeded to get ready and we were out the door right on time. We were headed around New Circle Road, which is the road we take to get to the interstate, meaning we could have been going anywhere. He got off on the Leestown Road exit (not the exit you would take to get to the interstate) and started heading downtown. So I thought maybe we were going to dinner downtown somewhere. Or to the Lexington Cemetery - which while its beautiful, is kind of  a strange place to go for an anniversary. Before we got downtown he made a right turn onto a road I'd never been on. I saw flashing cop lights and then this:

We were having dinner on a dinner train! Derek was so excited and said, "We're going to be like Harry Potter!" Apparently this dinner train usually starts in Bardstown (several hours away) but this was the first time they left out of Lexington, and it was a special 3 hour ride, with a 6 course meal featuring several different wines. When we got there they had appetizers for us and there was a musician playing guitar as well. We spent some time snacking and checking out the train.

We boarded the train and this is what we saw:

And here is our table:

And we got champagne when we boarded:

I didn't start taking pictures of our food til the 3rd course but here are some pictures of some of the delicious food. Our salad:

Lobster Bisque (this was so good!)

Entrees - Derek got the prime rib, and I got chicken.

And finally dessert!

We rode the train through the country and got to see some horse farms. Here are some of the views:

Another fun part about the train ride was the people we sat with. There was a family of 5 that joined us, 2 at our table, 3 at the table next to us. They had twin sons who were celebrating their 21st birthdays, and a daughter who was a couple years younger than me, who studied civil engineering at UK around the same time as me and she worked at the church Derek works at, while she was in college. It was fun getting to know the family we ate with and celebrating with them.

The train ride was 3 hours long, and was lots of fun since I had never really done anything like it. When we got off the train I had no idea what was next, but I'll save that for the next post :)

5 Years

Well folks, tomorrow is a big day! It marks 5 years of wedded bliss. Because Derek has to work on Saturday, we are beginning our celebration tonight. Derek has plans for this evening and tomorrow during the day, and then Friday night, I have something fun planned for us. So, with all of that going on, I figured I would do a little 5 year anniversary post today.

Thinking back on our wedding day, it was one of the best and most fun days of my life. I remember telling myself at the beginning of the day as I started to get nervous, to just enjoy the day. I won't ever get to do this again, and I don't want to not remember the day because I was too nervous. And that little pep talk did the trick.

I spent Friday night at the hotel our reception was at, and stayed in a room with my sister and my best friend from high school, Amy. I got a great night's sleep and I remember when I woke up my friend Angie texted me, and was all excited for me, and that made me really happy. The weather that morning was beautiful and I was so excited because it was supposed to rain. {Don't worry, it ended up being a cold and wet day, but at least the morning was pretty!} My bridesmaids met me at the hotel and we all had breakfast together, and spent the day getting pretty.

My beautiful maid of honor, my sister

Getting my hair did and reading a letter from my future husband

After hair and make up, we headed to the church to get into our dresses and wait for the ceremony to start. I remember singing "Going to the Chapel" with my sister and Amy as my dad drove us to the church.

Getting into my dress

We took pictures, separately, because we didn't want to see each other until I was walking down the aisle, and then had the long wait. Someone brought us subway so we wouldn't be starving, as there would be more pictures after the ceremony, and I remember being so careful not to spill any on my dress. We had lots of fun hanging out before the ceremony.

I don't have any pictures of the ceremony (well I do, just not on my computer - all these are from one of my bridesmaids, Ann) but I loved the ceremony. We had some very talented friends sing, and very good friends do readings, and even though we were up in front of hundreds of people, it was like it was just the two of us up there, laughing, smiling, making jokes. People commented on how "chatty" we were throughout the whole thing, and I love that we weren't nervous, just so excited and enjoying the day.

After the ceremony we were in a room with all of our families and the wedding party and everyone was hugging and it was such a happy few minutes while we waited for everyone to head to the reception so we could finish taking pictures. Pictures afterwards were the hardest for me. I was tired of standing, and really just wanted to get to the reception. But we made it through and got to party the night away with our friends.

I absolutely loved our reception too! Derek's one big thing he really wanted was to have a big dance floor. So when we were planning out the space, we made the dance floor as big as possible, and I'm glad we did because it was full the entire night. Everyone was dancing, and the only thing I wish is that I was able to dance a little more than I did, but being the bride you have to make sure you talk to everyone, and meet all of your husbands distant relatives and family friends, so I made sure to do that. But we did get some dancing in, and everything about the night was perfect. 

Dancing

Toasts

Cake

And since our wedding was at a hotel, at the end of the night we just hopped up to the elevator to our room. And my sister and one of my bridesmaids, Ann, snuck into the room and decorated it for us.

And a funny story after the wedding. Derek decided he really wanted some cake. I think it was around 12:45. He wanted me to call my mom and have her bring some up to us. So I called, and they were in the process of cleaning everything up and she was able to get some cake for us. So she came up to our room, on our wedding night and brought us cake. She is such a good mom. And of course Derek would not even come to the door because he was too embarrassed. But mom and  I talked for a few minutes about how wonderful everything was and we were both so giddy and happy from the day that it really didn't bother us. And Derek had cake and champagne, and we even had cake to take on our honeymoon with us! We woke up - although I'm not sure we ever really went to sleep, we were both so excited and spent forever just laying in bed talking about how awesome the day was - around 4 ish (I think) to go to the airport to fly out to Hawaii. I wish we had more time at the hotel, because our room was awesome. I would love to stay in that suite again - maybe one day :)  But that was our wedding day 5 years ago. It was absolutely perfect.

Derek, thanks for marrying me and giving me 5 amazing years. I love all of the memories we've made, and I can't wait for all of the ones we will make in the future. You're so much fun, and wonderful, and I am so blessed to be able to call you my husband. I love you!