In conjunction with Films with Feathermaye I am proud to announce the beginning of a new contest in which winners will receive DVDs, Movie Passes and other assorted movie-related prizes*!  

Starting in December and then each month thereafter, http://www.feathermaye.com/ will award a movie and/or movie-related prize to at least one winner who will be chosen at random** from all eligible entries.  

An entry will consist of nothing more than a comment placed on a designated blog post at http://www.feathermaye.com/ on specified dates.  Participants can place as many comments on each blog as they like, but only the first comment left by each participant will be considered an entry.

Participants will be given four (4) chances to enter each month, based on weekly participation. ALL members of Fab40 are eligible to participate, and encouraged to do so!

_{*actual prizes to be determined at a later date
**All winners will be selected using www.randomizer.org
Please note: this contest is wholly sponsored by http://www.feathermaye.com/ . No other website or individual bears any responsibility or obligation to the described contest or prizes.}

Today Scott and I celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary. Anyone who is even remotely familiar with me knows that I adore my husband. I not only love him, though… I LIKE him a great deal.

Scott and I both walked some rough roads before finding each other, and although it hasn’t been a piece of cake making it work for us, it has been worth every step to get here.

This particular song ALWAYS makes me think of my husband, and I have claimed it as our own:

Happy anniversary, honey! I love with you with my whole heart.

_{ps: Today is also Scott's 50th birthday!! Happy birthday, too!!}

So, I’ve been absent for a couple of days, and I’m really touched by all the messages I’ve received, checking on me and my trip to see Jonathan.

Our trip was wonderful, but exhausting. We left early Sunday morning and drove to pick up Jonathan. I snapped lots of pictures before we ever even got there, but the one sight that really took my breath away was this one:

The enormity of the program my son is in really hit home with me as we drove up to the facility. We had to check in at the guard shack, and they called his dorm, who then put him on a bus and sent him to us. We waited about twenty minutes before we finally had him in our clutches, but it was worth it.

We then drove to Austin and had lunch, where Jonathan wished I didn’t have a camera attached to my hands.

Then we visited and took a leisurely stroll (to the tune of about ten miles!) around the University of Texas campus. We saw some really impressive sites, like this beautiful statue of Martin Luther King, Jr:

And this fountain:

Ultimately, though, the most startling site of the day was of Jonathan and his newest habit, of which I’m not exactly pleased:

We dropped Jonathan back off that evening and then drove into San Antonio where we spent the night. We had planned on getting up early and checking out some of the attractions near our hotel, but to be honest we were simply exhausted and just decided to come home.

We‘re pretty much recovered now, but we’ve entered the next phase of excitement in our kids’ lives and are waiting to see how it will all turn out. See, Katy (Scott’s youngest daughter) and her online boyfriend are together, face to face, for the first time ever in our home right now. So far all is going well, although I left a friend of ours with them to chaperon when Scott and I went to bed…

As always, I’ll be sure to keep you posted! ;)

_{Edited to add: By the way, I took some killer photos of the Texas landscape all during our trip. Most of these pictures were snapped at 70+mph but are amazing, much to my surprise. If you'd like to see the first set of these photos, please visit} my personal blog

It's kind of startling to me when I let it sink in that I haven't seen Jonathan since the first week of August. And the last time we saw each other was a bit hectic to say the least. The only other time we've gone this long without seeing each other is when Scott and I were going back and forth from Texas to St. Thomas during 2003 and 2004.

Jonathan’s current schedule at the Job Corps has him working and studying right up until his Christmas break on December 19th, so he won’t even be coming home for Thanksgiving. Quite honestly, I NEED to see my son. I need to hug him and make sure he’s doing as well as he’d have me believe. Things like “I’ve lost twenty pounds, Mom!” have got me a little freaked out. Not that he’s in jeopardy of wasting away or anything…

So anyway, Sunday morning we‘re heading up to San Marcos to pick up Jonathan and hold him captive for the day. We‘re going to take him shopping, and let him get “his feed on” at a Chinese buffet and basically just make sure that by the end of the day he knows how proud we are of what he’s doing, and what he’s still planning to get done.

Scott has mapped our trip out to the minute, with such flexible situations as the time we‘re picking up Jonathan (10:30 am), to our arrival in Austin (10:55 am) and our first stop for lunch at the Chinese buffet (11:10 am). I am already planning an “unplanned” bathroom stop about halfway to San Marcos, just to keep things interesting. In all honesty, I’m just hoping to get that vein in his forehead good and throbbing before noon.

Jonathan has a 9:00 pm curfew but we‘re actually going to have him back closer to 8:30 so we can venture into San Antonio for the night and half of the following day. Scott’s never seen the Alamo or the River Walk, so I’m excited to get to create these memories with him.

We’ll head back home by noon or so to meet Katy (Scott’s youngest daughter) at our place on Monday afternoon. Then we launch into a brand new adventure on her behalf: her internet boyfriend, a young man who has been a part of her life for about six months or so, will be arriving from Michigan on Tuesday afternoon to spend Thanksgiving with us.

Stay tuned! Here lately, there’s never a dull moment.

Have a great weekend!! :)

I have to say, when my mother called me a few weeks ago and asked if we would entertain a visitor in our house for several days, I was hesitant. I mean, I’m fond of meeting new people and all that (particularly adventurous souls, as she touted this Flat Stanley fellow to be), but I don’t like bringing strangers into my home.

My mother, though, is very persuasive. Especially when it comes to me. Okay, I admit it: I’m a momma’s girl. Totally. And, in the end, all that mattered was that she’d asked for a favor (on behalf of my niece), and I needed to just say yes and get on with it.

As Mom explained it to me, Flat Stanley is both a book and a school project which promotes literacy and communications. Families all over the world (including a bunch of celebrities, as shown at the website ) are bringing Flat Stanley into their lives to support their grade schoolers' projects, and are encouraged to collect souvenirs, take lots of pictures and journal (or blog) about the time they spend with him.

Little did I know that bringing Flat Stanley into our lives would be so much fun!

“...Stanley Lambchop was a typical boy who had a large bulletin board fall on him. He was flattened to one and a half inches thick. Stanley discovered he could be folded up and mailed in an envelope to different places. Stanley now wishes to come and visit you.”

As luck would have it, Scott and I are taking a trip this weekend to go visit Jonathan. We’ll be picking him up from the Job Corps campus on Sunday morning and will travel about a half hour to Austin, where we’ll visit the University of Texas campus (where Jonathan hopes to one day attend), have lunch on 6th Street and just play tourists for the day. Then Scott, Flat Stanley and I will stay overnight either in San Marcos or San Antonio, and have breakfast on the River Walk.

I will be taking lots of pictures and blogging about our adventures with Flat Stanley. We hadn’t really budgeted for an extra person, but I guess he doesn’t look like he’ll eat all that much, huh? ;)

_{Flat Stanley is an international literacy and communications activity for primary and junior students, teachers and families}

About 2 - 3 weeks ago, I was the lucky winner of the mineral makeup prize here at Fab40, as offered by Terra Firma Cosmetics.

I was so excited because 1.) I rarely win ANYTHING and 2.) I am absolutely in love with mineral makeup.

I’ve mentioned before on different posts that I prefer the more expensive brands of mineral makeup, but that my budget typically allows for the store-bought brands. And I was okay with that.  

But this stuff… Oh. My. Goodness. It’s such a higher quality than ANY of the other brands I’ve tried. It applies smoother with less fly-away mess and is made with even less additives than the other stuff.

Not only did I get a complete cosmetics package (concealer, foundation, finisher, blush, bronzer, eye shadow and lip gloss!!) with carrying case, I also received a great kabuki brush AND facial cleanser and moisturizer. And these are full-sized products—not samples!

As of this morning I have used all of the products at least once, and I am completely in love with this brand.

The gals at Terra Firma were very helpful, too, in assisting me to choose the right colors for my skin tone and matching the cleansing/moisturizing products to my skin type.

All in all, this is the best prize I have ever won and I now consider myself a Terra Firma Cosmetics customer for life. I can't wait to try their other stuff.