Easy as pie

Over the long weekend that I spent at home for Christmas, I had the great idea that I should bake a pie. I love to cook, bake, do anything in the kitchen so I was looking forward to a chance to doing something domestic in my parent's kitchen. I've never made a pie before so I documented my efforts with my new camera that I got for Christmas!

Step 1:
Slice and peel the apples

Step 2:
Sustained an injury...and yes, that's a Strawberry Shortcake bandaid

Step 3:
Line the pie dish and mix in other ingredients with apples

Step 4: Lattice the crust to make it look pretty :)

Step 5:
Bake and enjoy!!

The fam gave rave reviews...and I have to say, it was very tasty. I can't wait to do it again and next time, I'm going to take on making my own crust!

Singleness at Christmas

God has given me a peace with being single...until it comes to the holidays. The past 2 and a half years, I've been single--and the last two years, I really have had a peace with it. I didn't have time to be in a relationship when I was at Georgia and I was more than okay with that fact because I knew that it wouldn't be fair to the guy I would be dating...and trust me, that was a big realization for me to come to. After graduating, I started to be a little less settled in my singleness simply because I realized that my chances of meeting people dropped drastically. Really though, it was not a big problem because I trust God has a plan greater than my own and it only takes one guy to be the right one.

But being single at Christmas time is a whole different ballpark. I love my family and look forward to spending time with them whenever I get the chance to be at home. The only problem is, well, I'm not married. And I say that this is a problem because I become alarmingly aware of my singleness around my family. Mom has dad, Kirby has Daniel, and Katie has Lee. And in effort to make me feel better, Kirby says "You at least have the Charlotte (soon to be Charlotte and other niece!) to play with." True, but everyone else wants to play with Charlotte too...and in the end, she'll always pick her mom and dad over me.

And when it comes to sleeping arrangements, I usually get kicked to the couch because we don't have to worry about anyone else but myself when it comes to going to sleep. Married people tend to sleep in the same bed, and since Kirby has twin beds in her old room and I have a full sized bed, I am forced to either sleep in a twin bed across my snoring grandmother, or opt for the couch in our bonus room.

It all becomes that much more frustrating because no one in my family really understands my singleness. Yes, they've been single before and had to wait for their spouses....but both Kirby and Katie got married the summer after they graduated from college and my mom met my dad when she was 17. So yes, they had to wait, but they haven't been single outside of college, and I am learning very quickly that that is a whole different ballpark as well. So if I hear "God has a plan." "The wait will be worth it." or anything along those lines much more...well, I'll probably just smile and say, "I know" to whoever is telling me. But know that if you say that to me, I'm smiling on the outside but cringing a little bit on the inside because hearing that a thousand times over does not make the wait any less painful.

I know that being in a relationship does not make everything easier...in fact, I know that it can make life a little more of a challenge at times. But I envy my sisters and their marriages because they have someone to go through life with. Someone to talk to day in and day out, a best friend, a constant. If God has a husband in my future, I am trusting in Him and His perfect plan because I know my plan is flawed and His is so much greater. But waiting becomes that much harder during Christmas time. A whole, whole lot harder.

This is not our Home

I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.--John 16:33

These past few months have been some of several victories for Christ, but it's been hard to see His love sometimes through some of the stories I've heard or experienced.

-It started with Sam Dowlen's nearly parlyzing injury in August.
-Then I found out my dad's cousin (my second cousin?) Sandra has ovarian cancer.
-A girl from my pledge class finds out that she has thyroid cancer soon after hearing about Sandra's news.
-One of Katy Fisher's friends from high school passes away after some complications during her heart surgery.
-Another girl from my sorority found her fiance dead in her room last week.
-Today, Kasey Gabhart told me the news of her 5 year old niece that was just diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphatic leukemia.

I'm not sharing all of this as a source for pity, but if anything as an encouragement to pray. I have been reminded over and over again these past few months that where we are now is not our home and this heartbreak is not meant to be our's forever. Some days, I find myself so much more grateful for that fact and can only turn my eyes towards Heaven as I wait and see what God has in store for the rest of my journey in my temporary home. I know that He is a Father that loves so much more deeply than we can understand and that He is just and righteous in everything He does, through His love for us.

Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.--2 Corinthians 4:16-18

lots of friends and lots of rest

This weekend was a very restful one, which is just what I've wanted and needed. Don't get me wrong, I love busy weekends full of seeing friends and being around them all weekend, but once and a while, everyone needs a chance to just veg. And veg I did :)

Thursday night was like a weekend night because right after work, I headed over the meet Anna Cleland, Chris Raynolds, Alex, and Forrest. We stuffed ourselves into Forrest's truck and made the trek up to Nashville to enjoy the Andrew Peterson "Behold the Lamb of God" concert. it. was. INCREDIBLE. I was so blessed to go last year and this year I had even more of an appreciation of the artists and the music that was full of worship and a love for our Savior. But boy was I exhausted by the time we made it home!! (I didn't get in bed until 2:30 AM and had been up since 5:15 AM!!!)

Friday morning wasn't too bad though because I don't have to work for the Y anymore!! I promise I'll post about my new job later this week...maybe tomorrow....or the next day....

Friday night I had dinner with my "twin" from camp, Hannah Card. We enjoyed time together at Panera as we caught up and ate yummy food. I was exhausted and started to yawn a lot at the end of our dinner, so I headed back to the Liner's and spent some time with Alex and Mrs. Liner before crashing! What a great Friday night :)

I slept in on Saturday (a very rare thing!) and bummed around, watching a couple of movies on TBS and stayed in my PJs until around 1:00!! I pulled my lazy self up though to get ready for the rest of the day. Haley Hill is hands down one of the most genuine, sweetest girls that I know and I was looking forward to our coffee date together. She and I enjoyed sitting and talking at Rembrandt's for several hours and I hope to see her again while she is home on break.

After our coffee dates, I headed back to Hixson so I could grab my stuff and go a much anticipated sleepover with my summer roommates :) This summer,

Julia Suddath and Kelsey Palm
lived with me in the Cabinetteand we wanted to spend time together over the break (they both go to UTK, but Julia lives in Dalton and Kelsey lives in Hixson) to reminisce. It was a typical sleepover in the sense that we stuffed our faces with homemade pizza, Christmas treats, and some strawberry champagne. *Side note: Champange is not meant to be put in the freezer. It was room temperature when we first had it, so we thought we would give it a quick chill and put it in the freezer for just 20 minutes or so....20 minutes turned into 4+ hours, turning the champagne into a frozen solid popsicle. So we spent a good portion of the next hour rubbing the bottles to unfreeze them. too funny.

Sunday was very, very restful as well. We had our potential new pastor speak at First Pres and we were all excited to have him voted by an overwhelming majority! This is a big deal for my church and we are excited to see where God takes us from here. I took a nap Sunday afternoon and spent some time with Reilly when he came over the his parent's house on Sunday evening.

Overall, it was a restful weekend, but not too boring!! And here's to a 3 day work week that I will get to spend going to church Christmas parties and seeing friends that are home from college on break!! :)

Taking work home from work

Project for the night:

Putting these labels on 300+ envelopes...Ohhhh this is going to be monotonous.

But at least I get to get some of these
with a friend before I have to sit down with these (awesome) labels (thanks to Hayne!!)

Secret #3 is revealed!!

I kind of spoiled my own "reveal" of the secret in my last post. I was reminded that I told my blog readers I would share the secret when Emily Geyer was guessing what the secret was when we were on gchat earlier today....when I had to tell her that she kind of already knew.

Secret #3 is.....
(imagine you hear the drum roll in the background)
Drexel and Matt's engagement!!!

Matt Bond called me on Thursday afternoon to ask if I could keep a secret as he continued on to tell me that he was proposing to Drexel on Friday afternoon and wanted to have a bunch of people over to Nurse Lynn's house later on in the evening. I literally was screaming in the car by myself....the slight problem with when Matt told me the big secret was that I was on my way to see camp friends that Thursday night. So I found out this SUPER exciting news, and then had to keep my mouth shut around all of these people that knew both Matt and Drexel. Talk about testing my secret keeping abilities under pressure!

The Proposal: Again, I apologize for my lack of pictures from this weekend--with so much news, I should have been clicking pictures right and left! Matt had been planning this proposal for a long time and it could not have turned out to be more perfect! For Matt and Drexel's first date, they went to a friend's large house/tons of land up on Signal, so Matt took Drexel back to their friend's land to spend some time together on Friday afternoon. Matt had written several poems to Drexel throughout the time they have been dating and told her a while ago that he would write her a poem for Christmas. He told her that he wanted to give her her Christmas present early and takes out the poem to read to her. Matt had never told anyone he loved them before and didn't want to do so until he knew he would be marrying the girl. So halfway through the poem, Matt says I love you and gets down on his knee! Of course Drexel said yes! and they start calling friends. They celebrate by going out to dinner and Matt says that Lynn Jones really wanted to see the ring/them and brings Drexel to Lynn's house...little did Drexel know that several of their close friends were their to see them!

It was so wonderful to see them that night and see a couple so happy and so in love. I am so excited for them!!

So many friends, so little time

Oh my goodness, what a weekend!!!!! I can honestly say that I have not had a weekend that so much has happened in in quite a while. My weekend unofficially started on Thursday...And here's why.

Thursday night, Kelsey Bull, Allison Little, Jordan Johnson, and Gavin McLaughlin all come in town from UT and Union for the Christmas party :) I spent the night over at Gavin's so I could spend as much time with them as possible. We stayed up super late catching up, then I had to wake up to make it to work on time.

I worked for several hours Friday morning, met the group for lunch at Yellow Deli (yum!...even if I don't agree with their beliefs, I believe that my tummy always leaves happy) and met up with my bosses at Neidlov's to go over some stuff before we went to look at some new spaces that we might be relocating to soon!

Friday night I met up with a group of friends from camp that were in town at Sticky Fingers (yum, again) before I had to leave them for my "Christmas party". I put Christmas party in quotes because that was the lie I had to tell everyone so I could go to a surprise engagement party for my wonderful friends Matt Bond and Drexel Dunagan. (Story on their engagement to come! I don't want to overwhelm you in this post more than you probably will be...) I spent the night at Gavin's again that night (stayed up super late again) and got to sleep in a bit on Saturday.

We took our time to get up on Saturday morning, but once we finally got up and ready, we stopped at Sonic before heading to America's Thrift Store to find some classic White Elephant gifts. (I purchased a dancing/singing monkey that was wearing a turban and a shampoo sprayer...and no, I really don't understand how the shampoo sprayer really works or what it's purpose really is.)

The Christmas party was tons of fun! We had the party at CVP and enjoyed Heather's yummy chicken poufs and lots of other delicious treats. I ended up with a Yanni CD, which I "accidently" left at camp. The night was so fun to spend time with lots of friends from camp that I don't see or spend time with nearly enough.

Sunday morning was a BIG day for me--I joined First Pres!! I have never been an official member of a church before, so this was a big deal to me and I couldn't be more excited! After church, I went to lunch to spend a few more minutes with friends before they got back on the road. When we were at Mojo, I ran into Deb Jones and her fiance!!! She and David had gotten engaged the night before and I was so excited to see her face to face to hear the news!!

I went home to take a nap before I went back to the church to see White Christmas--a program put on by the children of the church and it was PRECIOUS!! I'll upload the video as soon as I can so you can see how precious it really is.

Whew....that was a suuuuper busy weekend but I absolutely loved every single minute of it! Sorry for the sad lack of pictures, I took 2 pictures the whole weekend plus the video of White Christmas....severely lacking on my part, I know.

Secrets

When someone asks you, "Are you good at keeping secrets?" who would really say "no, not so much"? Very, very few people would respond that way.

I've had to learn better than ever to keep secrets in these past few month. I mean, I would definitely consider myself a good secret keeper, but there are some things that are super exciting and I want to tell everyone...but I've had to learn that some news is just not my news to share, and that's totally okay.

Secret #1Kirby told me that she was pregnant the day after I got back from camp!! but couldn't tell anyone until later since you usually don't announce it until the pregnancy has developed a little bit!! But it's not a secret anymore!! :)

Secret# 1.5
Kirby and Daniel found out the sex of the baby but didn't want to announce it until they were sure that they wanted the world to know boy or girl! I'm still not sure if that's something I can broadcast over the internet.

Secret# 2Kasey Gabhart's engagement!! Her fiance, JR, sent me a facebook message the week before he proposed because he knows how much Kasey and I care for each other and being long distance best friends makes it a bit harder at times. The hardest part was that Kasey called me the Monday afternoon before he was proposing that night and it was soooooo hard to not giggle whenever she mentioned JR or when we started talking about our plans for the night!!

Secret #3
I can't tell you yet!!! But trust me, it is sooooo hard to keep this one! I'll be sure to post something as soon as I can...hopefully by the end of the weekend I can share this really fun, exciting, and wonderful secret!! :)

Thanksgiving Rewind

Over Thanksgiving, the Mardis family tries to make a little tradition of doing something together the day following Thanksgiving. This year, we headed up to North Georgia to visit several apple orchards in efforts to find the tastiest apples we could!!

Kirby, Daniel,

my dad and myself

loaded up into my dad's truck and road up to Ellijay, Georgia. We stopped at 4 different orchards and finally settled on a winner!


We enjoyed some yummy apples, apple treats (like fried pies and fresh apple cider!), and lots of fun family time before going to a really cute local restaurant...that I forgot to take a picture of.

But all of that to say, it was a really fun day with some of my favorite people on a little adventure in North Georgia!

To Kentucky and Back

Finally!! I'm as close to being "in the swing of things" with blogging as I can get right now...so here it is as you used to know it, my weekend update!

Friday after work I headed up to see this girl; the bride-to-be Miss Kasey Gabhart (soon to be Mrs. Kasey Vance! Has a nice ring to it, don't you think??)


She and I spent some much needed girl time on Friday night--we went out to eat and played "chicken leg"...and of course talked wedding plans!! We usually got too distracted by talking about what she already had planned about the wedding to get much planning done, but good thing phone calls, text messages, and emails can remedy our tendency to get easily distracted.

Kasey had to go with her future mother and sister in law to a play in Nashville that she had already committed to...which actually worked out perfectly so I could see other great friends in Bowling Green! Ryan Graham and Jessica Paulsen came out of their way to visit me when I was at Todd and Ben's house. Most of the afternoon was spent watching the SEC Championship Game (Roll Tide!) and redecorating Todd and Ben's Christmas tree. I wish I had taken a before because it was a little rough...but thank goodness I could help! haha and Ben helped a little bit too, I guess. But here's the masterpiece!



And yes, that is Snoop Dogg at the top of their tree...don't ask because I couldn't explain it if I had to.

I got to spend some time with Kasey, JR, and his best friend Joe at Kasey's future house that night which was relaxing and lots of fun too!

After going to church, followed by a great lunch with even better friends, I got to have a very brief catch up time with Jessica before I hit the road again!!

I spent almost the whole trip on the phone with Kelsey Bull before I met up with my dad for our becoming-tradition of Sunday night dinner's at Cracker Barrel...where he brought me my new toy!! I've only had it for a day and don't know how I ever got along without it!



My weekend came to a close by watching Seventeen Again with Deb and staying up waaaayyy too late. Which I'm starting to wonder why I decided to blog at 10:00 the night after having a short, and bad night's sleep the night before. So I'll take this as my cue to shut my computer and go to sleep! Yawn!

It was a great weekend of great friends, but man! was it tiring!

Reilly's Old Room

That's right, Reilly's old room. It's what I have called home for the past several months that I have lived in Chattanooga. I know that this is beyond several months late, but I have a guilt that whenever I don't blog about something I've wanted to blog about for a while...I just can't move on to other blogging topics until I've covered the other ones that came first.

Right after I got the job at the ribbons company...and when I say right after, I mean, I was started the job with the ribbons on a Thursday and I moved in on a Sunday. And where did I move into you might ask? Reilly Liner's old room. That's right, I live in the Liner's basement apartment!! Complete with....

A bed, dresser, computer desk,

a full bathroom,

and a "kitchen" which now includes a coffee pot and microwave!
and when I say kitchen...I really mean a fridge and some counter space...

And it has been a HUUUUUUUGEEEEE blessing!! I have a garage door opener and key to the house so I can come and go as I please. And surprisingly, I very rarely see George and Susan, but it is so good to know that I'm not in their house alone. And when I do get to see them, I feel as those they're like my aunt and uncle that I just love to sit and talk with and be around.

Sadly (for me that is), their house is for sale, but I know that God will provide housing (because I really don't want to have to live alone!) but it would be nice to live a little bit (or a lot) closer to my job and church rather than making the trek up and down 27 every day.