The McMahon Family

1998 we got married. I put our wedding videos in our media cabinet.

2008 we moved into our first house. The media cabinet moved with us.

2012 we replaced the media cabinet with new furniture. The wedding videos moved to the storage closet. I think.

2013 we moved to the Cottonwood house. The wedding tapes went to the basement.
I think.

2015 I wanted to watch the videos. I couldn’t find them in the basement. Anywhere. I searched the whole house. The wedding videos were gone.

2020 we moved to the Grand house and downsized. Going from 3000 sq. ft. to 1200 sq. ft. forced me to go through every single box, bag, item and purge most of it. When we got to the basement, I told everyone to look for the video tapes. As we moved everything out of the basement and got to the last cabinet to empty, I realized they really were gone. I had personally gone through every single cabinet, storage bin, shelf and box myself. The basement was now empty and no video tapes. That was such a sad realization and I have mourned their loss for over a year now.

3 days ago I saw a headline in the news: “Husband surprises wife with lost wedding video 14 years later.” I told God, “How fun would that be if that could happen to me?!”

Yesterday I got this text from Cheri:
“Oh and also I picked up some mail that was delivered at the old house and [the new owners] had a bag of your old video tapes and one of them was of your wedding. she thought you would probably want them :-)”

!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I didn’t ask God for the miracle. He just loves me enough to do this for me!

Nicki and I decided that we needed to go to Wrigley one more time and this time we needed to experience the bleacher seats. We also decided since it was a day game we would take the train. The experience did not disappoint! I could do without the train experience, but the bleachers were the best! There is not a bad seat in the whole section. We finally decided on seats right at the basket in right center.

Unlike the April trip, this day was extremely hot. I mean sweat in all places of my body. All places.

It’s the ivy!!!!

Just us shagging balls in the outfield during batting practice.

And turns out, we ARE hat people!

And had a little time to kill before catching the train home.

Way more pics are here!

Sometimes it’s just fun to document our days with our boys…who are growing up way too fast.

Growing up in Georgia meant that we traveled to Illinois numerous times for holidays. Those trips are some of the fondest memories I have of growing up. We’d take the seats out of a van and create a large bed in the back. I can still remember the soothing feeling of sleeping while traveling. We would play the alphabet game, request truckers to honk and pass the See Rock City and See Ruby Falls signs along the way. We never stopped to see either. So Nicki and I decided that on our way home, we were going to stop and see this time! Unfortunately, Ruby Falls didn’t work out, but Rock City did!

For Mom’s 70th birthday Tara, Nicki and I decided to surprise Mom with a trip away. She had a planned trip to Tara’s so Nicki and I headed out the day before her and met her at Tara’s. She was very surprised to see us down there! That’s when we informed her that we were taking her to the Biltmore in Asheville, North Carolina. On the drive from Georgia to North Carolina, we drove along the Nantahala River. Growing up, our youth group took river rafting trips here. Tara and I both white river rafted down this river!

Heading out!

Found a fun local pizza bar for lunch!

Views of the south are so great.

Had to stop for a pic with this chopper.

Margarita pitchers!

Wine tasting. Even I participated!

We stopped some random lady to take this pic…it was way more complicated than we had anticipated! But we did get our picture.

All of the pics with captions to explain the trip are here.