Happy Holidays, Neighbor!

Hi there! I hope you all are having a wonderful week before Christmas! Would you be scared for me if I told you that we haven’t even started our Christmas shopping yet? Well be scared, be very scared because I haven’t bought a single thing! Where has the time gone!?

Last week, six finals consumed my life (which, btw, the hours spent studying paid off! I made my 3rd 4.0 in a row!), this past weekend I gave Graduation fun all of my time, and now this week we are hosting our first annual “All Stars in the Making” Baseball Pitchers Camp up in Cartersville, GA (close to Dustin’s hometown).

I’m not exactly sure when the Christmas shopping will occur, but can I promise you that it will.  On the ride home from Statesboro, Dustin and I made our “To-Get” list, with lots of great gift ideas, so now I just have to make those gifts come to a reality.  It takes me forever to figure out what to buy someone because I like for gifts to be extremely personal; for example, when I am shopping with someone in June and they tell me how much they like/want something, I try to remember those conversations so that we can give them something they really wanted and not just something that I could afford to buy them.  But anyways, I hope that you are better off than me (I’m sure you are); I can’t decided if I am even going to brave the malls or stick to other venues at this point.

As I mentioned above, this week, we are hosting our first annual “All Stars in the Making” Baseball pitchers camp.  This is a youth (8-16 y.o) baseball camp, focusing mostly on the things Dustin wishes he had known when he was a young athlete: agility/speed work, pitching drills, fielding work, etc.  One of the days I am going to talk to them about the importance of nutrition too!

At first we were a little disappointed by the turn out (apparently our marketing was a little weak, as we found out that most of the elementary school and middle schools in the area didn’t even hear about it), but it is slowly growing everyday and now we know in the years to come what works and what doesn’t.

Dustin’s good friend, Everett Teaford of the Kansas City Royals, and cousin, Drew, have been helping him tremendously and today, and another one of his friends, Jonny Venters of the Atlanta Braves, is coming to speak to the young boys about what it takes to make it to the next level.  The guys seem pretty excited about that! These young athletes have had a lot of one-on-one attention, something that if it had grown to extremely large numbers they wouldn’t have been able to get.  A picture from the camp was in the Cartersville newspaper yesterday (below), a write up about the camp will be in it today, and Dustin did a radio interview yesterday, that we were told aired all day yesterday as well.

It definitely has the potential to grow in the years to come!

We have been staying with Dustin’s parents this week… our poor parents, they both thought they were getting rid of us once we got married; little did they know we would be back oh so often! We have been baseball camping by day and eating yummy, clean dinners by night.  It has sure been a treat! Here are a few pictures I was able to grab on my iPhone out by the outdoor kitchen…

And one last photo of the crazy dogs; both so happy to be able to run free up here!

Well, we are off to the gym and Day 3 of the camp! I hope you all have a wonderful day!

Good health!

Ashley