YeeHaw!! Howdy from Texas Ya'll!

Cowgirl Jessica here, saying hi from the Stockyards in Fort Worth Texas! I'm out here visiting the southern belle, Brie and enjoying some of the hot Texas summer!






















Looks like we got here just in time to see some Texas Longhorns being driven down East Exchange Avenue. This is part of the daily cattle drive through this historic part of the city.


After this we'll be sure to grab some awesome Texas BBQ and check out all the shopping! (This is me after all!)

One year to go!

One year to go until Kyle and I officially become the Cormany Couple!

Kyle, Mom, and I went down to SLO for the weekend to see family and enjoy the beautiful weather.

Kyle was such a good sport listening to my mom and I talk wedding all weekend as we measured the yard, and shopped for my dress, and picked out plants for centerpieces, etc... He was even a good enough sport to pose for some pictures.



I can't lie, the first time I set foot in this yard (after dating Kyle for only a week) I knew I wanted to get married on these steps. And in one year from now, we'll be back here saying our vows! I'm so thankful that Kirk and Candace are letting us get married at their beautiful home. I feel like our day will be so much more special because we are sharing it with them.

Lost in the Woods

Natalie and I decided to beat the heat and head out for a nice hike through some redwoods. We packed snacks, highlighted a map of our trails, and donned our most comfy shoes for a nice afternoon trek. All was going nicely except none of the trails seemed to make much sense when we looked at our map and it was taking us much longer to find our destination (a field filled with ladybugs) than we expected.

Just when we were thinking we were lost we saw a sign!











Hmm... The Iverson trail. One of the trails we were looking for, but the sign was on the ground and there was no way to tell which direction to take. So we chose to keep on trekkin...
And then we saw this!









All the signs had been pulled out! No wonder we were lost.

We came to a creek and decided to cross because it looked promising on the other side and we didn't want to backtrack all the way to the beginning. After I saw Natalie get her shoes all wet by stepping on some wobbly rocks I decided to take the fallen log across. Looks like I still have some gymnast in me!










Once we climbed the bank of the creek and got to the main road we saw the backs of a whole bunch of signs.










These would have been helpful! Apparently we had missed a turn and ended up on a trail that was no longer open. Yikes! Well, we did find our field eventually, but there were no ladybugs. However, we did find some liverworts (a non-vascular plant that is similar to a moss). Yeah, we're cool science teachers, haha. Well, it was a pretty fun hike even though we got lost in the woods for a bit!

Sisterly Love

Lady and Bella are slowly getting used to each other. Bella wants to do everything that Lady does, and Lady is having to get used to sharing all of her toys. As you can see below, it doesn't always go well for Bella.










"Hi Lady! Whatcha doin?"










"I'm scratching on my scratcher. You can't play!"










"RRrrrarr! Hisssss! Get away from my scratcher Bella!"

Every once in a while we'll catch Lady being a good sister by sharing her bed. Here is Bella doing her best sleepy Lady impression.










Here are our two beauties taking a little cat nap. At least they can both agree that sleeping for most of the day is the way to go! Gotta love being a cat!

FREEDOM!!

Kind of...

I don't think that it has quite set in yet that I'm on summer break. That could be partially because Kyle has been keeping me insanely busy, or that Lindsey has seriously kicked my butt into wedding planning mode, or the fact that I still have work to do for school.

Either way, my first weekend of "freedom" started off with crashing a birthday party of complete strangers. Very unKyle-like, but it turned out to be a fun time between the undergrad type drinking games and the bounce house in the backyard. It was fun to meet young people in our area and just hang out for a change. Saturday Kyle decided that we should beet the drinking blues by having brunch in downtown Menlo Park and then catching a movie. We went to see Star Trek, which I had my doubts about, but it was actually really good. We finished up the weekend by going car shopping for me. I drove a couple and decided to rule out a Corolla as an option and consider the Lexus IS 250. We also saw the Camaro that Kyle wants to get, and I was pretty impressed!






On Monday, Linds got here for some serious wedding planning. She pulls out her super organized binders- one for my wedding and one for hers and I'm already overwhelmed. She is one heck of a maid of honor though, so she helped me figure out some issues and gave me some assignments to get done by the end of the month. On Tuesday, after we had established that Lady can't handle company and Lindsey really does in fact HATE cats we went dress shopping. This time Linds got to join in the fun and she found a few really beautiful ones. I found one that I'm really excited about, but we'll have to see if it passes the mom inspection first!

Yeah, summer break is great...

Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas!

This year's Vegas trip was a complete blast. I got to room with Brie and Erin, the two Vegas trip newbies. It was so much fun to hang out with the girls and have no responsibility whatsoever. We spent pretty much all our time downtown this year since we were having too much fun to make it down to the strip. Among the highlights for me were watching mom scream at the cab driver that he was a huge A-hole, watching the almost brawl in the hot tub, and cracking up with the girls as we danced on the bar at Gold Diggers.


As always though it was fun to see all the ladies together and hear their stories from the year and check out the shoes from this year's theme: Ugly Shoes.







Maybe next year I'll be able to keep up with all the "mommies gone wild" and actually stay up past 2!

One Week To Go!!

This is the last week of school!!! I think I finally started to realize it when my students started asking me to sign their yearbooks today. Weird! I totally remember how exciting the last week of school was and how it seemed like finals were far less important than making sure every single friend had signed "Have a good summer!" in my yearbook.

I had to say goodbye to my seniors today because they're off to graduation practice (and their adult lives!). It was really hard to see them go! I think I might be feeling just a little sentimental since this is my first year, but these kids have been my life for the last 10 months and it will be weird to not see them every day. Don't worry about me though, I'm sure 2 months off will cure that in no time! So, here's to the class of 2009, and my first year as a teacher. By the way, I totally bought a yearbook, haha!