Kreative Blogger Award!

I appreciate and gladly accept this from Andrea and Aimee-thanks girls! You are the best! I love these awards...for nothing else than it is an easy way to blog for the day! :) My job in receiving this award is to share seven things I love and then bestow this award to seven lovely people that put a smile on my face!

My seven things (and just so you know...I didn't pick obvious ones like my husband and JD because they are my TOP two for my life...these are my selfish 7! :) Maybe this should be the awards name?? :)

1. I LOVE FALL. I know this one seems like a cop out but I really do love this season. I love that the days are still warm and you can wear summer type clothes with maybe a light jacket during the day and then the nights are chilly and you get to wear jeans and hooded sweatshirts and be all snugly. I also love all of the smells that fall has, the burning leaves outside, the breezy air, cookout smells...all of it! I love the days of the year that God blesses us where it actually feels like fall and it isn't. That is a blessing (to me of course)!

2. I LOVE HOMES. I will look through home magazines...the ones that have actual homes with floor plans attached and also the ones that show only insides of homes with decor. I love to go to open houses for no apparent reason than to look at the house and get my own ideas for our home or you can sometimes find me driving around and to look at neighborhoods filled with beautiful homes. I also love to dream about what I could do with a specific home if for some reason we were able to afford buying it and fixing it up (no I don't have a specific one in mind right now but you catch my drift). Which brings me to my love for shows that have to do with homes. Not just the local weekly tour of homes show but DIY, flip this house, flip that house, sell this house...you name it I am watching it (when I get time and my TIVO is empty)!

3. I LOVE TO BAKE. This started out really as something I only did once a year, ONE DAY a year, with my girlfriends for a holiday cookie bake. I was probably the worst baker of them all that year...but I learned a lot. And one of the best "lessons" I learned was (and still is) that people feel good when you give them baked goods. Seriously, I brought a whole tin to work that year and my office was filled with co-workers raving about the cookies and treats. Everyone was so thankful and appreciative...and all for what? A few bucks worth of ingredients thrown together (with love of course) in the form of something sweet? That is amazing! I then started to bake all the time and have become rather good at it (if I do say so myself). But mostly its wonderful to be able to share yummy treats with everyone I meet!

4. I LOVE PEOPLE MAGAZINE. Mostly I love the first 5 pages where it shows famous people on the red carpet or just "out and about" and then the crossword puzzle at the end. I just find famous people fascinating and think People does the most tasteful job at stalking them and telling us normal folks about their lives. :)

5. I LOVE MY DIAMONDS. This one speaks for itself really and is coming across completely materialistic but I am being real here and I love them. I specifically love my engagement ring and wedding band and the accessories P-Daddy has showered me with over the years. I don't accessorize with anything else. I go "classic" everyday (I am laughing even as I type that because I am just not one to ever discuss my accessories so this is foreign to me! HA) and wear only my wedding set, studs, and a solitaire necklace. :) P-Daddy has been extremely generous to me and I am extremely appreciative of everything I have...and don't need anything else!

6. I LOVED MY HONEYMOON (and I LOVE VACATION). I speak specifically of my honeymoon because you didn't know me then and that specific vacation is one of the main reasons I want to continue going on vacation after vacation after vacation. It also has kept me sane in the years that we haven't been able to take a beachy get-away vacation, the "just the two of us" kind (are you singing Will Smith's song cause I am!). :) We went to "Secrets Excellence" in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic and it was seriously the best!! I had never been on a vacation like it (or since) and part of me thinks that I will never go on another one again (not selling myself short or anything...just don't think you can replace the feelings that accompany the honeymoon). It was pure bliss in every sense of the word. I tell everyone this because I think it is noteworthy...I think it was bliss because I HAD NO EXPECTATIONS! P-Daddy and I joked that this place called "Secrets" could potentially turn out to be a bit porno and would say "Shhh...its a Secret" at every opportunity we could! We also flew into the Dominican Republic's airport, which turns out was a HUT (I mean a large hut, but still a HUT...insert panicked look on both of our faces)...and then took a bus for an hour drive through the worst poverty I have ever seen in my life and NO RESORTS IN SITE (insert a bit more panic and also sadness for the starving children on the side of the road and no I am not kidding)...but the end result was soooooo worth it (and the resorts there actually do a good thing because they have brought jobs to those within the poverty and pay their employees a fair wage). It was the most either of us had ever spend on vacation and it was the best money we have ever spent! You can't get your honeymoon back people...so don't skip it and LIVE IT UP!!! By the way...it was far from porno! HA! I love vacation though because it takes you away from your reality and it is the one place that I fully relax. Everyone needs that at times (I need it soon please! :)

7. I LOVE BEING FROM DVEGAS! If you are my friend on facebook, this is also my "status" today. HA! I love being from Dvegas for so many reasons but one of my favorites is that everyone of my friends, acquaintances, or even people I just know of that are also from there are such individuals that stand out in their crowd with such strong personalities. When we all lived there together, this produced some interesting times of course but now as we all are gone and have our own lives with our own careers, husbands, wives and children we are each making the world a better place in our respective cities. We are grounded in every sense of the word. We all played baseball or softball for and against the same teams, had parents with blue collar jobs that always wanted more for each of us (and who ALL accomplished it), got to play any sport we wanted to because it was small enough for that but big enough that in most cases our teams were extremely competitive, we could ride our bikes safely anywhere we wanted, most of us walked to school everyday until high school, I could go on and on but the bottom line is, Dvegas was a GREAT place to be raised. If it was the same, I would move our family there right now and raise our children there proudly(Gasp from the Dvegas crowd that are readers-HA)! I don't know if it is something in the water in Dvegas, but confidence comes with being raised there (at least during the years of 1978-2000). :) I am sure many people feel this way about where they come from...but I don't know people, I think Dvegas is unique (it did produce people like Gene Hackman and the Van Dykes after all!). :) P-Daddy also loves that I am from Dvegas because there are so many random good places to eat we still haven't covered them all (after almost 8 years in total together)!

The seven people that put a blogger smile on my face that "win" this award are as follows:
Lora over at Jakezilla
Mama over at The Elmo Wallpaper
Angie over at A Book a Day
Ashley over at Three Lil Callahans
GranBeck over at Grandmas Gotta Blog
Kathryn over at The Brown Family
Kristina over at KB in the City