hello again friends!

Caleb and I are both on the couch. I'm sick and he's propping up his swollen sprained ankle. We're a little pitiful this week at the Martin household. Our couch has become every other room in the house. The office, kitchen, and bedroom as well as the dining room table and ottoman. In a season of thankfulness... I'm thankful for our coffee table.

So now that you know where we are now. Let me catch you up with how we got here.

Erin and Micah came into town! We love when they come to visit because they live in Texas and we don't get to see them very often. They came and stayed with us the Friday before Gold Rush. We had a blast!

Caleb and Micah's favorite thing to do together was wrestling! Micah would run as quick as his little feet would let him and push over Uncle C! I think it happened at least 50 times...

The next morning Erin went and ran the Gold Rush 5k while Caleb and I babysat. Caleb introduced Micah to our Wii, named Sallwii - after my mom (Sally), and we played a morning full of tennis and Backyardigans on Netflix! Best babysitters ever!!!!

Speaking of our little man! I want to give a shout out to our favorite nephew! He's turned TWO yesterday!!!! He's getting so big!

Happy Birthday Micah!

Later Saturday we ventured out to Gold Rush! It was literally in our backyard this year. That's why we love were we live so much because we are walking distance to everything on the square and campus.

 Micah checking out our mums before riding in style to Gold Rush

 And the best thing about Gold Rush... Oh course... THE FOOD!!!!! Our favorite are the hand dipped corn dogs. These are some pictures I took for my photography class. We had to pick a topic on Gold Rush and I chose the food. Not so original...

My parents and Auntie & EB came up Sunday. Auntie's walking around with one of Emma's Christmas gifts and we stopped by the Farmer's Market on the way back to our place.

Everything was so fresh and colorful there.  

Here are a couple of things I ended up with at the end of the day:

 My parents got me this print of a barn in Virginia. This artist use draw for the AJC and so many other beautiful pictures from some of our favorite places like Jamaica (where we went on our honeymoon) and Santa Rosa Beach. 

 Homemade blackberry jam (tried to make it look artsy)

 Basil Plant that quickly died.

My idea is to potentially have an herb garden on our back porch patch of cement  so we can pick fresh herbs whenever we need them.

So I know I promised to get to you back to where Caleb and I are pitiful on the couch but it's just not going to happen. I will fill you in on the rest hopefully later today or today. Need to take a breather. So just consider this a timeout.

Be back soon! 

Lately..

We went to the Cumming Fair. We went with friends. We had a blast. We ate lots of food. My brain is fried....

Botanical, the beautiful

Caleb and I recently visited the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. Here's some pictures from our trip. We had a great time!

Caleb playing biologist and inspecting the cactus. 

Wildflowers and Atlanta Skyline

                                          Caleb loved the Skyline pictures

Afterwards, we went to the yummy Greek place called, Athens pizza. This is one of those places that I wish I could take credit for finding on my own because it's so good but I can't. My best friend Dianna is the ultimate lover of all things Greek and anything she recommends is going to be AWESOME! We had the best pizza of our life, Athens Special - you gotta try it!

The Botanical Gardens were also so fun because I got to learn all the new skills from my photography class. I've completed my first course - Beginner Photography and am about to move on to advanced. It's so much fun and I've really fallen in love with it! I'll post another thing about that later!

AHHHHH!!!!!!

I almost drop kicked my laptop making this post so this is a great time so share why I'm so excited for Christmas to come. I'm a mac user and my mac came with a faulty mouse so in hopes of correcting it, I'm asking for this from Santa Claus.

It's Apple's magic mouse. It sits on the side so there will no longer be accidental laptop mouse swipes in the future! Cha Ching! Happy Tuesday to all and to all a good night! :)

Under Construction

I'm currently in the midst of changing everything around!

Domestic Epiphany

     So I promised myself that I wasn't going to make a blog until I absolutely loved the name. So while folding laundry (this doesn't happen very often around our place- bad wife, I know) I started thinking about the line from John Denver's "Country Roads".
     Here are the lyrics http://www.superseventies.com/sl_takemehome.html
   
     I don't know how I thought about it but I just kept singing it in my head, we all know it, "West Virginia, mountain momma, Take home, country roads". So trying to think of the cute blog name that semi rhymes (finding a blog name is almost like making a Campus Outreach newsletter) I thought let's name it, Mountain Martins. We live in Dahlonega where our backyard literally is the skyline of the Blue Ridge Mountains full of winding backwood country roads and it's now where we call home! Are you starting to see why I'm so excited about how perfect this name is?!!!! So all in all, welcome. Welcome to our life. We're just a couple of sinners trying to figure it all out one step at time (well that is with Jesus in the control room). One thing I promise that you will see in our lives is that I, Katie Martin, am the grammatical error queen and that is not a reflection of my grammar loving husband, Caleb.

Happy weekend!