I was doing so well at updating the blog regularly, don't you think? I was really proud of myself then last week came and it was one of those weeks where you need one more day.
We kicked off our second semester of Financial Peace University at our church. We are so excited to get to lead another group, but there is a lot going into this class mainly because we have 32 people participating. THIRTY-TWO! wowsers. Plus we advertised that we would offer childcare, so I've been coordinating that for about 12 kids. Honestly that has been the most work - arranging to have childcare workers there each week, having the right number of people helping each week, getting payment from each set of parents, paying the workers, and getting the reimbursement set up with our church. whew. Just trying to explain it all again makes me realize how much work is involved.
However, this past week we had our second class and after all the emails and returning families showing their appreciation, it is completely worth every second of the planning.
We have a great group for FPU - very diverse and everyone already seems extremely enthusiastic about the class. Even more exciting is that we are coordinating a second class that starts this week - wow!
On top of all the FPU craziness, I had to squeeze in work hours. I have been very fortunate that I got approved to work my second day at home now so I'm only having to go into the office once a week - so I work about 7 hours in the office and anywhere between 3-4 hours at home. It's been great so far, but makes for a busy week trying to squeeze in those hours in between everything else going on.
I also had two cake orders that were due by Thursday - I think they turned out really great. I was really proud of them - especially the R2D2 cake because it was a really awesome 3-D cake, standing about 1 foot tall and the family who ordered it loved it.


So after staying up until about 4am Thursday morning, I got the cakes delivered, then headed home to pack for our family trip to Gatlinburg. We gave my parents a weekend stay in Gatlinburg for Christmas and our entire family tagged along (sister and her family). Brent and I decided to head over on Thursday so we could see our good friends Chad and Gena in Knoxville. Ari and Gabbie are about 3 months apart in age and every time we visit, it seems like their age difference is becoming less and less. They had a great time playing with each other Friday morning before we headed to the 'Burg.
I'm not sure why I don't have any better pictures than this one, but it's still cute. Gabbie loved Ari's little chair.

The rest of the weekend was spent in the beautiful metropolis of Gatlinburg. The weekend involved shopping, eating, walking, eating, napping, eating, games, sleeping, eating, Titanic and sleeping. That pretty much sums up the weekend. HA



We did tour the Titanic Museum before leaving Gatlinburg on Sunday. And while you may be with me and think that is the epitome of redneck: a Titanic museum in Gatlinburg, it actually was very interesting. They did a great job of setting up the whole scene: before boarding the ship, you received a boarding pass that assigned you as an actual passenger that had been on the Titanic. Then you spent the entirety of the tour looking for artifacts and information about your character down to the last stop where all of the passengers were listed and whether they survived.


We headed back home early Sunday because we have an almost 4 hour drive back home. We had to make it time for the big Super Bowl game and literally we rolled in about 20 minutes before kickoff. We spent the game at Brad and Casey's watching with a lot of other friends - we had a great time, playing Minute to Win It games which was a blast!
So whew....that week was packed full of fun and busy-ness to say the least.