Love. Not like. Love:)

When we were in Colombia adopting Athena in 2007, we bought her a beautiful emerald since Colombia is known for their emeralds. We will give it to her some day when she is old enough so she has a little piece of her birth county from the weeks that we spent together there before returning home with her. We wanted to do something for Alton also, though we weren't completely sold on getting another emerald for two reasons. First we thought it might be better for each of them to have something different than each other for their special thing from the trip. Second, aside from putting it in a tie tack we couldn't really see what he would do with his emerald. Well, we kept our eyes open each time we went out and about & to the markets the whole time we were there. When we got our sentencia and knew we only had about a week left, we were about to just give up on finding something original for Alton and we were going to go ahead and get him an emerald too even though we weren't super excited about the idea for him like we had been for Athena. We went to the markets one last time. While we were shopping we stopped an an artist's stand with piles and piles of canvas paintings. I told him I was looking for something with trees or flowers or something 'naturey'. He dig through the piles and pulled out one kind of abstract painting of some very colorful trees with falling leaves and one more realistic looking one with purple flowers. We were going back and forth deciding between the two and then I put them side by side to compare and once I saw them next to each other, I wanted both of them. I thought they had just enough complementing style and color that they would look awesome hung side by side in identical frames. John still teases me that I ruined any chance he had to do any bartering because of my excitement and insisting on having them both no matter what:) So, after carefully rolling them and rigging up a travel container made out of puff cans duct taped together the paintings made it home safe and sound. We took them in to be professionally stretched and framed. That, BTW will cause you a bit of sticker shock if you've never had that done before! Yowza! But it was so worth it!!! They turned out gorgeous! Of course they will be Alton's some day, but until then they have a home in our master BR where they look amazing:) This wall has been blank since we moved into our new home 2 1/2 years ago and I think fate made us keep it blank because it knew we would be bringing these gems home from Colombia some day. Of course the snapshots here do them little justice, but it gives you an idea of how awesome they are:) I lovelovelove them!