Malena Louise Spencer Nov. 24, 1977 to June 19, 2004

(This was written on Friday June 19th but not published until today.)Today is an especially difficult day for me and my family. Five painful years ago my beautiful, sister Malena was killed in a horrible car wreck. As I have tried to focus on the wonderful memories of Malena, who I and my family referred to as Nina, left us with. I am reminded of all the hurt and devastation her tragic accident caused me and my family. Nina was the sweetest, most loving, forgiving, non judging person I know. She always thought of helping others and was a very dedicated worker at ETMC Athens where she was a registered phlebotimist going to school to be a nurse. She truly had a heart of gold. I miss her loving personality and the joyfulness of her laughter. She and I had a very close relationship and she was always there for me...never judging me, just always listening and being a friend. She and Kerry were very good friends and like each other in many ways. They both had the same take on many things and would team up against me from time to time. I love the memories I have of the three of us going and doing things together. I am grateful for the 26 years we had her on this earth, but cannot help to wish we had longer. I miss all our long telephone conversations and her rational advice and the way we had so much fun together. Nina wasn't too crazy in the past about the guys I chose to date and usually disapproved. Until Kerry and I started dating that is. She knew Kerry from high school and always thought he was a good person. She liked us together and would go just about every where with us. She even kept us together a few times. We hung out just about every weekend together. It was really cool for us to be so close. Now I am so thankful for all the memories we made and Kerry and I always laugh when we think of my sister. She left us with many fond memories and I know we all miss her dearly. Please remember my family in ur prayers as this is a very difficult time of year for us all. XOXOX

Hello...Where has the time gone?

Ok, I am so sorry that it has been so long since I have posted a blog. So much has been going on in our lives and I have pushed blogging aside. Kerry and I celebrated 4 wonderful years of marriage on May 14th. Bree spent the night with Nona and Daddy and I spent an evening out to dinner and a movie. The years have gone by so fast and we enjoyed our special date in celebration of our anniversary. Bree is so much fun to be around. She loves playing outside and most of all playing in the water. Memorial weekend we went and stayed in The Embassy Suites in Irving and this was her 1st experience of the summer of swimming in a pool. She absolutely loved it!! She couldn't get enough of it. We had such a fun time with her. Then we spent a few afternoons out on the lake boating with the Dugan and Tolar families and that was another favorite for her. She laughed and giggled the whole time we were cruising on the water. She is a little fish! While we were boating Bree went without a diaper for like 6 and 7 hours at a time. She would tell me every time she needed to use the restroom. So I realized that if she could remember to tell me for that amount of time then she could possibly tell me the rest of the time. Hey, it was worth a shot anyway. So, I ran to Wal-Mart and picked up several cute, girly panties for her and we were both so excited. Bree loved wearing her big girl panties and she was so easy to train. Since then(knock on wood) she has done great. We welcomed baby Austin D. Dugan into our world May 29th. Bree went with us to the hospital and was so excited. When he was born she was running and singing in the waiting area, saying "want to see, want to see." We decided to give her dear binky, which she loves so very much, to Austin. It was a lil hard at nap time that afternoon. She cried for it and wanted to go to Nona's house to get another binky.But I convinced her that we gave them all to Austin, even Nona's. And after that she has adjusted rather well.Although every once in a while she wants to go look in the cabinet where they were kept to make sure they are still gone. My baby is such the big girl. Big girl panties and no binky all in the same week. Wow!! Well we wanted to reward her, so we got her two, new baby kittens for being so big. She wanted to name them both Gracie, I think after our Pastor's baby that stays in the nursery with her. But since they are both boys we had to help her pick another name. We named one of them Tiger because he has tiger stripes all over his body and the other one is Lil Blue cuz he is a grayish blue color. They are really sweet and playful and Bree loves to drag them around. Poor kittens!! But they do love her, too. The other morning I was getting her ready to take her to Pa and Mema's house and they were meowing like crazy, as they usually do when they see us. Well Bree said "Kitty's crying, want me...want me to hold them." I though it was so cute. She thinks they are her lil babies and she is their Mommy. She is definitely an animal lover. As natives of Grand Saline we enjoyed introducing Bree to the annual Salt Festival which was held the 1st weekend of June. We took her downtown to the kiddie capers, which she enjoyed. Her favorite thing, which came as no surprise to me, was the petting zoo. She loved the blow up slide and games too. That evening we dressed her up in her Ariat Baby Phat red boots along with a denim skirt and red tee that said, Mommy's Cowgirl and took her to the rodeo. She loved seeing the cows and horses and sat in the bleachers cheering for the calves during the calf roping. It was a lot of fun for us all. She makes everything so much more enjoyable! The Salt Festival will surely be something she looks forward to as her Daddy and I both did when we were kids. We have been so busy with lots of summer birthdays. We recently celebrated Bebe's, Uncle Brandon's, Finlee Rae's, Hardy's and Finley White's, Marti's and Macoy's and we have Hannah's and Crew's this week. Wow, there are a lot of blessings that were born in the summer months. Which means lots of parties and celebrations for us. We have enjoyed celebrating our loved ones and friends so much!! Happy Birthday to them all! Well I know this has been like a huge post of all sorts of things, but I have been going non-stop. I'll try to post again soon. XOXOX

Our babay girl is 2!

Wow...Sunday the 26th Aubree Malena turned 2 years old. It is impossible for me to think of where the time has gone. She is speaking in sentences now and learning her colors. She loves to sing, mainly twinkle twinkle little star and Jesus loves me. She is such a joy to be around. We had a Fancy Nancy party at our house Sunday afternoon to celebrate this milestone. There were 17 kiddos and they enjoyed playing on Bree's new wooden swing set Gramps and Bebe gave her for her b-day. They also enjoyed the cutest pink, tiara cake and banana splits. I tried to take quotes from the book and apply them to the party. There were frilly toothpicks in the sandwiches, cuz Fancy Nancy states that, " Sandwiches always taste better with frilly toothpicks in them." The kids also had fun dressing up Fancy Nancy style. After the party Bree said to me, "Party fun, Momma." It was so sweet. I am glad she enjoyed her party. Thanks everyone for coming and celebrating Bree with us. We have been so blessed by her precious soul. Last week we enjoyed taking Bree to the Van Zandt County Fair. We met The Stewart family at Jerry's for some pizza first and then took the girls for a fun nite at the fair. Bree and Hannah, who is a few months younger than Bree, had fun riding the elephants together. Them and the lil train roller coaster, and the carousel were Bree's favorite rides. She had such a great nite. Daddy even won her a cute, purple stuffed teddy bear. I am just left wondering how my baby got so big so fast?....

Ok I know it has been forever...but I will try to get back on track. We have had such a busy month. I helped give Amie Dugan a sweet shower to get her ready to welcome her precious baby boy, Austin into the world. He is scheduled to arrive May 29th, unless he decides to come earlier. Easter was a great experience for Bree. Lots of egg hunts and candy. We took Bree to the Tuttle ranch, which is one of our neighbors' ranch, for a huge town hunt on Sat. afternoon and then that night we ate supper with Kerry's family and then she hunted eggs with her cousins. We had candy running out our ears at this point, but we still managed to take her to one more hunt on Sunday after church at my great Uncle & Aunt's house. Going to Bobby and Nadine's for Easter has been a tradition in my family since I was small and Bree seemed to enjoy it as much as I always did. She is like a pro now at the egg hunting thing. We celebrated the rising from the dead of Jesus with lots of family and friends and of course we r trying to teach Bree all about the meaning of Easter and everything else. She gets a lil of it. We will just keep teaching her. I hope everyone had a wonderful Easter as well. Aubree has been busy helping us work in the garden and in the flower beds around the house. She mostly just loves to play in the dirt, but she thinks she is helping. We have also been getting the deck and porch fixed up, too. We have been working especially hard to get everything ready for her 2nd b-day party at our house this weekend. She is so excited. She says, " Bree 2, Party with cake, ice cream and friends. " It is so sweet. She tells me like everyday who she wants to be at her party. I cannot believe she is already 2. I haven't been blogging cuz I have been scrapping like crazy to get her 2nd scrapbook finished by her b-day. And I can happily say....it is finally finished. 35 pages that sum up the last year of her precious life. I will post more later...I just wanted to let everyone know I do intend to get better with this again. XOXOX

Ok, so it has been a couple weeks since I have taken the time to sit down and blog. I have only one excuse....LIFE. And it has been busy. Busy, yet I love every minute of it and am so blessed by the the life I have been given. So, what is it that we have spent the last couple of weeks doing? Well, we took Bree on an 8 hour car trip to Springfield, MO a couple of weeks ago. We rode with Gramps and Bebe to visit Josh and Emi (as Bree calls her). The car trip was not as bad as I had anticipated with a 22 month old little one. Bree slept and watched movies almost the whole way. We had so much fun visiting and enjoyed a lot of good food while we were there. The best part of the trip tho was when we woke up on Friday morning and there was snow everywhere. It snowed like 2 1/2 inches while we were asleep. When Bree looked outside she said "Broke". It was so cute. She kept telling us that it was broke outside. Little ones have such a precious way of viewing things and it is funny the things they come up with. We played out in the snow and Gramps and Kerry even built a snowman with Bree. She loved playing in the snow and liked to eat it even more. The trip was a lot of fun and we all enjoyed it. We have been celebrating a lot of birthdays this month. Last Friday we celebrated with cousin Brett for his 5th b-day. Wow it is hard to believe he is so old. He is such a sweet soul and a joy to be around. Saturday we journeyed to Allen to attend Emma Tomlin's birthday party. Emma is about 6 wks older than Bree and the girls have a special connection. Holly and I have been close friends since we were 13 and it is so special to see our little girls grow up together. The party was a lot of fun and we enjoyed seeing everyone. This week has been about spending a lot of time indoors since we have been blessed with the beautiful, much needed rain. I know our garden is rejoicing and thankful for all the water we are receiving. Kerry has been so busy working around our house and on our land. He got our dock and deck finished this week. They both add a lot to the look of our place and I know we are going to enjoy them this spring. Bree has been helping me pot some blueberry plants and really enjoys watering the plants and flowers. She is so independent these days. Definitely going on 2 years old. She has to do things her way or it gets really dramatic. She is so sweet but very head strong, too. She loves to color and draw and also loves to dance and sing. She is so fun to be around. She just radiates with energy and joy. She is such a blessing in our lives and I never imagined how much better a lil one makes everything. Sorry it took me so long to post, but now you have an idea of what our lives have been like for the last couple of weeks. Thanks for checking on us. XOXOX

To sum things up for the past week I will start with Friday, since the week was pretty uneventful and spent mostly working. However, we did manage to spend time having dinner with Pa, Mema and Nona on Wednesday and Gramps and Bebe and Aunt Beth on Thursday. Then on Friday Kerry and Aubree met me in Mesquite for lunch at Jason's Deli. This is one of our favorite places to eat and probably one of the things I miss most about not living in the Dallas area anymore. Bree shares our love of muffaletta's, too. After lunch we headed downtown to have our taxes done with Mr. Orrick, which we love. He and his wife are really sweet people and they were so kind to Bree. His office is right across from SMU and overlooks Central Expressway. The walls on the outside of his office are glass and Bree enjoyed looking down on all the moving cars. They had this peg game where all the pegs were different colors and Mr. Orrick asked her to find the yellow pegs and sure enough she went right to them. And then she found all the blue pegs, too. We were all impressed. She loves her Doug and Melissa puzzles and one of them is about matching colors, so maybe she has learnt some colors from that. But I must also add that the week before we were making Valentine cards for her grandparents and on one page there was a place for her hand prints. So, I got out the hand paint and we did her prints. Well, Bree picked up one of the paints and said "paint pink" and sure enough, it was pink. So, I guess she is really learning her colors. To a first time Mom it is really cool how they pick things up so fast. After having our taxes done we took Bree to the Dallas World Aquarium. It was great! Bree loved all the fish, birds and turtles. It is really an awesome aquarium and I highly recommend it if you have not experienced it before. Of course we enjoyed it as much as Bree and it was unanimous, our favorite thing of all was the sea otters. They were very entertaining and friendly. We finished the day off with a little shopping. It was a perfect day. Aubree is such a good girl when we are out on the go. She really enjoys going places and was so fun to spend the day with. Saturday we spent the day in our pj's. We were complete bums. Kerry painted our front door black and mowed some but Bree and I spent the day playing inside. Kerry grilled cheeseburgers for supper and I never knew Bree liked them so much. She ate an entire half all by herself, along with some chips and ranch dip. What a big eater! Sunday on our way to church I asked her if she wanted to go to church with Daddy and Momma or go to the nursery and she said, "nursery." I guess she does like going to the nursery still. Mostly though, I think it is so neat how a 22 mo. old can understand what I am saying and express her thoughts so well. I am so glad we are able to communicate so well, now. It was only a few months ago that she could barely talk and now she has learnt so much and can tell me what she wants. After church when we got home from lunch Kerry went back out to mow some more and Bree was in her room watching him out her window while I changed. Well, when I went in there to see what she was doing I found her holding my lipstick with it smeared all over her chin. She missed her lips just a little. Ha! Well, it was the long lasting kind that last for like 8 hours and I couldn't get it all off. Hopefully it will wear off soon. She had sat on the bathroom counter with me this morning while I got ready and I let her play with some of my brushes, so I guess she wanted to complete the look with some lipstick. She is in the stage where she wants to do everything we do. If I put on deodorant, she wants some. If I spray perfume, she says, "Bree some." So I always pretend to give her some. She is the same way about my makeup and everything else. It is so fun to see her pretend and try to copy us. We spent the afternoon outside enjoying the beautiful day. Brandon and the 3 boys came over and Bree and I really enjoyed playing with them. I have a short work week this coming week. I work Mon. and Tues. and am off for the rest of the week. Woohoo!:) I can't wait to spend 5 days at home with Kerry and Bree. Kerry worked hard last week to get our gates painted black and a new mailbox and porch light up. I posted a picture of the gate to the front pond, which I love looking out at from our kitchen window. Although, we do miss some of the amenities of living in Dallas, we love the beautiful land we have in Grand Saline. Our house is small and cozy, but we love it. Plus the land is so pretty and we have a lot of hopes for it. We are starting to get things to looking the way we want them to. It is so fun working on our land and house. We are really enjoying the countless projects ands the difference they have made to the looks of our place. Thanks for checking on us. XOXO

In honor of Sweethearts Day I spent a lot of time this weekend remembering the special moments of my true love. For those of you who don't know Kerry and I both grew up in Grand Saline but he is 5 years older than me and we didn't really know each other until the summer of 2001 when we ran into each other in the infamous "bear grounds" in town. He was with some mutual friends of ours and I was with Audra, a long time girlfriend. We started talking and there was just something about him. He was funny, outgoing and witty, but also charming, sweet and polite and really thoughtful. (I know some of you may be wondering if we are talking about the same guy.Ha!) He has always been so sweet to me and treated me like a queen. He is this big, rough, tough man's man who has a heart of gold and really knows how to make a girl feel special. We ran into each other the next night at a friends house and again hit it off great. I must admit that after talking to him I couldn't wait to see him again. At the time I was living in Mesquite going to college in Dallas and had to go home then on the third day for school. Well, I can still remember the feeling I got on that Tuesday (5 days after running into him in the bear grounds)when he called me for the first time. We were good friends at first but both knew there was something really special between us. At the time neither of us were wanting a relationship, but we just couldn't let each other go either. We talked and saw each other on weekends and whenever we could for 3 years and then when he graduated from UT Tyler he moved to Dallas to be closer to me. We became engaged on Dec. 21 of 2004 and got married on May 14, 2005. We have always had this special connection and I am so glad God brought us together. May 14, 2005 was one of the greatest days of my life. I can still remember the look in Kerry's eyes as we stood there saying our vows. He and I have this deep connection, we are true soul mates. He makes my life so wonderful. So, as I spent time remembering all the special moments of our wedding day I got the album out and started looking at all the pictures. Seriously, that day was AWESOME! We were married at Castle Douglas in Rockwall, Tx. And everything about our wedding day was magical. I was so honored to share the day with some of my best friends and family. I decided to share some of the photos with everyone so you can see how truly wonderful the day really was. We have now been married almost 4 years and have been blessed with a 22 month old beautiful little girl, Aubree Malena Kindle. God has been so good to us and I am so happy to have celebrated my 8th Valentine's Day with Kerry. I was off from work Thursday and Friday and enjoyed my long weekend with my family and friends. I spent the majority of this time at the Dugan's house assisting with a garage sale. Bree loved playing outside all day and ofcourse spending time with Mommy, Daddy and the Dugan's. We spent Feb. 14th enjoying the beautiful weather outside and also enjoying our time with our daughter. That evening Bree spent the night with Nona and Kerry and I enjoyed dinner and some alone time. Our daughter is the center of our universe, but we do still love spending just a lil time alone together. I will spare ya the details. Ha!Ha! Anyway, happy V- Day to everyone! XOXOXO