Photo Friday!

So I am going to try something new.  One of my fellow friends who is great at blogging has inspired me to be better at getting on here, so from now on I am going to have "Photo Friday"!  Every Friday I am going to post a picture of something or someone!  I hope you like this new addition to Corbett's Corner!

 Today's picture is of someone that I love very much and I don't get to see very often!  This is Fletcher my nephew and he is just the cutest thing you have ever seen!  I miss him all time so I covet every picture that I can have of him!  This is one of him at the pumpkin patch taken just last week!  Enjoy!

The Big 30!!!

This past week my wonderful husband turned 30!!! Joe is such and amazing man and I am so excited to be able to be apart of this milestone in his life!  Joe has accomplished many things over the past thirty years and I am so proud to see what the next 30 will hold for him.  We were blessed to be able to celebrate his birthday last weekend with about 40 of Joe's closest family and friends.  We had a wonderful party here at the house and everyone had a great time with tons of food, drinks and ended the night with a fire pit in the back yard making smores!  I would be happy to post pictures however I didn't take many!  I was so busy hosting and cooking food for everyone that I didn't remember to snap any pics. I was able to snap a pic on my phone when Joe went to blow out the candle of his cupcakes so I will attach that at the end of this post.  The big surprise is that Joe was given a pretty cool gift by his wife for his birthday.....at kitten!  He has been asking for months if he could have this one cat from his gramps house and for his birthday i caved in and said yes. I might be crazy, but Joe loves his animals and has for his whole life....all 30 years! I know that his love for animals is one things that will never change.  It is that same love for animals that makes him such a loving and compassionate person and i am so glad that I get to spend the next thirty years with him.  Happy birthday Joe...I love you so much!  Welcome to your thirties...your gonna love it!

Happy Birthday Baby Brother!

Happy Birthday to one of the most amazing men I have ever had the privilege of knowing...Billy Hawks!   Today my baby brother is tuning 22!  That makes me feel super old!  I am so glad God gave me a little brother to love and who loves me back! I am so proud of all that he has done in his young 22 years and I know that he will continue to do much much more!  Here are a few pics of the handsome young man taken recently while he is living in Spain and working on his MBA.  I have to say spending you B-day in Spain isn't a bad way to go! 

Delish!!

Zesty Slow Cooker Chicken BBQ

6 frozen (or not) Boneless skinless chicken breast.

1 Bottle of BBQ sauce (your choice)

1/2 Cup Italian Salad Dressing

1/4 Cup Brown Sugar

2 Tbls. of Worcestershire Sauce

Place chicken in the slow cooker. Mix the remaining ingredients in a bowl and then poor over the chicken.  Cook on High for 3-4 hours.

The chicken will fall apart when it is done.  We shredded it and made pulled BBQ chicken sandwiches!  They were awesome!

Thanks for the recipe Lynsey....your the best!

One of my friends posted this recipe on her blog a few weeks ago.  I decided to try it out and OH MY GOSH was it GOOD!!!  I would recommend it to anyone and it makes so much, you could feed and army and people will think you spent hours cooking!

Girl Just Wanna Have Fun!

A few weeks ago I was so lucky to have one of my best friends Meredith and her sister Mary-Kathryn
(who is like a little sister to me) come to CT for a weekend get away! (both girls are pictured above)  I was so excited to have two southern girls to spend time with.  We were determined to have a weekend full of fun and boy did we! We were able to pack in allot in 48 hours.and didn't stop until they were dropped at the airport Monday morning! We started the first day by shopping at a local flea market, then headed to the shore for some relaxing time walking and talking. We ended the day with a yummy home cooked meal and made smores in a fire pit in our back yard.
The next day we took at little road trip to VT!  It was just perfect!  The leaves were changing and we had a ball stopping to look at everything and eating all things maple!   God is so good to give me such good friends to spend time with! He knew I needed some girl time boy did he deliver! Here are some of the pics from the weekend!

All three of us at the shore!  My friends so pretty! We are all wearing our new sunglasses that we got at he flea market and mere got a new hat too!

                    Smores time!

            Overlook in VT!  So pretty

            The three of us hanging out around the fire pit all cozy in our App hoodies!

 Me and mere hanging out with a moose in VT!


I will post a few more pics of the beautiful scenery that we saw while we were in VT on a follow up blog!  Stay tuned for some beautiful sights!

Potato Peel Pie!

I recently finished a book for the book club I am a part of at my church.  We tend to read NY times best sellers and I have really enjoyed being apart of this group.  The book that we have just read is called The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, by Mary Ann Shaffer.  This book was a good read and very different that many books that I have read. It is told entirely through letters. Juliet Ashton the main character receives a letter from a stranger, a founding member of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. And so begins the tale of the island of Guernsey during the German occupation, and of a society as extraordinary as its name!  This book has a little bit of everything, history, romance, humor and literature! If you are looking for something fun and a bit different to read I say you should give a read!  I hope you enjoy!
PS: At the end of the book club meeting we made a potato peel pie just to try. While I reccomend the book, I do not recommend the pie!  It was not good at all! Kinda tastes like paste! I do have the recipe should you feel the need to try it out yourself!

Under Construction and Best Friends!

Just in case some of you were wondering.......you may see some different designs on our blog over the next little while.  This is because we are trying to spruce things up for your viewing pleasure, and when I say we I mean my best friend Heather is taking care of me on this one! I seem to lack the skills that it takes to make it look amazing so I have called in an expert to get us looking ship-shape!  Many of you my know my BF Heather Bryan, formerly know as Heather Tittle, she is amazing, loves the Lord, beautiful, tons of fun, and so stinkin funny!  She is truly a blessing to me and only God could have put the two of us together...let me tell you the story of just how we became true best friends.....

Heather and I had both decided to pledge Sigma Alpha Omega sorority fall of 2000 at App. State where we were at school. While we were in the same pledge class I didn't really get to know her until the weekend of our pledge retreat/ initiation.  What you must know about this retreat is that it was top secret.  We didn't even know where we were.  The older sisters "kidnapped" us with blindfolds and took us off for a weekend of sisterhood at a very nice home outside of Boone.  In fact most of the sisters didn't really know where it was either.  It was shortly after our initiation that we decided to have a movie night before we all turned in.  We all lined up our sleeping bags in the basement of the weekend get away home we were at and hit play on some super girly movie!  About 20 min into the movie the phone at the home rang.(mind you this was before cell we all had cell phones.....crazy right!?)  One of the older sisters answered the phone and on the other line a male voice answered her back and asked her  if all of the ladies we were enjoying out movie?!  How freaky!  It was soon after that, that we heard footsteps out side of the house running along the wrap around porch and knocking on windows. It was right out of a scary movie! 

Well as you can imagine 40 some odd girls began screaming and crying and having panic attacks etc!  How did anyone know where we were? Was someone really going to get us?  These two questions never really seemed to bother Heather or myself.  The two of us by chance ended up laying next to each other. As girls on either side of us were shaking and crying Heather and I rolled over and faced one another and started to giggle.  There we were 38 girls crying and Heather and I laughing!  I laughed even harder when Heather look at me and said "Well Avery...what ever this is, all I can say is that I sure am glad I ate that second bowl of ice cream!"  I laughed so hard that one of the older sisters had to hush me and that I needed to be sensitive to the others who were upset.  For some reason Heather and I both knew it had to be a prank and we both love a good prank! In fact I have tons of stories about the two of us an pranks too...but I will save those stories for another day!  As it turns out we were right and it was just two of the boys from Campus Crusade who knew allot of the girls.  They knew went out driving around a few on the Mt's outside of school in hope of finding where we were,,,,and they got lucky and found the house with all of your cars outside of it. It was too good to be true and so they just had to pull a prank!  After finding the phone number to the house via 411....the prank began and ended just after the police showed up! What can I say, Heather and I thought it was funny but the other girls were scared and called 911. Yikes!

What you must know is that ever since that night back in 2000 Heather and I have been the best of friends.  We went on to live with each other in summer school one year at App, live together in seminary for two years and were eventually in one another weddings! What a Joy it has been to have her in my life and I am just so thankful for her.  She is truly a gift from God!!

Above: Heathers wedding in Oct 2006 f

Below:  A pic of Heather and I at our Wedding in March 2007

What if.....?

"And i pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together will all the saints to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God." Ephesians 3 :17b-18

Did you ever stop and think just about how much God loves us? While I realize this may sound very narcissistic to sit around think about how much we are loved, that is not what I am getting at. I am sure we have all met someone who gets on our nerves because all they do is sit around and think about how much they are loved by others. But this is different, this is Gods love!

What if we stopped to think about how much God loves us everyday?!

That was one of the question that was brought up at the Bible study that I am leading this fall. What if I really stopped everyday to ponder Gods love for me...what would that look like in my life? Would I study His word more? Would I talk to him more? Would I loves others better? What would that look like?

It sounds like such a simple questions. God's love is something that if most of us are honest, we take for granted allot of the time. The truth is, I don't sit around thinking about how much I am loved by God. While it seems strange to ponder how much someone loves us it is certainly necessary in all of our relationships. When I think about how much my parents love me, I am driven to make them proud or to show them my love for them. When I think about how much my husband loves me, I am compelled to show him my love for him in return and be the wife God has called me to be. This same principle is especially true of our relationship with God. It is when I loose sight of how much God truly loves me, I am not really able to show Him my love in return. I don't talk to Him as often and I don't read his word like I should, and I definitely don't treat others with love either. I know that we will never ever ever be about to comprehend His love for us, just how high and deep and wide and long that love is, but I do know that if I really made it part of my daily life and really thought about how much God loves me, I think....make that I KNOW that my life would look much different.

So that's it, that's my question...What if you really thought about how much God loved you everyday? What would your life look like?

Barkley

I know that I had mentioned a few blogs ago about our dog Barkley passing away. I just wanted to share a few pics and share a few words about our Bark. Sr. Charles Barkley the Dog came to live with Joe 11 years ago at the age of two after a good friend just couldn't care for him with her two small children. They were a match made in heaven and Barkley loved Joe more than anything! He followed Joe everywhere and had to be next to him at all times. He was sweet and obedient (for the most part) and was the joy of many stories around our house. We loved talking in our best "Barkley voice" and give commentary on what he may be thinking at times and we loved horsing around with him on the floor and listening to his funny sounds (that was mostly Joe). I loved that I had a built in garbage disposal since we don't have one in our sink and that my floors never had a crumb on them! He pre-washed every dish clean as could be and always helped me clean out the fridge every Saturday! He was such a good boy! He brought so much joy to our house despite the massive amounts of dog hair that he left behind. Bark kept me company many nights when I first moved here and was always very protective of both Joe and I. Since loosing Barkley the house seems just a little bigger, a little more empty and allot quieter and it has taken some getting used to. We loved Barkley very much and we are so grateful that God gave a such a wonderful dog to love and who truly loved us back! We will always remember our Barkley with joy in our hearts and thank the Lord for the time we had with him. Our Christmas card just won't be the same this year ....we will always miss Mr. Barkley! Here are some of our favorite pics of the B-man! Enjoy!