Mother's Day and 10th Anniversary

Hey, thanks for reading last week's post.  It had almost 100 pictures in it.  Crazy huh?  Well this week we have a lot fewer pictures, but it was still a good week.  Even though the weather decided to freak out and send us all back to winter for a few days.  

First let's talk about Mother's Day.  It was really fun to watch the kids try to make my day special.  Charlotte was especially cute.  A few weeks ago she heard a radio commercial where they said, "Mother's Day is coming up soon."  She got really excited and wanted to know when exactly Mother's Day was.  Then she started asking me what my favorite breakfast was.  She was like, "you eat oatmeal and raisins every day so that's your favorite breakfast right?"  She can make oatmeal in the microwave so I think she was planning to wake up early and make oatmeal for me - which is really sweet. But I didn't want oatmeal on Mother's Day so I told Brandon that he better get with Charlotte so they could plan a "surprise" breakfast.  

In the end I bought my own breakfast food since I was the one who went grocery shopping while Brandon was at the cabin with his dad.  I wanted bacon and eggs.  When we grabbed the milk the kids mentioned that they wanted to buy chocolate milk some day.  I decided on the spot that I had "always wanted chocolate milk on Mother's Day." So we bought half a gallon of that.  

So in the morning I came downstairs and had this wonderful breakfast that Brandon and the kids had made for me.  

Charlotte and Lydia made me a lot of cute cards.  Lydia had even typed and printed her card that said, i LOVE MOM.  Charlotte gave me a cardboard tube with hearts on it.  She'd found it earlier on the day she'd heard the mother's day commercial.  I just know that she thought, "what can I give mom?  Oh I can give her this tube that I found. I love it so I know she'll love it."

She even wrote this note on the tube.

Here are my two little sweet hearts.  They definitely did a good job at helping me feel loved.

Brandon and the kids had bought flowers for me the day before.  They'd dropped me off at Walmart so I could buy some stuff while they and went to Lowes to pick out my gift.  When they picked me back up Derrick immediately said, "buy Christmas Presents!"  And Veronica yelled, "We buy plant." So that wasn't much of a surprise.  But I was impressed by the pretty beads on the hanging supports.  

After breakfast we got ready for church.  Church was good. Usually I have a really hard time with mother's day.  I listen to people praise their wonderful mothers and then I feel like I'm coming up short as a parent.  But this year Mother's day was just great. I'm basically immune to self doubt now because I've spent nearly every day of the last 6 months questioning my parenting skills and then deciding that I'm doing okay.  So I didn't have to deal with even a little bit of Mother's Day guilt.

In the afternoon Brandon made egg plant Parmesan.  This was for Mother's Day/our anniversary that would be happening later in the week.  It's sooooo good, but kind of labor intensive so that's why he did it on Sunday afternoon when we didn't have anything else to do.  Usually when Brandon cooks egg plant parmesan I'm stuck tending to the needy kids.  But this time all the kids were playing well by themselves.  So I actually got to help Brandon in the kitchen.  That was probably the best mother's day present of all.  I helped dip the egg plant slices into flour and then eggs and Brandon put them into bread crumbs before flying them in a frying pan.  Brandon also made a marinara sauce.  We layered the egg plant slices with the marinara sauce and mozzarella cheese and baked it all in the oven for about 30 minutes. It tasted so good when it was done! 

 And the kids all ate it all without much complaint. Brandon has spent the last 6 months really working with the kids to eat their dinner. He encouraged them by telling them that whoever was the first one done got an extra serving of dessert.  And he punished anyone who didn't eat by making them sit in their seats until bedtime or until they ate their food. There were A LOT of power struggles with different kids each night.  But in the end Brandon prevailed.  The kids will pretty much eat whatever is put in front of them now.

I had all sorts of grand plans for writing a ton this week.  On Monday I was still on track to do my 30 posts in 30 days.  But I discovered that most of my desire to write had disappeared.  It was replaced by my desire to get packing for our summer in Yellowstone. In the end I pushed out one more post to finish up writing about out move from Alabama to Utah.  And then I wrote a list of 30 things to do in the Texas Hill Country. But even though I didn't get 30 posts written in 30 days I did get 19 post written in 24 days.  And that's pretty awesome.

Our 10th anniversary was Wednesday May 17.  Brandon and I had already celebrated by ourselves with an overnight trip in the RV on Friday/Saturday so we decided to celebrate as a family on our actual anniversary.  We've been talking about buying shelf milk at Gosners Cheese in Logan so we decided that we should go on a little day trip to Logan on our anniversary.  Charlotte had mentioned that she wanted to go get Ice cream as a family and so we decided to also stop at Aggie Ice cream.

We'd heard reports about winter weather returning to Utah this week, but still I was a little surprised when we found snow on the ground when we woke up on Wednesday. This has been such a long winter!

Charlotte has been playing with these little dolls a lot lately and she wanted me to take a picture of them all sitting around a camp fire.

The kids all got up and ready for school earlier than usual.  That meant there was time for us to take an impromptu family picture. I love the little stuffed animal photo bombing in the bottom left corner.

Derrick wanted to take a picture of me.  He loves taking close ups of my face.

Brandon dropped the kids off at school and I threw together this picture.  

Along with this little countdown that we'd come up with together the night before.

10 Years
9 Big Road Trips (at least)
8 (and a half) Months of Deployment to Korea
7 Addresses
6 Wards
5 Paid off Student Loans (and 5 more to go)
4 Brilliant Children
3 Cars
2 Bachelor's Degrees
1 RV

10 years ago we had no idea what life had in store for us, we only knew that we wanted to spend it together. I'm looking forward to many more adventures with Brandon. He's my best friend, the love of my life, and the person who makes my crazy dreams into a reality. Here's to the past 10 years and to many more.

Wednesday is the kids' early out day so we picked the twins up from school before 11:00 and were on our way to Logan.  It was snowing as we drove.  It was definitely crazy weather for the 17th of May. 

Our first stop was the Smith and Edwards Store south of Brigham City. We went there to buy a dutch oven.  We've always wanted one, and we figured that it was a good anniversary gift. 

The kids were so impressed by the store.  The girls loved all the horse equipment - especially these saddles. 

Then we kept driving north.  Normally we would have gone through Sardine Canyon.  But there was a wall of clouds covering the mountains when we got to Brigham City.  So we decided to go around the mountains and go through the lower pass that is north of Brigham City.  Even then, this is what the drive into Cache Valley looked like.

Gossners was our first stop. Oddly enough, this was the first time that Brandon and I have been here together.  When I moved to Logan almost 11 years ago I was sort of dating another guy.  He took me to Gossners, and I liked it, but I never went back.  If I remember right the store was never open when I was off of work, or something like that.  Anyway, so this was our first time here.  They have little cheese and shelf milk samples so we tried those at first.  The kids and I all liked the rootbeer flavored shelf milk.  Brandon bought two cases of 9 quart boxes of plain shelf milk, squeaky cheese, and a 6 little boxes of shelf milk.  Then we went back out into the cold and the snow.

Our next stop was Smiths MarketPlace.  We lived right across from this store for almost 2 years and this was our favorite store.  It's also the only place we've ever bought sandals that lasted Brandon more than one summer.  So he ran in there to see if they still carried the type of sandals he liked, They did!

After that we briefly met up with Brandon's friends Laurie and Brent. Brandon hasn't seen them since 2011 and I haven't seen them since 2012.  They hadn't even met Veronica yet.  Thank goodness for Facebook for keeping us connected during the past 5 years.

Then we went to Aggie Ice Cream for our long awaited treat.  Even though it was freezing outside we all still wanted our ice cream.

We let the kids each pick out a flavor.  There was this nice big mirror that made taking a picture really easy.

We were going to meet up with Brandon's friend Trevor for dinner, but that wasn't until 6:00ish.  So we had to figure out what to do for the next 2 1/2 hours.  If the weather had cooperated we would have just walked around USU's campus and showed the kids where our classes were and such.  But the weather was not cooperating.  (Why is it always cold when we try to go to Logan?)

We made the impromptu decision to do part of the Cache Valley Food tour. This is something we'd kind of always wanted to do when we lived in Logan.  However, finances and schedules (and our lack of a car for 6 months) had made it impossible. So it seemed like a good idea to finally do it today.  Our first stop was supposed to be Casper's Ice cream to pick up Creamies Popsicles and Fat Boy Sandwiches.  The only problem was that I wasn't sure where Casper's was.  I'd gone there with the same guy who'd taken me to Gossner's. My memory of that date from 11 years ago wasn't great. I knew Casper's was located north of Logan - possibly in Franklin but maybe in Richmond.  And I knew we had to turn off of Highway 91 and head west.  

Even with a sketchy memory I was sure we'd find Casper's.  But, for probably the first time ever, my internal GPS was faulty. We never found Caspers.  (For future reference its located at 11805 N 200 E, in Richmond.) We did see some awesome clouds though.  

After we gave up on Casper's we stopped at Pepperidge Farm to try their samples and to buy gold fish crackers and milanos.  The gold fish were saved for yellowstone, the milanos were eaten the next day. 

On our way back to Logan we went through Hyde Park and noticed a sign for a Creamies Outlet.  So we went there and bought Creamies and Fat Boys. 

After that we made a quick drive by at the Logan Airport.  I took this picture of USU's area and then joked that I was going to draw flames all over it.

We stopped off at TJ Maxx to Brandon could say a quick hello to his friend Jana. And then we met up with Trevor and his wife Lisa at Chick Fil A. We haven't seen Trevor in years so it was great to catch up with him.  The kids had a great time playing in the play place.  They'd spent the whole day in the car so they were happy to have a place to run around.

Soon it was time to leave so we got back into the car and headed by to the lovely Ogden Valley.  Hopefully next time we visit Logan it will actually be warm there.

On Thursday, Brandon's mom wanted to take us all to a petting zoo that is in the Valley.  We all got in the car and were so excited, but when we drove up to the zoo we discovered that it was closed due to the the cold weather!  So instead we went out for ice cream at a cute place Ogden called the Birch Street Market.  

Veronica was pretty happy about her ice cream.

I'd spend a lot of time packing the kids clothes.  I packed up all the clothes that I didn't want to take to Yellowstone - the girls fancy dresses, clothes I wanted to save for school in the fall, and things that did fit. Then I took all the remaining clothes and set up a little "store."

I wrote out a shopping list for the girls.  It said things like, "2 dresses, 6 shirts, 2 shorts, 2 capris, 4 pants, 4 warm pajamas, 1 pair of easy on/off shoes and 1 pair of good walking shoes."  Then I had the girls go around and pick out the clothes they wanted.  Since I'd already gamed the system by taking out the clothes that I didn't want packed for Yellowstone I didn't really have to worry about what they chose.  But they felt like they had some say in what they would wear all summer long.  They thought it was so fun.  They had laundry baskets that they pretended were carts.  And at the end we pretended to have them check out.    

Later we did it with Veronica.  She kind of understood what we were doing.  I also did it with Derrick, but he didn't care at all. I plan to do the same thing with the toys.

The girls set up this area with the blocks and took a picture of it.  I was trying to take a nap on the couch when they did this so I never found out what it was supposed to be, but it sure looks cool.

Lydia has been happily running around the house dressed like a bat. She likes putting her bangs in front of her eyes. I told her she looks like Lindsey Sterling. 

 On Friday the girls had a little field trip to the firestation and the library.  I volunteered to go along.  I had a group of five girls.  Charlotte and Lydia were both in my group plus three other girls.  The best part was when they got to spray a fire hose. Here's Lydia.

 And here is Charlotte.

 And here is the whole kindergarten with the fire department.

 We had lunch at the park after the field trip.  Brandon was going to meet us there after he picked Derrick up off the bus, but the weather was so cold.  I called Brandon and told him that we weren't staying at the park very long and not to worry about meeting us.  We hurried and ate our sandwiches and then came home.  Even though it had been cold, it was still a good field trip.

Saturday was a BUSY day!  We spent the morning packing and taking things out to the RV.  In the afternoon we ran a bunch of errands including our last big grocery shopping trip.  This was the first time we've gone grocery shopping as a family in almost 6 months.  The kids were excited that they all got to sit in the car carts.  

One of the things we bought was a Lightning McQueen Car for Derrick.  He's wanted one for about a month.  We aren't bringing his train to Yellowstone and we figured that a Lightning McQueen Car would be a good consolation prize. We've been looking for one for a while, but they are tricky to find.  As we were driving around on Saturday Veronica announced that she wanted "Chick."  I knew that meant Chick Hick's the green racing car from the Cars movie.  I was like, "How are we going to find that car?"  But suprisingly we found a set at Smith MarketPlace that had Lighting McQueen, Mack the truck, and Chick Hicks.  I grabbed it off the shelf as soon as I saw it.  Derrick and Veronica were overjoyed.  

They came home and immediately started playing with their cars. Derrick and Veronica have always played well together, but they really played well with these cars.  It's so cute to hear them talk about their cars.  The weather finally improved and Derrick and Veronica spent most of Saturday evening playing together outside.  These two are such great friends.. 

Brandon and I spent the rest of Saturday packing the RV.  I somehow got all our food to fit into our tiny pantry area. Food is one of our biggest concerns while we live in the park. We can't just run to the store whenever we want. This is definitely going to be good training for how to live off of food storage. We've bought a lot of food storagy things like oatmeal, dried apples, powdered milk, etc Brandon has also used our food dehydrator to make jerky and dehydrate bananas.  Brandon is hoping to make it two weeks before he has to go on another grocery shopping trip.  We'll see how this goes.

Today marks exactly 6 months since we moved back to Utah. These last 6 months have been hard, but they've also been good.  Without the hard parts we may not have decided that Brandon should go back to school or that we should do this crazy Yellowstone plan.  It's been good to be here, but I am ready to move on.

Charlotte and Lydia wanted to take this "family" picture with some of their dolls and stuff animals.

 And guess who is out of hibernation -ANTLER.  Antler was packed with the other stuffed animals and every time Charlotte asked about her we told her that Antler was hibernating for the winter. Well that story didn't hold up as well when spring arrived.  So Brandon finally got out the box of stuffed animals and Antler and Nose are back to playing with Charlotte and Lydia.  Here is a helicopter that the girls built for Antler.

 A few weeks ago we got a book from the library that showed fun projects you can make with trash.  One of the things was to use papertowel tubes and a box to make a castle.  Charlotte has been dutifully saving our paper towel tubes.  Today we sat down and made the castle.  It turned out really great. It's now a house for Antler and Nose.

And that's it.  We are caught up again.

We leave for Yellowstone this week.  I'm hoping to squeeze in one more post before we leave, but no promises.  Keep watching this blog and www.51centadventures.com for an update.