Top 11 things from 2011

Here are 11 of my favorite (random) things from 2011.

1) Favorite Album:
Josh Garrels Love & War & The Sea In Between
p.s. - It is free. Go download it. Seriously, you are foolish if you don't get it.

2) Favorite Vacation:
Acadia National Park, Boston, and NYC







3) Favorite TV Commercial:



4) Favorite Blogger:
http://www.tylerstanton.com/

5) Favorite Nature Moment:

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

6) Favorite Board Game:
Ticket to Ride Germany

7) Favorite Amazing Thing:



8) Favorite Additions to the Family

Ava Thompson, Kenzie Miller, & Lily Ruffner!





9) Favorite Comedy Bit



10) Favorite Prank



11) Favorite Personal Accomplishment

Running the Indy Mini, my first half-marathon, at 01:57:52, coming in 6,985th out of 35,000.

Oh me oh my, it's been since July?

It's been awhile. When life gets busy, blogging takes a back seat. Sorry people who don't live near us and know what we are up to. (You could just move to Akron, you know...)

And a lot has happened in the past four months. Here's a brief overview:

1. Three Year Anniversary: We celebrated three wonderful years together with a weekend in Canton. We stayed at the Football Hall of Fame hotel, caught a late night movie, and played some tennis.



2. East Coast Trip: We met up with our friends Daron and Rachael and spent a week traveling the coast. We visited New York City, Boston, Acadia National Park, and several smaller coastal towns. Some highlights of the trip were walking the entire length of Manhattan in a day to see all the hot tourist spots, visiting Fenway Park for a Red Sox vs. Indians game (which the Tribe won!), hiking the Precipice Trail in Acadia, and gnawing down a "lobsta" dinner. We are grateful that Daron is a professional photographer, so we have LOTS of incredible pictures from the trip. Here are just a couple:






3. School-Year Begins: I (Kristi) am still teaching 8th and 9th grade English at CVCA, and this year I added Junior High Spanish as well. I love teaching there, and am looking forward to continuing to build relationships with the teachers and students. The youth programs at Goss are also up and running for the school year. We have seen a larger number of students on Wednesday and Sunday nights, so you can pray that they start coming consistently throughout the year!

4. Rock the Road: This yearly mystery road trip is a partnership between Goss and First Glance. The kids sign up, and literally have no idea where they are going. This year Josh knew where we were going, but I didn't. We took 30 students (+ one simulation baby for a high school project) and began with an Amazing Race type scavenger hunt. (I'll note that my van of girls won, for the second year in a row!) Then we headed to Cincinnati for some laser tag, go-karting, and the zoo. We spent the night in Kentucky, then hung out at a park in Dayton and went to a fall festival near Columbus. We even ended up spending the first night at a church near my hometown, where my dad and mom surprised me by showing up to make snacks and breakfast for us! It was an amazing weekend of hanging out with students and building relationships with them in hopes of showing them more of who God is and how much He loves them.



5. Garden: Our first year of gardening didn't go as well as we had hoped, but it was an enjoyable experience. We were able to freeze some broccoli, green beans, and carrots, and we canned some jars of pizza sauce. Our lettuce did really well too. After some soil tests, we have figured out one of our problems = No Nitrogen. Oh well, better luck next year!




Hopefully we'll be back blogging sooner than last time!

The Hall's Walls

Two posts in one week. We're on a roll. A year in our new home and we are finally finished with our last paint project! We ripped the wallpaper off the walls in the hallway the day we moved in. Then we realized it was not drywall under the wallpaper, but plaster, and much of the plaster was ripped off with the wallpaper. We spackled and sanded about 9 months later, and that brings us to yesterday when we painted.

Our hallway when we moved in:

Our hallway today:

Then we celebrated by dressing up like cows and heading to Chick-fil-a for free value meals!

The Month of June - Gone So Soon

It has been an exciting month! I realized this morning that in the past two weeks, we have only spent six nights at home in our own bed. I cannot believe that July is already here and I will be heading back to school in a month. At the beginning of summer I always have high hopes and big dreams of everything I am going to accomplish. I just opened up my "Goals for Summer 2011" document to realize that I have only accomplished one of the twenty goals I set. I deleted some to help me feel like less of a failure. But looking back, it was a full, adventurous month! Here is a brief overview of our June.

June 4: Ben (Josh's brother) & Kenzie's Wedding - We added another Miller to the family! Josh was the best man and I read scripture for the ceremony. In a way, it seems like Kenzie has always been part of the family, but we are excited to have her as a sister and are glad to be back in the area to spend more time with them.

June 9: Camping at Salt Fork - Katie and Courtney are two of my childhood friends from church. During college, we took a road trip to Florida every summer. Now that we are married and have jobs, we have kept up the summer trip tradition by going camping in Ohio with our hubbies. We decided to upgrade a little this year and rented a very small cabin. Kurt (Katie's husband) got carried away with the idea of camping in luxury and brought a window air conditioner.
Believe it or not, this is the most normal picture we took while camping.

June 19: Project Shine Week - Project Shine is a local mission trip to Akron based out of our church. Several churches bring youth to work on houses around Kenmore and to have a week focused on spiritual growth. It was a really exciting week, full of scraping, painting, laughing, and worshiping. The highlight of the week was that one of our youth asked Jesus into her life. Josh and I spent a lot of time talking with her throughout the week and helping her understand what it means to follow Christ.

June 29: Ava Grace Thompson is Born - Cory (my brother) and Michelle had their second child! Josh and I love being an aunt and uncle!

June 30: Camping in Canada - To wrap up the month, we headed up north to camp with some Huntington friends. Nothing like celebrating the Fourth of July in another country, eh?

You Reap What You Sow... Now It's Time to Grow!

After two straight months of rain, we finally had a rain free weekend at just the perfect time. PLANTING TIME! We spent our Memorial Day weekend planting flowers and creating a garden space in our backyard. My parents came up for the weekend to help us with our landscaping projects. Here is the progression of our garden/backyard.

-This was our garden two years ago when we were renting a house in Huntington, IN.

-Our new house in Akron came with a swimming pool in the backyard.

-But we had a vision to plant a garden so we removed our pool and sold it to our new neighbors.

-We ordered three different dump trucks of dirt to fill the hole.

-Then a professional landscaping company put in our retaining walls.

-After laying a tarp down over our garden area and planting grass last fall, we decided to move our garden to the other side of our yard where it would get more sun. So Josh tilled up our new grass and planted grass seed on the other side. Here is our garden area!

-We measured out our "square foot garden" and laid down our weed mat over our pathways.

-Ta da!!! Our finished garden!

-With the grass seed planted, our whole backyard is finally ready to grow.


We planted tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, green peppers, red onions, white onions, romaine lettuce, baby romaine lettuce, green beans, carrots, broccoli, and soon to come a strawberry patch!

It doesn't look very big, but the square foot gardening method is supposed to produce a high yield in a small space. We shall see if our research, planning, and hard work will pay off.

It's exciting to see our garden vision finally become a reality! Now it's time to keep the critters away!