Panama City Beach 2009, and some other stuff

We recently returned from our annual Skeltons/Kitchens/Walters Florida vacation, and it was fabulous. Wes and I made the heinous (but thankfully safe) 15 hour drive to my parents' in Alabama and we were so ready for the sand, sun, and family! I tried to pick just a few of my favorite vacation pics, but still ended up with like thirty on here... oh well, hope you enjoy!

Precious niece Rylie (4 years old, almost 5) posing in her pink bikini.

Precious niece Bailey (3 months) in her tiny pink tankini at the beach for the first time.

This is what Bailey did the majority of the time on the beach.

My family celebrated my birthday with me while we were there, and we got a delicious Publix cake!

This was our set up each day:

The Kitchens family:

Enjoying my margarita (non-alcoholic of course) at Margaritaville:

My dad, sister, Wes, and brother in law on the go carts:

Wes got this awesome shot of my sister and I sitting at the ocean:

The whole clan:

Wes and Rylie playing the velcro mitt tennis ball game (or whatever it's called):

Miss Bailey in another precious little bathing suit:

The day we drove back to my parents' from Florida, we got to spend a little time on the boat on the river in Alabama.

Rylie and I had a dance-off in my parents' living room, and this was the trophy ceremony. She's apparently very serious about it.

In other news, Restoration Church is going great. This past week after we got back from vacation, we had a big project going on that we helped with. We made "love gift" baskets to hand out to local businesses close to where Restoration Church meets. We had people volunteer to make homemade goodies that we but in the baskets, along with a copy of the new "Restoration" CD made by Wes, and an information card about the church. Then we had volunteers come help assemble the baskets and volunteers to hand them out to the businesses. We gave out 100 of them, and almost all of them were very positive responses. For a lot of the people it was weird that we were just randomly giving out gifts with no strings attached. Hopefully, it got a lot of people in the community thinking, wondering, and most of all experiencing the love of Jesus! Wes and I got to help assemble them and also got to help give them out, and it was a great experience. Here are a couple pictures Wes got of us assembling:

And then finally, I'm sure if you are reading this you know that Wes and I are expecting our first baby in February. I figured I better start doing the belly shots so the family can watch me grow! It will also be cool to look back over all the months. This is my first one at 14 weeks (picture taken August 25, 2009). Although I had just eaten a lot of cookies prior to this picture, there is definitely a little baby bump there!

Celebrating the first anniversary of Leslie's 29th birthday in Toronto!

Wes and I decided to go for a fun little trip to Toronto, Canada to celebrate my birthday. My birthday was on Saturday, so we went to Toronto on Friday and stayed one night and came back Saturday night. Here we were driving into the city:

Here is our hotel, the Delta Chelsea, in the middle of downtown:

I just wanted to relax, enjoy the hotel, and enjoy the city. At the top of the hotel they had an adult pool and hot tub ("adult" just meaning no kids were allowed - they had a family pool on another floor) so we enjoyed that on Friday evening for a while.

After that, we decided to venture out into the city and we walked to Chinatown which was very interesting and cool.

We just came across this cool painted map thing on the side of a building.

Here is an interesting tidbit: Canada has solid black squirrels! We have seen several of these in Niagara Falls, Canada and then we saw some here in Toronto. The crazy thing is even though Buffalo is so close to Canada, we have never seen a black squirrel here. I guess they don't like America.

We wanted to eat dinner at a unique place, so we came across O'Grady's while we were walking and decided to eat here. It was pretty good.

On Saturday we spent a lot of time at a huge indoor mall thing that was just a couple blocks from our hotel. This is just one level of four I think.

And here's the one picture we got of us together.

Downtown Toronto. Look at all the people! It's kind of like Times Square.

Wes looking super fly in H & M.

This was one of those crazy, cool guys that stand and look just like a statue and then they move and it's totally freaky. I love these things.

It is really cool living so close to Toronto!