Happy Birthday, Joey!!!

Our sweet little Joey is ONE YEAR OLD! And as a friend said at church today, he is a character. He loves to laugh, makes lots of funny faces, has a "speed crawl," is also a "distance crawler," and loves his family and friends (but especially his mommy). He already goes up and down stairs and basically has no reserves about crawling ANYWHERE. He eats dirt when he gets the chance, chases the vacuum around while Christy's cleaning, plays in the toilet under Tommy's supervision (yikes!), says "goo" with his mouth closed (try this one at home--it's harder than it sounds), and insists that we heat up his milk (yes, milk, not formula) first thing in the morning. We love his thighs and arms (he's still got the rolls), his chubby cheeks, his BEAUTIFUL blue eyes, and his two teeth (actually now he's got six). Here are some pictures from Joey's big day:

We love you, Joseph Porter Holt!

Home Improvers For Hire

We've completed our first real home improvement project! We sealed and painted our garage floor! We ran into only a few pitfalls. Perhaps you can learn from our mistakes:

1. Never, never, and I mean never assume that it will be easy to strip old paint from a concrete floor. We probably didn't need to strip our floor, but we decided to do it anyway. We really wished that the paint stripper would have included a warning label that said in bold type: "Beware! I am your worst nightmare!"
2. Power sprayers, though awesome, put out VERY hot air. Jon nearly burned a hole in his leg, and though we'll spare you the details on the blog, feel free to call us for a cool story. Seriously, though, power sprayers are fun.
3. Do not snap the handle off your only long-handled roller at 10:35 pm on a Friday night when you are just three-quarters of the way through with your project, and the paint, now mixed, lasts only six more hours.
4. If you do snap the handle off that roller, Wal-Mart is open. But make sure that you've left yourself an exit from the room you are painting so that you don't have to make a sprightly leap across your painted floor to get to the door. Oops.

We didn't get the best clarity with these pictures, but here are the before and after garage floors:

BEFORE

AFTER

Now we can say that we're true homeowners!

The Fam

I went to Texas a couple of weeks ago to hear my mom's senior vocal recital for her music program at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. (For anyone who didn't know, she is graduating with her bachelor's degree in vocal performance this weekend, and I'm so happy for her!!!!). Her recital was amazing. Really. It was awesome, and I was so glad to be there. Anyway, here's a picture of my family after the recital (We wished Jon and Jerry-Michalann's husband-could have been there too!) From left to right: Paul, Ellis, me, Julie, Jay, Michalann and baby, and Taylor. I love my family so much and was so grateful to be able to spend the week with them.