Our trip to Texas was, plain and simple, a lot of fun! Prepare yourself for picture overload……
The kids LOVE this place in Perryton. Travis and Kasey took us last time we were in town and the kids have been dying to go back! Pizza and bounce castles – how do ya beat that??
The big kid liked it, too!
Sayble got (conveniently) hungry in the town of Wichita Falls, Texas so while I fed her, daddy took the kids to explore the falls.
Beautiful!Cuties on the bridgeGorgeous!Love this one
Flush faced and sweaty
Traveling with a baby calls for a few *ahem* more stops than normal, so the kids got to get a lot of good park play in…which was good for them, too!
Not sure if this is a beaver or chipmunk or prairie dog but that girl is sure cute!Driving the John Deere, of courseLove that face!Slide time!SO cute!She liked the purple one, of course!WEEEEEEEEEBig stuffGo faster!
We got to see quite a bit of family while we were gone – always a plus!
The kids and their great great aunt Sandy…Sneaking some snugglesWith their great grandma CherrySweet momentCousin Camryn and baby SaybleSweet Iraydi getting in on the action!A few of the cousins together…Playing with Aunt MalainaSweet TylerThe boys hugging goodbyeLook at these cuties!Nehemiah and Wryder taming dinosaursToo much cuteThe kids with Uncle NateAmber getting some snuggles inWith Gramps
And then, of course, there was wedding fun!
With the bride and groom…Dancing with Uncle DustinSwoonLate night dancing with the bride and friends
Wryder’s already ready to again! Our conversation at breakfast the other morning went like this:
WD: Sissy at sale barn with daddy.
Me: She is! She’s gonna have fun today…what should we do fun?
WD: Go (to) Texas!
Wrexy’s boss and longtime friend, Travis, got married this past weekend in Cleburne, Texas. Wrex was the best man (awwww!) so obviously he had to be there.
The kids were desperate to go (who doesn’t love a good wedding?! Plus, they LOVE Travis and his new bride, Kasey) but I wasn’t so sure how I felt about taking care of three kids – one of which was barely a month old – by myself in triple digit heat 14 hours from home. Do ya blame me?!
We sucked it up, spent 3 days packing, 2 days driving and did the dang thing! So glad we did!
We drove to Booker, Texas the first day where the weather greeted us with a balmy 100 degrees. *ahem*
Later, we experienced a flash flood (not sure my shoes are dry yet) and the loudest thunder I’ve heard in my life – no joke!
Wrex visited at the plant a bit, showed off miss Sayble and the next morning we scurried farther east and made it (by the skin of our teeth) to the rehearsal dinner. Despite the high humidity (oh my poor hair) there was a breeze and some shade at the wedding venue. Jesus loves me…
The next morning, while Wrex and the groomsmen hung out with the groom, we ate a yummy breakfast, picked up some some snacks and glowsticks for the wedding and then hit the splash pad!
The splash pad was a genius idea, if I do say so myself. It cooled us off, was highly entertaining for $0 AND served as an easy pre-wedding bath for 2 of the 3 kiddos. Oh yes, they were clean…
Everyone napped good, except for mom who was busy ironing clothes and packing diaper bags and feeding babies and attempting to make my hair do something other than frizz…and then off to the wedding we went!
Daddy almost sweated to death in his tux but he made it! The kids had a ball dancing to the Hogg Maulies and running around and making new friends and we had a good time catching up with old friends while witnessing Travis and Kasey make their covenant with one other.
The happy coupleFirst danceGetting ready for the bouquet tossSawyer’s new friend, Katie, caught the bouquet and shared some flowers with herA few of Wrex’s Clarendon College judging team members…
By 10:00, we were all hot, sweaty, TI-URD and oh so happy we made the trek.
As Wrexy said in his toast, here’s to a lifetime of marriage…and a pastel of little sheep showmen…to the bride and groom!
Love you guys!
****And for those of you at the wedding that asked for a copy of said toast, I’ve pasted it here…
Good evening. My name is Wrex Phipps and it’s my honor and privilege to be able toast the happy couple tonight. I promise not to take up too much of your time as I don’t want to embarrass Travis too much…I’d like to return to Colorado as a fully employed man this next week.
First of all, lets make sure we all know who Travis is as he seems to have quite a few different nick names: In his early years you might have know him as Floyd, then later on maybe Woodrow or Toothpick. Now, he answers to Babe or Rathead – but you’ll have to ask Kasey about that. Now, I mainly refer to him as Travis my boss and also one of my best friends.
Travis and I met in junior college 14 years ago. We were on the livestock and meats judging teams so we spent A LOT of time together. Now we work for the same company and we spend a lot of time on the phone together.
As you may know Travis is not an over communicator! Sometimes, he can even be a rather private person. Or maybe that’s just with me and I get that. Our relationship can be kind of hard to define at times. When we talk, sometimes it’s friend to friend. Sometimes it’s boss to employer and sometimes I have a tendency to over-share other people’s news. They don’t call me “Radio” back home for nothing.
So when he first started dating Kasey, I didn’t know anything about it. I had kinda suspected he might have a lady friend when he was a little more chipper and optimistic than usual on the phone.
Normally, it’s a “Hell-oh” or “Roger” or “Odie”…anybody that’s hung out with him or called him in the last 5 years knows what I’m talking about…but things had been a little different lately.
He seemed to laugh more and I didn’t seem to be getting in near as much trouble when my cows were high. Not that that happened very often……
And then one day, I got a text…and I knew for sure. I had sent him a message from the sale barn that morning saying: “About 250 head here. You thinking the same bid?” He wrote back and said yes, I wrote back and said ok….and he wrote back and said, “Love you, too” – with 2 exclamation points!
Now, for a minute there, I was a little taken aback. I thought, whoa……he just took our friendship to a whole new level. And then I realized – aha! There IS a girl!
Then “ol Radio” kicked in. I immediately took a screen shot and sent that message to my wife and about 7 of our closest college friends…and Travis’ boss… This was good stuff! On a lot of levels!
You see, my wife has known Travis as long as I have and he’s taken as good a care of her as he has of me. She’s always been a big fan of Trav’s and she repeatedly said that one day Travis would have the best, sweetest and cutest wife out of our little group of friends. So we had been praying that he would find just that. While I’m incredibly fond of my wife, I can equally say – “Well done, Rathead.”
Here’s to a lifetime of marriage…and a pastel of little sheep showmen… To the bride and groom!
We survived our first severe weather outbreak of the summer. Thank you, Lord.
I think I’ve mentioned it before (ahem) but I loathe severe weather. I grew up in tornado alley…in the panhandle of Texas…without a basement…and with far inferior weather technology. It wasn’t that fun to me.
I remember going through a couple of springs where tornado warnings were issued every.single.night; it was like clock work. We’d get home from school and have no time for dinner before we had to hunker down in the hallway (remember, no basement), throw a mattress over our head and pray. My mom would be in the living room watching the TV and my dad would be on the front porch storm spotting. (Nuts!)
I remember a night that we were all so tired of the weather. We had been in the hallway every night that week and it had just gotten long and wearing. My brother was starving and I remember him praying, “Lord, please keep up safe…especially the kitchen because I’m so hungry!” HA!
My grandparents came to visit one weekend and my grandma likes tornadoes about as much as I do. Sure enough, that night all the sirens were going off…the tornado was about a mile from our house. My mom, brother, aunt and I were sheltering in a closet and my grandma was in our bathtub “praying with a cricket.”
A tornado did hit the backyard of our home on two different occasions AND a small one hit our house in Brighton the last year we were there. Do I attract these things, or what?!
Technology has come sooooooooo incredibly far; it’s fascinating to me! Growing up, there would be a little thunderstorm and/or tornado symbol in the bottom corner of the TV – no map. If it was just an outline, it was a watch…if it was filled in, it was a warning. If and when it was a warning, it wasn’t just letting you know it was heading your way like they do now…it meant there was a tornado on the ground – take shelter! I prefer today’s method. 🙂 The lead time they’ve been able to gain and the specificity with which they can predict is just amazing.
I do feel like that for the past two years it has missed us more than it has hit us, thankfully. I firmly believe it is the Lord protecting this little area that we have prayed His protection over. There will be storms all around us and they will arch up and over us…like today.
The pink star is us, approximately…The pink star is us, approximately…
I am thankful we have a basement. I am thankful for advanced weather technology. I’m thankful for friends and family who pray, text and call. I’m thankful for live internet feeds and buried fiber optic cables. I am most thankful for the One who even the wind and the waves obey.
We tossed the sheets in the wash, locked the doors and headed eight hours south to Booker, Texas. One of our good friends from college worked as the head cattle buyer at the plant and had told the owners about Wrex. With the drought hitting so hard in Texas, they knew cow numbers would soon be short and that they’d need to expand their buying circle. They wanted to get a northern buyer trained and in place, but weren’t in just a huge hurry to do so; they wanted it to be the right kind of person. Unfortunately, the cow buying business has it’s fair share of crooks and traders and this company had worked been working for a few years on cleaning up their buyer staff.
There are several owners and shareholders and only a few of them live around the Booker area. As the Lord would have it, Wrex got to meet several out of staters, including a fellow Nebraskan. That pretty much sealed the deal! HA! Kidding…but I’m sure it didn’t hurt. Those Huskers gotta stick together… It wasn’t a formal interview, but he was there most of the morning; a good four hours or so. We ate lunch, said our goodbyes and then continued on to visit my side of the family.
For years, we’d talked about the possibility of him buying cows for an outfit; it’s a job that he’d been groomed for his entire life. We didn’t have any doubts that he’d enjoy the work and he felt like things went well, but we left not knowing exactly what they were thinking.
We had a good time seeing my parents and brother and then traveled further south to see my mom’s extended family. We don’t get down there often enough just because of time, money and distance, so it was nice to be able to have a few extra days with them. It’s hard to have “time off” when you help run a farming/ranching operation so this was, by far, the longest visit we’d had with them since we’d been married.
They were all so sweet and were scurrying around trying to find Wrex a job down there, which would’ve been a-ok with me, bearing I could hack that heat and humidity. I have gobs of incredible memories tied to their little area of Texas. At the time, my grandma had already been moved into an assisted living facility and her house was on the market, as she wouldn’t be going back. We got to stay there for what would be the last time – an incredibly bittersweet thing for me. Talk about memories being bound to a place…we spent every Christmas and summer there since I was born and Wrex and I were married on their acreage. It was hard to leave and at the time, every fiber of my being was just screaming for a job there so we could buy the house and keep the place alive, but it wasn’t meant to be. I’ll always cherish that piece of our trip and I most definitely view it as a sweet little gift that the Lord gave me in the midst of an erratic time in our lives.
Once in Oklahoma, the Lord was so faithful! We were really beginning to wonder what our next move was. We knew we had to go back to Colorado for a few days, but then what? He just showed us time and time again that He wasn’t absent from the process. From people calling with words (rhemas) for us or the message at church we felt led to attend one Sunday morning that was titled, “What to do in the time of transition.” Yeah. That was us…and He was with us.
That Monday, Wrex got a phone call that ended in a job offer from the packing plant in Booker; they wanted him to come on as their northern cattle buyer. He’d train in Texas for three months and then move up north and establish himself…somewhere. They would give him a set of barns he was to buy in on a weekly basis, but he would be able to determine the specific community in which to settle.
After a day’s worth of prayer, we felt full release for him to take the job! It felt so right and like a huge, heavy weight had been lifted off of our shoulders. They settled on a start date, we hit the road back to Colorado to tie up a few more loose ends and grabbed a few little necessities out of storage – like a crib and a bed and a kitchen table – so that we could make ourselves at home in Texas….again.
