one down one to go!

this weekend i graduated. no more wwu for me {bitter sweet}. isaac (who will be graduating in march) and i drove up to bellingham with dogs in tow on friday morning. we met up with my mom, dad, karlene, and grandma for dinner. we also saw meg and tony for a bit. graduation was at 10 am on saturday (really, who graduates at 10 am??) isaac, meg, mom, dad, grandma and karlene all were able to come to my super eventful ceremony. i did not get to walk with the education majors, instead got stuck with the "science and technology" degrees (darn math degree that better get me a job :] haha). our student speaker's name was bailee bailey (married name) and our "adult" speaker was pretty good. after we all went to OG (olive garden for those of you not ridiculously obsessed). yum. after we hung around bellingham for a few hours.

overall, i now feel stuck in the in between of graduation and "real life". i know i will miss it. it flew by so fast and it was all just so fun. i am so thankful to have been able to spend those 4+ years with my amazing best friend. love love love me some megan jones.

It's been a while...

...but we've been up to fun things!

Student teaching has taken over our lives. We LOVE it. But it has taken over. When we aren't at school teaching, we are at school planning, staying after school with students for "Homework Cafe", or coaching {Mrs. Thomas just wrapped up her first season ever coaching 6th grade girls soccer (if you know her, you know that she played soccer ONE season and it wasn't pretty!) and just kicked off coaching the 6th grade boys team! Every day is a new learning opportunity.... right?? :]

We also recently started volunteering with Young Life at our former high school, Stadium High School. We have been having so much fun, and we can't wait to see what we are taught next through these amazing teenagers :]

Thanksgiving is only 4 days away, and we've got really new plans this year. For the past three years we have been eating two dinners (one with the Thomas' after church and another with the Rytkonen's at night). We can't say we are sad we wont be stuffing ourselves with two meals this year, but we wont be with either of our parents, which we are a bit sad about. We WILL however be with family; Leah, Josiah, Isaac and I are venturing south to Portland to celebrate with our cousins from Hawaii, Cat, Scott, Dan and Chris. We are excited for new adventures (and to hit up black Friday sales with no tax!).

We had great weekend celebrating two very special people, Isaac (the 19th) and Karlene (the 21st). More about those birthdays later this week!

We are getting so excited for the holidays and are hoping to get our first Christmas tree this week. Yay!

It started snowing as we drove into Tacoma this afternoon, and we're crossing our fingers for a snow day {or a late arrival at the least!}.

I love Megan Jones.

I am sorry I deleted my facebook without asking you first. I love you and know our friendship will be maintained.

Zeph 3:17

The LORD your God is with you,
He is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you,
He will quiet you with his love,
He will rejoice over you with singing.
Zephaniah 3:17

She said... He says sometimes :]

As you might've noticed, we've got about a 1-5+ posting ratio on Isaac-BonnieJean posts and my posts are "girly" and sometimes {or often} are very random... so this is going to be more of an She said.... He says sometimes. Haha. We want a blog to keep everyone {i.e. family and friends} up to date on our life happenings... we want to stay connected to everyone we love as we are all spread all over the place.

You might have also noticed that we re-decorated this space :] I am very much loving the new layout and design! Really fits our new She said... He says sometimes :]

BIG news!! WE FOUND THE CAMERA CORD!! Yay! So here is a picture of us from the first day of school (over a month ago, 9/2/10) :] Isaac even got up early and was such a trooper! Of course he went right back to bed immediately afterwards, but hey, what guy wants to get up to take an outfit picture at 6:45 AM? Doesn't he look great though?? :] I'm one lucky lady!

So we've been student teaching for almost 2 months now, and we're really loving it! Isaac is in a 1st grade classroom at Browns Point Elementary School (4 blocks from our home) and I am a less than 5 minute drive up the hill teaching 6th grade (math, language arts, social studies) at Meeker Middle School. Ironically, we have very similar stories to share each night (who knew there were so many similarities between 1st and 6th grade??) More updates on this in the near future!

You may have noticed the board in the lower left hand corner of the above picture. It was a gift from our wonderful wedding planner (Kerra Breum). She put it together and it has a bunch of special items/moments from our wedding and we cant wait to get it hung up. She is so sweet and thoughtful and we are loving seeing the beautiful reminders of our wedding that she created for us :]

Well, it's officially 10:12 PM {aka waaaay past my bed time} so I must get to bed! One last thing before I go.... guess what you will never believe that I did today.... I, BonnieJean Thomas, deleted my FACEBOOK. Yes, it is true. And it was EASY. I was just done. I couldn't think of any valid reasons to keep it, and tons and tons of reasons to abandon ship, so I just had to. I will {obviously} still have the blog to connect with people through, but no more Facebook. I am not saying I'll never go back, but with the hiring process around the corner, and not having enough time to get swept up in yet another time sucking activity, it seemed like the right decision for me at this time. Haha, I should not have this much to say about this topic, so I will now stop.

Hope your lives are filled with smiles, contagious laughter, and inspiring people, just like ours have been working with these kids everyday.

mini-update

We cant find the camera cord to get our pictures off the camera and onto this lovely blog. It is really holding things up here, and therefore we have little to post about.

The house is not too dirty for us to find it, we think we put it away while cleaning... humph.

Today we helped my family paint our house! It was tan, and now {parts} of it are a very pretty green!! My lovely sister came home for the weekend to help out!! LOVE seeing her, and wish she came home every weekend!

We are still not done with any rooms in the home... well, I guess we are done with the kitchen, so maybe we will clean it and post a few pics in the near future! Oh wait, we can't post pictures because we cant find our cord!!!

I am having trouble fully completing the rest of the rooms in the home. Our room is basically put together... but we have lots of {stuff} in the corners or the room, etc. Same thing with the bathroom, craft room, living room, etc. Hm. Maybe once the weather gets worse, we'll make time for cleaning the corners of our rooms :]

I have a lot of things on my To-Do craft list also... the skirt I talked about here, some flowers for my hair, painting random frames, re-doing a lamp, and more! Wish I could do this all day!

Isaac and I have been watching Glee lately {we just finished what we could watch for free of Weeds} and we are really loving it!! :]

Hm. That's all for now! :]

MIA

LIFE has officially taken over, and we are sorry. Student teaching has filled our days, and balancing everything else has filled in every minute in between. Which means blogging has been a no go lately. Today we are having fun, seeing family and relaxing.

In the near future {whatever that means} we will post about our first day of school, and a few other things on our minds :]

Hope you have a relaxing weekend!

Love,
BonnieJean

Back from Bellingham Breakfast

This morning we were able to take a moment and relax. We returned last night from Bellingham, Washington after finishing moving the rest of our things out of our former college homes. In the process we were able to visit with many friends and enjoy Bellingham one last time for the summer.

Student teaching, here we come...

Yes Please: Stripes and ruffles

I feel like everywhere I look there are stripes and ruffles, and I LOVE it. At first I was OK with not really owning many stripes and basically zero ruffles, but the more I looked, the harder it got. At first it was how I wanted to decorate, but quickly turned to clothing. See below:

(jcrew)

(jcrew)

(anthro)

(anthro)

And here are a few examples of how I would also like to {someday} incorporate these elements into a home:

(threemenandalady)

(theinspiredroom)

(countryliving)

(rufflesandstuff)

(sorry, no link)

Good news! {Of course} I can't really afford any of these clothing tems... BUT after sorting and cleaning the newly created craftroom (I will post about this room in the very near future, only a few more shelves to hang!) I rediscovered this:

the grey fabric! I found it originally at Goodwill (in it's first life it was a fitted bed sheet). We used it as the base for the fabric garlands (will post about those at some point, but you can see them on the roof of the tent in a few of the wedding pics) and for Austin's bandana he wore at the wedding (BTW, both items were madewithlove by my dear mother :])

So, back to the point.... I have decided to make my very first article of clothing!! I would like to make a grey skirt to go with my new school boots! :] I will keep you posted on this learning experience! I bought a grey zipper yesterday (the only item I don't already have to complete this project) so all I need to do is actually figure out how to do this.

Oh.

"Do everything without complaining or arguing" Phil. 2:14

I should probably work on this.

This was supposed to be a post with a FEW wedding pics...

So I thought I would look at Rhys' Flickr account and download a few of our "favorite" wedding photos... haha, not as easy as it sounds. I just LOVE so many of them.... So here is like a pictorial rundown of the day :] Sorry it's so many! We will post in more detail in the near future, highlighting specific elements! Hope you enjoy these just like we have! and THANK YOU to our AMAZING photographer, Rhys Logan. We LOVE you!