This Easter my family is scattered all over, but I’ve thought of them often.  Dwyatt and I went to church this morning with some dear friends, then we all came back to our house, colored Easter eggs and made Easter brunch!  Beautiful spring weather, summer dresses, flowering trees, and the joy of the Easter holiday… couldn’t get much better than this!

I always remember the sacrifice it took from our Saviour to bring us to this Easter morning, I dance and celebrate this great day and the joyous truth that “It is finished!”  The debt is paid in full.  Jesus paid it all for us so that we could be free to live the beautiful lives he has planned for us!  Shout with joy!  Alleluia!

Happy Easter!

We have very large front flowerbeds, they’re really too big in my opinion.  The problem was that they had little tiny plants in them, and plants that we haphazardly strewn around the bed with no rhyme or reason to their layout.  We also were experiencing a takeover of bermuda grass… that pesky stuff had completely taken over!  Honestly,  we let these beds just get too far gone that we were overwhelmed with the amount of work it would take to get them back in working order.  It got to the point that I was embarrassed of them when people would come visit us and walk the front door… I knew we had to do something!

We hired Giant Landscaping and have been so happy with their work!  In only 2 days we had entirely new flowerbeds!  That amount of work would have taken Dwyatt and I at least 2 solid weekends of constant work, something we can neither afford time-wise, or want to do labor wise

The “Before” pictures… what a mess!  Oh, and a picture of the one pretty daffodil we had and Weston just because he’s so cute…

After Day 1 we returned home and all the old plants/weeds/grass was gone!  The beds were perfectly clean with new fresh dirt!  They did transplant some of the old grass for us which will be perfect along the side fence of our house.

The “After” pictures!  Day 2 we arrived at home and Dwyatt instantly fell in love with the giant tree.  He was SO excited about the fact that it’s taller than the roof.  The two big crape mertle trees just look like sticks right now, but come summer they’re going to be beautiful!  We have rose bushes, holly, black eyed susans, and several types of native grasses, all kinds of different things that are made to thrive in Oklahoma!

I can’t wait to see how this project flourishes this summer and I’m now fully prepared with a bottle of weed killer to take on the bermuda grass & weeds and keep these beds looking great!

• Vacation with friends to Kiawah Island in South Carolina, so much fun!  
• Losing my grandfather in early November, heart breaking, but an opportunity to spend a wonderful week with family.
• Hosting Thanksgiving in OKC for my family!
• Flying to NYC for the first time, both for work & a fun girls weekend with Mom!
• Christmas in Texas with Dwyatt’s family
• New Years in Colorado with my family
• Dinners with friends in January

All of this brings me to today… the time between January and what is now the end of March seems like a blur.  I don’t have many pictures, and I have many memories of long hours, hard work, way too much time in front of computer screen or with my nose in a book, and luckily it all cullminated with an opportunity to pursue a dream!

Ok, so what am I talking about??  Well, as some of you know Dwyatt and I are nearing the end of completing our MBA program.  I feel like that’s all I’ve been talking about on here lately, but it’s a huge thing for us, and it’s been a long time coming!  This is our last semester, and in January we had 2 classes to finish, which meant we were in class 3 nights a week.

If that in itself wasn’t enough, one class called Strategic Venture Development is about double the work of a typical class.  We’ve probably made it that way from taking it so seriously.  You see, the idea in this class is that you come up with an idea for a business concept and you learn to write an actual business plan around that concept.  I think Dwyatt and I have been pretty open in the past about how our dream is to ultimately start our own company.  We see this class as the perfect end to the MBA and a direct launching pad that will help carry us forward into this dream of actually getting out there and building this dream for ourselves.

Writing this plan has been a ton of work.  Most weekdays involved getting up a 4:30am to workout, working all day, working all school during lunch, going to class after work, getting home about 9:45 and working on more school until about 11pm and then doing it all again the next day.  I write that all down not to make myself sound impressive to others, but to remind myself one day, when I forget how much work and dedication it takes, that I am capable!  I truly believe that it takes hard work to accomplish the big dreams and I’m not afraid of that work!

So where does the big dreaming and success come in??  Well, the culmination of this class is to submit the business plan to two different business plan competitions.  One is local to the state of Oklahoma know as Governor’s Cup, and the other is “the super bowl of competitions” (according to our professors) the Rice Business Plan Competition.  The Rice competition has teams apply from all over the world, and they ultimately pick 42 teams to go to Houston to compete.  At this one competition alone they award over $1MM of prize money and seed investments, and there are over 300 judges/venture capitalists/angel investors that attend.  This year they had over 600 applicants, and guess what… WE GOT IN!!!

I’m a very glass half full kind of person, so I had no doubt we’d do well, but I was still shocked beyond belief to hear we got in accepted to Rice!  So now that we’ve settled down a little bit it means more work putting together the presentation, display items, etc.  before we fly to Houston in April!

Very exciting times… it’s definitely one of those experiences that feels like God is just laying down the stepping stones one at a time, leading us down the path of our dreams.  We just have to be patient enough to wait for the next stone, and then faithfully keep stepping toward wherever he leads.  We’re ready for that & can’t wait to see where this road is taking us!

Oh!  And what exactly is our little company??  We are Rose Energy.  You can learn a little more about us here.

So much fun to celebrate with Christina and spend some time with this amazing group of friends we’ve made.  It’s amazing how close you can become to friends you push through a college program with… truly some friends I’ll cherish forever.  I love you all and can’t wait for you to all come to our graduation party in May!  :)

We also tried a lot of novelty fried food, drank a couple of beers, watched some bull-riding, rode carnival rides, and saw a great concert!  A great way to spend a September Friday night!

After dinner, drinks, and way too much red-velvet cheesecake, we bought out gaming cards and were off to win credits!  The boys played Buck Hunter for hours and us girls flitted from game to game, spinning wheels, competing in digital connect four, and collecting tickets everywhere we went!  We laughed a lot and reverted to child-like enthusiasm about our bucket of tickets.  What a great night!

We spent our time taking in the sights in both Paris and Scotland, arriving home with over 2,000 photos and video clips along the way.  I’ve spent a lot of time the last couple weeks to pull them all together into a coffee table album (which is now printed and sitting in my living room, yay!!!) and a video that we can remember the trip by.  It’s been a lot of work, but now that it’s finished it feels like quite the accomplishment, and one of the best “souvenirs” we could ask for!

So if you’re curious about our trip you can either flip through the pages of our album:

European Vacation 2012 by Caitlyn & Dwyatt Jackson | Make Your Own Book

Or… sit back, relax, and check our my newly published video…  although to give you fair warning, it’s over 45 mins long…

** To watch it in full screen mode click on the title of the video which will take you to the YouTube page, there in the bottom right hand corner of the video you can select “full screen”

It was an absolutely fabulous vacation!  I hope you enjoy the images as much as I do    More updates to come soon!

My Mom and my Aunt… two of my favorite girls in the world

All the boys took turns “dancing with the bride”…

The cake topper especially designed with my grandparents in mind…  Pap with his pipe, Nana with her cat-eye sunglasses!

The food was excellent… always is with this family it seems…

Pap doing one of his favorite things… playing 42!

Daddy… I love you

We even got to play with Sporty… my Mom’s new baby!  He is growing so fast!

Such a cute little thing

The whole clan!  Love you family… it was a great weekend