happy birthday week to me/ happy 4th to america

last night was fun! one of my favorites so far, which is hard to say because tori left yesterday morning to go to the lake. if she didn't get to spend hours in the car beside sterling and then end up at the lake, i might actually feel bad about having fun without her. and also, i feel certain that i'll have several new favorite nights to rival this one very soon. my family is coming this week, hillary and tori's is coming next week, joy beth is coming at the end of july and melinda is coming at the beginning of august. it is going to be some fun times in nashville!!

how great is it that the fourth fell on a sunday this year? that leaves room for everybody to party it up all weekend, and nashville took advantage! (or as i said to hillary, in keeping with our culture our country celebrates our independence day by wasting millions of dollars, and i intend to participate in it) starting friday there was free music and fireworks downtown and the whole shinding was closed last night with the big daddy firework show backed with music by the nashville symphony. how fun is that??!! amazing fireworks AND a flippin symphony playing along with them is definitely one of the coolest things i've ever seen.

where we watched it from was also pretty great. while the event was free, we knew it would be expensive to park and the foot traffic would rival that of rush hour traffic on weekdays. we took our exit off of the interstate and were sitting on it when a truck in front of us suddenly pulled over into the median between I-40 and the ramp. then the car after him did the same. and then the one right in front of us did the same. we made the quick decision of deciding that pulling off was a great idea - no parking fees and we didn't have to leave our car! within 10 minutes there about 30 cars set up right there! since we weren't right in the action we wouldn't have been able to hear the symphony if it weren't for the wonderful radio!!! i am not a fan of radio, slightly hate it even, but i was loving the fact that we got to hear the symphony accompany the spectacular show! they started out playing music from star wars and ended with a medley of patriotic songs.

getting home was a breeze - we just pulled on through the grass onto the interstate, pulled off on the next exit and set the gps to avoid highways for a few minutes. hillary and i came home and started watching harry potter and playing on our computers. (i got a list of daycares that are hiring and emailed someone that needs a nanny. feel free to pray about this for me.) at about 1:30 hillary decides she wants to do pilates. she's crazy, right? the even crazier part of this story is that i said "i'll pilate with you!!"

and pilate we did. considering we're not exercising fools like our dear friends joy beth and lauryn, i think we did pretty good. with shampoo bottles for weights and old school britney spears to listen to, we did almost the whole program. then we started getting slightly tired of it and decided hip hop abs would be the best way to end our spontaneous workout session. this part was very fun, but at this point we were too tired to do much of it.

i wasn't feeling my best and slept most of yesterday (when the upstairs neighbor kid wasn't bouncing his dadgum ball LOUDLY) so here it is 5 in the morning and i'm wide awake. hopefully today will be as rockin as yesterday - i have big plans of getting coffee, dressing up slightly nice, driving to kinko's to print out copies of my resume and references and then driving to daycares that are currently hiring. and i feel certain at one point or another there will be some hip hopping and/or down-dogging.

i am so very excited about my mom, aunt carol, aunt becky and lindsey getting here this week! i've made a few plans for us that include touring the ryman, where there is a new "johnny and june" exhibit!

-meghan