Easter

 We had the best Easter weekend. It began with the Good Friday service, followed by watching the miniseries, The Chosen. We watched that while painting eggs. Then on Sunday, we celebrated the resurrection first with our resurrection rolls and then at church. The kids did their usual Easter egg hunt and as always Kianna had one egg she couldn't find, although she did find one from last year. We had a lovely meal at Stacie and Patrick's house. We are blessed to have a risen savior. 

Soccer Parties

Trace sure has fun with his soccer team. He got invited to several birthday parties, one at the beach and one with an inflatable waterslide. Trace loves Rise FC and his teammates.  

 

The College Visits Continue

Florida State University

Southeastern University

Kaylee has three more college visits under her belt. She tagged along with her friend, Lilly Doster and her mom to Florida State University in Tallahassee. She enjoyed that visit and has deemed it her #2 school.

She also visited Southeastern University in a Christian college in Lakeland, FL for their One Day event. We experienced a chapel service, tour of their dorms, ate lunch in their cafeteria, attended a business class, and drank coffee at their coffee shop. It was a full day, which I loved and her highlight being the dorms...

The next day, we visited the University of South Florida in Tampa, since we were already there for a basketball tournament. We did our own self-guided tour of campus. The campus isn't as old as UF and FSU, so doesn't have quite as much character to it. However, she did really like The Villages, which are pictured above. The dorms appear brand new and have a nearby Publix, swimming pool, dining hall and recreation center. I believe USF is her #3 at present.

Kaylee doesn't like to talk about college, as she wants desperately to attend UF and knows it only has a 30% acceptance rate, making it very challenging to get into. I keep telling her, she will have a great education no matter where she goes and that she will end up wherever she's meant to be and have a great experience. God's in control!

 

Merry Christmas to Me

 

Kaylee knows how much I love quality time, so for Christmas she gifted me with a date to paint ceramics with her. I redeemed my gift today and enjoyed time painting with my sweet girl.

Our 19th Anniversary

                                          

We celebrated our anniversary by Trevor taking the day off work and going out to breakfast together and then to the beach for the afternoon. It was a very relaxing day spent enjoying each other. The kids made us homemade cards, my favorite, and Kaylee surprised us with homemade chocolate covered strawberries. We decided to let the kids join us for dinner and ate at Tommy Bahamas for the first time. It was a great day spent with the love of my life! 

 

Jennifer Thullen

Sadly, on the way home from Gainesville, I learned that my childhood best friend, Jennifer Thullen had died of a drug overdose. She struggled for years with fibromyalgia, several head injuries and survived several unsuccessful suicide attempts that left her in bad shape both mentally and physically. Despite all this, the news hit me hard. I had an excellent conversation via text, a few weeks back, where we had laughed together, as she shared a ridiculous dream with me. She was hopeful about her temporary job turning into a permanent position. It was the best I had heard her be in a long time and now she is gone...

I wrote the following Facebook post:

"My dear friend, Jennifer passed and since I won't be able to attend her memorial, I thought I would share a post here:

Jennifer and I met in 2nd grade when walking home from school. One of us, I can't remember which one, shouted across the street, "how old are you?". We quickly learned that we were only four days apart in age, we went to different schools and lived two blocks away from each other. We were friends ever since. Growing up we were the best of friends. We speed skated together. We played together in the amazing tree house her dad built. We went to vacation bible study together. We skied together. We camped together at Kent Park and Backbone State Park. So many of my childhood memories include Jennifer including some of my most embarrassing moments, which I enjoy sharing with my kids.

Jennifer went to Florida with my family on several occasions. On the drive there, we sang Garth Brook’s Greatest Hits, on repeat, at the top of our lungs. We got burnt to a crisp, walked the beach, were silly, and laughed so hard. Life was simple back then and filled with laughter.

I know the years since high school were tough for Jennifer. She had several car accidents that resulted in undetected head injuries, followed by fibromyalgia, which kept her from working and doing what she enjoyed. However, that’s not the version of her I want to remember. I want to remember the lightheaded, silly Jennifer.

A few weeks before her death, I unknowingly had my last conversation with Jennifer. It was a very uplifting conversation where she was excited about a permanent job opportunity and shared a couple funny things with me. One of those was a super crazy dream, where her and I were together at Olive Garden with the rest of my family. Somehow her bra kept popping off and her butt was in her purse and it wouldn’t stay inside. The dream when on and on. I laughed so hard and shared it with my mom and sisters and they laughed with me.

The conversation continued with Jennifer telling me about a recent experience she had:

“So you know I swim at the gym…I have waterproof headphones that attach to my goggles over my cap. And also wear webbed gloves which is super hot. There is no mirrow in the locker room but you can see yourself in the reflection of the sauna room door. I’m always alone in there because I go so early, and today I was all geared up waiting for the shower to warm up and dancing along to Eminem like a gangster in front of the sauna and oops the room was full and they were all laughing super hard. I gave them a nice little aqua dork gangster comedy dance show”. I laughed so hard!!!!

I’m glad that these were the last conversations I had with Jennifer. I choose to remember the good memories and not the bad, the laughter and not the tears."

Rest in peace my friend,

Keri Cook

Spring Break in Central Florida- Part 2

 

On Wednesday, Kaylee had her first college visit to the University of Florida in Gainesville, FL. Kaylee and I had the best day touring the campus. She declared "I'm in love" when referring to her #1 school of choice. Kaylee wants to attend a big university with big time college sports, as she wants to be able to attend the games as part of her college experience. She was impressed that the students get free admission to games. I was excited to learn about that some of the 1000 organizations available include bible studies and other Christian orgs like Young Life and FCA, that gave my mama heart some peace.

When we returned we took our birthday boy out to a dinner of his choice. We had a yummy meal and the following day continued the festivities by watching Batman at the Ocala Drive In Theater. We sure love our birthday boy!!! He's the best!!! 

On Thursday, we visited Silver Springs State Park near Ocala. This park proved to be our favorite. We began our park tour by kayaking through the Caribbean blue waters, which was absolutely gorgeous. After kayaking we hiked through the park, which was pretty great too. 

On Friday, we drove to Orlando, so Kaylee could meet up with Lily Ford, one of her BFFs from Iowa. Lily was traveling with her choir group from Marion High School to visit all the theme parks in Orlando. Friday was her last day and it was spent at Universal Studios, our favorite!!! Kaylee had a great time with Lily and her friends exploring Harry Potter World and riding a few rides. Unfortunately, given that it was spring break, everyone and their brother, sister, and cousin were there. The lines were extremely long, so the kids were only able to ride a few rides before it was time to leave. We did manage to squeeze in a meal at our favorite City Walk restaurant, Cowfish. We even splurged on the milkshakes. After dinner we headed back to Gainesville, for the girls basketball tournament.

Honestly, I don't even remember how their teams did, what I do remember is that Kianna ended up spraining her ankle badly. She wasn't able to bear weight on hit for three days, so I had to take her to urgent clinic. The x-ray was negative thankfully, but she did a job on her ligaments and even her tendons, which led to her being out for five weeks...

It was a busy, go go go, type of week, but we saw the beauty of God's creation, had a first college visit, had a bad injury, and made some new memories together. All in all, it was a great week!