Connor's Baptism

On Saturday, we officially welcomed little Connor into the Catholic Church! We've been looking forward to his baptism day for so long, and it was really just an amazing feeling to celebrate our first child's first sacrament!

 

Happy boy!

We would've loved for Connor to wear a passed-down family outfit, but my baptism gown was really feminine, and Jeff's was way too big for our little boy, so I ended up buying this baptism outfit and these baptism shoes for Connor. I think he looked really cute!

Connor was baptized at our church, with three whole pews full of family there to celebrate! 

He loved the baptism candle!

The ceremony was a little too long for a baby who eats every two hours, so Connor got hungry and cried very loudly through the end of the ceremony. The deacon ended the ceremony by looking directly at Connor and saying "go in peace!" Haha!

My sister flew in from New York to be there and be his godmother!

Here's our little family of three!

We hosted a lunch at our house afterward and served sandwiches, fruit salad, and Caesar salad. Oh, and this cake:

It was an Italian cream cake with cream cheese icing, and I think it might be my favorite cake I've ever made. It was also my first attempt at a two-tier cake, and the stacking/decorating/etc. went really smoothly! These 6-inch cake pans are phenomenal! I made a little "God Bless Connor" banner to go on top of it.

Before we blessed the food, we passed out cards with a blessing printed on them and had everyone read this prayer together for Connor:

I decorated the tables with blue hydrageas and baby's breath, as well as some family heirlooms (doilies made by my great-grandma, napkins made by Jeff's great-grandma, and candlesticks passed down from Jeff's grandma). 

In our entryway, I set up a little display with Jeff's and my baptism gowns and a couple frames with brief bios of St. Thomas Becket and Bl. Conor O'Devany. We wanted everyone to be able to read a bit about Connor's namesakes! 

Connor had all four grandparents and all six living great-grandparents at his baptism. We feel so blessed to have such a wonderful family that loves our son so much! 

One set of great-grandparents...


Another set of great-grandparents...


And yet another set of great-grandparents!

Jeff's Parents

My Parents

God bless you, Connor Beckett! We love you!

Easter 2014

Oh goodness, y'all. I never blogged about Easter! Life has just been so busy! Anyway, I figured I'd do a quick little post just so everything is sufficiently documented!

We went to church in Cypress with my parents and my littlest sister on Easter Sunday (such an enjoyable Mass, especially after last year's disappointing Easter at church!), then went back to my parents' house for a delicious Easter lunch.

My other sister, Kristen, is living in New York now, and she wasn't able to come home for Easter, but we made sure she didn't feel left out by dressing up a dress form and taping her photo to the top of it. :)

Jeff and I hosted Easter dinner for Jeff's family at our house again this year, and I managed to get exactly zero pictures, except for a couple photos of the carrot cake I made:

I always forget to take pictures when I'm hosting something at our house. I just get caught up in decorating and cooking and totally forget to grab the camera! Jeff's mom brought over a ham, and I made this pork tenderloin with dijon marsala sauce, these roasted potatoes, these green beans, this orzo salad, this rosemary bread, and a baked pineapple dish to go with the ham. Plus that pretty little carrot cake, of course!

It was wonderful to spend the holiday with both of our families, although we definitely wished we could've had real Kristen rather than fake Kristen there!

Kappa Theta Beta Reunion

When I was in college at Texas A&M, I was part of a Catholic sorority called Kappa Theta Beta (KTB). KTB was (and continues to be) a huge blessing to me. Because of KTB, my faith was greatly strengthened during my college years, and I am so, so grateful for that. My best friends today are girls I met through Kappa Theta Beta, and my friendship with them means the world to me. They're the most supportive, prayerful women, and I thank God all the time for putting them in my life.

KTB celebrated its tenth anniversary this year, so we got to go back to College Station for a reunion. It was so amazing to spend time with old friends (with boyfriends and husbands and babies tagging along!), celebrate the beautiful sisterhood of KTB, and see how much the sorority has grown and developed since I graduated!

It was really special to be back at St. Mary's. We often go to Mass there when we're in town for football games, but it had been a really long time since I set foot in the Activity Center (where we had our weekly meetings).

This is five of KTB's former presidents. It was so fun to talk with these girls about what was going on in KTB during each of our years as president and take a walk down memory lane. 

My sweet friend Pilar is in med school, and between the craziness of med school and the craziness of law school, we haven't been able to see each other nearly as much as we would like during the past few years! We were absolutely thrilled to finally be in the same place at the same time for more than just a super-quick lunch!

And, of course, Jeff and Pilar's fiance were thrilled as well. 

Hehe. 

KTB hosts "The Hoedown" every year to raise money for the Good Samaritan Gabriel Project, and the reunion was planned for the same weekend, so we got to put on our cowboy boots and dance the night away for a great cause! We also got to take this awesome photo of us riding ostriches:

It did my heart so much good to spend a weekend celebrating something so near and dear to me. Jeff and I spent the entire drive home trying to figure out how we could get jobs in College Station and be there all the time. Probably not going to happen, but we sure do love it there!

Christmas 2013

What a wonderful Christmas we had this year! It's always such a special thing to celebrate Jesus' birth surrounded by family and good food and gift-giving and carols and all sorts of fun.

We drove to Dallas early on Christmas Eve this year, and we made it in time to have lunch with my grandparents (dad's side). Then we went to Christmas Eve Mass at the church we went to when I was in elementary school, which was pretty special. I hadn't been back there in about ten years!

With my parents and sisters after Mass

We went to see my other grandparents (mom's side) for Christmas Eve dinner (we always do a delicious seafood boil with crab, shrimp, mussels, potatoes, and corn), and we got to see all my aunts/uncles/cousins on that side of the family.

With my mom, sister, and Gran-mom

The big Christmas tradition on that side of the family is a Christmas carol party on Christmas Eve, complete with songbooks and guitar music and lots of loud voices. So fun!

My mom buys our family matching pajamas every year, so we woke up on Christmas morning in our snazzy matching jammies and opened gifts and stockings at my grandparents' house.

Matching! 

Stockings!

My aunt/uncle/cousins on that side of the family came over later in the morning and we opened more gifts and had a lovely lunch.

Our fourth married Christmas!

After lunch, Jeff and I got in the car and drove back to Houston. It's always a bit weird to spend four hours in the car on Christmas Day, but it allows us to be with all the people we love most, so we can't seem to stop doing it! We made it to Houston with time to spare before dinner, and we got to celebrate with Jeff's parents, brothers, and grandparents (who travel to Houston for the holidays).

Dinner, complete with Christmas cracker hats!

We spent the night at Jeff's parents' house and had a nice leisurely morning and lunch yesterday. It's back to work for me today, but Jeff has a few more days off, which he plans to spend installing crown molding in our bedroom (!!!).

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. Glory to the newborn King!

Our Third Anniversary

I just realized I never wrote about our third anniversary. So I'm going to go ahead and document it now... even though it's been almost four months since then. Oops!

Our third anniversary was July 31st, which happened to be the second day of the bar exam. Jeff was super sweet about it... he put a note in my lunch box. :)

We did actually exchange gifts and cards in the hotel room that night, but it was more like a study break than an anniversary celebration, so we rescheduled the celebrating portion of our anniversary to a later date. Because we left for our Alaskan cruise so soon after the Bar exam, we decided to officially celebrate our anniversary in Seattle!

We picked a fun restaurant called Poppy, and we had such a great time sitting in their herb garden and eating "thalis"! The food was absolutely delicious!

I always get Jeff a present that goes along with the traditional anniversary gift for that year. The traditional gift for third anniversaries is leather, and I've actually been waiting for this one for a while... ever since I first saw leather as year three, I've had it planned!

(named blurred out)

I got him a (leather bound) family Bible (it's this one), imprinted with our last name. We have plenty of Bibles around the house, but I wanted us to have an official "family Bible."

It stays in our living room where we can get to it easily, and it has lots of fancy pages in it for recording things like wedding dates and baptism dates and family history. It's a really beautiful Bible with lots of illustrations and a pretty large font. We can't wait to use this Bible for reading the story of Jesus' birth on Christmas morning and other fun tradition-y things like that!

I always wrap Jeff's anniversary gifts in our wedding colors, navy and burgundy.

I used the last of the burgundy ribbon this year though, so that may be the end of it. We'll see.

Jeff's gift to me was a sunset sailboat ride! You know how you sometimes talk about the wayyy distant future and brainstorm fun things? Well, when we do that, we always toss around the idea of maybe someday, when we retire, learning to sail and buying a sailboat and spending a portion of our time living on our sailboat. I had never even been sailing though, so I honestly had no idea if I even liked it. So it was a really sweet gift from Jeff to get to go try it out!

Due to assorted scheduling problems, we didn't actually get to go until just a few weeks ago. We drove out to Clear Lake and rode a sailboat with a captain for a few hours. The sunset was just absolutely beautiful on the water, and it was fun to get to see how the whole sailing thing works!

So, in the end, it was kind of like we got three anniversaries this year (our actual one in July, our celebration of it during our trip to Seattle in August, and the sailboat ride just recently)! Such fun. Yay for three years of being married to my best friend (and many more to come)!

Oh, and just for fun - here's how we celebrated our first anniversary, and here's our second!