Jessica Kelso

Happy Anniversary to the love of my life!

Laptop – check.

Phone charger – check.

Every other electronic – check.

Shorts – check.

Shirts – oops.

Seriously. I gotta call my husband out on this one! He was just a little too excited for our weekend getaway that he could only think about packing the necessities. Like electronics. We had quite a few instances like that happen this weekend. I topped all of it off by leaving our pillows at the hotel, so now I can’t actually say too much to him All was well since we were able to find a mall and get him some new clothes. That’s always fun for me.

We had a blast! It’s been YEARS since I’ve been to Daytona beach, but it was exactly as I remembered. We rented jet ski’s, went surfing little kid style (boogie boards!), putt putt golf, lots of delicious food, frisbee’s, and climbed over 200 steps to the top of Florida’s tallest lighthouse. We definitely filled up 2 days with a good time and I’m slightly bummed it’s over. A ton of funny things happened that I just don’t feel like explaining, so just trust me. . . it was great! We came home to find our A/C was running on 71 all weekend and froze up. So after grabbing some food and attending a foster care orientation class tonight (have I mentioned we’re starting the process to become foster parents? Well, we are!!) we prayed a little prayer for our future plans along with the air conditioner. Came home and it still wasn’t working. Planned to spend the night at my parent’s since it was close to 90 degrees in our house, got a bag packed and then started to feel cool air. We laughed in amazement at how silly and perfect it was.

Let’s back up a little bit. Before the A/C started to work, we decided to open our anniversary presents early because that seems to be a ritual for us. We are always way too excited to wait until the actual day. So I got K some books and clothes he wanted (boring, I know) and he got me a little sewing starter kit. I thought it was cool but was slightly confused. So on the back of my card it had a sticky note telling me where to go next. Turns out he made me run all over the house like a crazy lady looking for what I thought might be a sewing machine. Turns out I was right! I’m so excited but have absolutely no idea what to do with it.  I’ll probably stare at it for a couple of days until I have enough guts to put it all together. I still can’t believe he picked it without my help. It’s the exact one I would have gotten for myself. He is the absolute best.

Tina finished the photos from the shoot on Sunday. . . so I thought I’d go ahead and share them. Sorry there are so many, I just couldn’t pick my favorite! Oh, and would you believe me if I told you my gorgeous friend Rachel is 4 months pregnant in these pictures? Yeah, probably not.

It’s already Wednesday and I’m wondering where the week has gone. This weekend was perfectly busy. I say perfectly because it was busy with all the good kind of busy. Surprise parties, meeting new people, photo shoots, exploring an amazing farm, eating pizza after a long week of overly healthy eating, and the start of a new journey.

Sunday afternoon I brought out my wedding dress and got to play dress up with my friends Tina and Rachel. Tina is an amazing photographer here in town and with her busy schedule it’s been hard finding time to get in a “fun” photo session. After Rachel’s wedding, she had been wanting to do something high fashion and I just had been wanting to get dirty and have some fun pictures in the process, so Tina found a farm and that’s what we did. It was somewhat of a “trash your dress” type photo session without being too messy. Her husband’s family has a farm out in North Lakeland that was perfect for what we were wanting to accomplish. Apparently when you step foot on to a farm, the mosquitoes grow a couple sizes. They were massive! So we were all pretty bit up by the end of the night. Despite that we had a lot of fun and I’m so excited to see the results! These pictures are just ones Kevin snapped with our camera.

Oh and my handsome hubby was in some of the photos, but mostly he was hanging with the other guy’s exploring the farm and climbing this big cylinder. Apparently they even came across wild pigs. If only Tina had been around for that, she could have gotten some amazing shots of them chasing the pigs.

Monday I started shadowing a client advocate at the pregnancy center. I was also able to explore other opportunities to volunteer at the center without being a client advocate. I’m going to give it a couple tries, but I’m not so sure if I’m going to feel comfortable in this position. The women who do it are absolutely heroes to me and I respect them so much, I’m just not sure if I feel ready to take it on. We’ll see.

We both have Ipod’s with an incredible amount of music on them, like 60GB or something crazy. Half of which we probably don’t listen to because we always get in the funk of listening to the same stuff. But I quickly learned when I started running, that my big bulky Ipod wasn’t exactly ideal to use. So we got these cute little Sansa 2GB MP3 players that are awesome and just clip right on to your shorts. I think Kevin put some of the music on mine when we got them and I’ve added a couple of things since, but I’ve never really sat down and added songs that I thought would be fitting for when I run. Some of what was on there just wasn’t cutting it. So today I’ve gone through our enormous music collection and added 2GB worth of totally random, awesome, high energy music. From Queen, to Andrew WK, Electric Six, The Faint, Chiodos, and The Sleeping. I should probably just have 2GB worth of Andrew WK on there, but I thought I might get slightly annoyed after a couple of days. I sure do miss him though. Listening to certain music brings me back to different times in my life and makes me so happy. Perfumes do that too. Sunflower perfume. 7th grade. Ohhh man. Anyway, lots of good times were had listening to Andrew WK and going to his shows. I even have the proof forever tattooed on my arm.

Along with updating that, I’ve decided to try and make my own video of our wedding day. We paid good money to have a videographer at our wedding, and that’s definitely one thing I wish I could take back. It would have been so much better to just have a friend going around with our video camera catching little things happening here and there. The videographer made everyone uncomfortable and you can totally tell in the video. And his style just wasn’t our style, at all. I definitely take 100% of the blame for it though considering I picked him out. I am glad we have it all on video, just wish it was done differently. So I’ve been working on trying to find a program to take bits and pieces from his video, add pictures and music to it and make a decent one. So far I haven’t had much luck but I’m determined to make this happen before our anniversary so we will have something fun to watch.