Weekend

I thought of two things that I wanted to blog about for today, but now that I'm sitting here ready to blog, I can't think of them. I used to write them down because I always had something to say and I'd forget with so many ideas rolling around in my head. I'm not sure what's happened to me. It's like they pulled the plug on my blogging brain. So, when I thought of these two things earlier, I repeated them several times to myself so I'd remember and then I forgot anyway.

One of them I actually sort of remember but it just doesn't make sense to me now. I can't remember why I thought it would be interesting to blog about it. It just seems, well, kinda dumb.

So, I'll just tell you instead about my weekend, mmmkay?

My weekend rocked. I don't remember Friday very well. Oh wait... it's coming back to me now. Dustin was in a black mood and the weather matched him perfectly. (That part of the weekend didn't rock so much.) We had a severe thunderstorm. Seriously, I heard thunder non-stop for about 15 minutes. Branches were down in the street, leaves littered the ground... craziness. That kind of weather just doesn't happen much where I live.

So, after Dustin went out and watched the lightening show, he came in and went to bed. You say.. "Big deal? So what if your husband went to bed." It was freakin' 7:30pm! My husband went to bed at 7:30 on a Friday night! Can you believe that!? I couldn't.

While he slumbered, I put the kids to bed and then read on blogs and in my book (1400+ pages!). It was a fairly weird Friday night.

BUT! Then came Saturday. We got ourselves packed and took our kids to my mom and dad's. Then we ventured up to a mountain getaway and hiked around... I did a little trail-running, which ROCKS, by the way! (no pun intended) And then we went and checked in to our little room we were staying at. It was a riverfront room of a slightly dumpy, yet still charming in a funkified sort of way, motel. Our room had no insulation and it was a far cry from a warm evening, but we cranked our little space heaters and worked the adventure factor. We walked out onto the little dock that was in front our room and watched fish roll in the river. It was very picturesque.

6:00 rolled around and we headed to the little Playhouse where a "Dinner Theater" awaited our enjoyment. It was fairly good, mass-quantity-type food, and interesting company. I learned that at a dumpy-ish motel, you should keep quiet about the amenities of your room. Our dinner companions were talking about how hard their beds were and, not wanting to be left out of the conversation, I piped up with, "OH NO! Your beds are hard? That's crummy! I didn't ever sit on our bed, but when we sat on our couch we both sunk to the middle!" I demonstrated by leaning my body at an angle, crashing into Dustin.

Two of them narrowed their eyes at me and said, incredulously, "You have a couch!??"

"Oh... well, um, yeah... we have a couch. But it's not very comfortable!!!" I was backpedaling at this point.

Then the conversation went on for a few more minutes and, for reasons I can't recall, I said something about how the fireplace in our room is built so strange.

More eyes narrow, and more incredulity ... "YOU HAVE A FIREPLACE!!!!???"

"Ummm, yep. We have a fireplace." I was feeling like our room was very luxurious indeed and backpedaling seemed futile. "Maybe I should just not say anything else about our room tonight."

One lady, who was particularly huffy about her crappy room, said in all seriousness, "Yeah, maybe you shouldn't."

Ummm..... awkward.

So, after shrugging off the awkward jacket that had wrapped our conversation, we had a lovely little dinner and then watched a very silly show entitled, "Les-s Miserables". It was gut-busting funny. I laughed my head off and enjoyed myself very much. During the intermission, the cast brought us and several other couples onto the stage because it was our anniversary. Eleven years for us. That doesn't seem like that long, but there was only one other couple, at 15 years, who had been married longer than us! I was shocked! There were about eight couples on the stage and we were married almost the longest! Several of them were older couples too! The oldest couple of all had been married one year! That was the shortest time! It was weird. Made me feel old.

So, back to our room we went. When we got there I thought I'd test the bed and see if ours was as terribly hard as the others described. I laid down and Dustin asked from the other room, "So, how is it?"

I giggled and, thinking of our irritated dinner companions, said, "It's acutally really comfy... not hard at all!" We clearly came out on top in the room competition.

Dustin proceed to build a fire in our weird fireplace. It all looks normal, but the "fire area" of the fireplace was several inches lower than the hearth, preventing the wood from getting enough oxygen, making the fire go out repeatedly. The mountain-man side of my husband was very affronted at this and so he threw all the logs we bought on the dang fire, building it higher up where the airflow was better. It worked. It was also smokey.

Here's some Clancy-Trivia for you. Clancy LOATHES smelling like smoke... abhors it!... cannot abide it!!! (unless, of course, Clancy's CAMPING where there is supposed to be smoke.) So, Clancy got a little grumpy about the smokey situation in the room. Her head ached from it and her eyes burned. She was feeling very disgruntled, indeed.

Enough third person. I was a grumpy-butt for a bit and then I decided that this was a lovely adventure and I must chill out! Literally! We opened the front door and the back window and let in a little arctic air! (Seriously by about 10pm, Dustin, after getting something out of the car, reported that the weather was trying to snow. Awesome. Snow is June is my favorite!) So, we went to bed with the window open, blowing cold, smoke-free air on my face. Not to worry though. I sleep next to a man that is a walking furnace. So I was snug and cozy and much less grumpy because the chilly air cleared my sinuses of the abhorance of smokiness.

Then, we woke in the morning to whiteness out of the window. It didn't snow a lot, but snow, it did. That cut out any plans we had of more hiking, which was fine.

We did end up with a couch and a fireplace and a comfy bed in our room, but I didn't discover what was truly negative about our room until it came time for a shower. When I went into the bathroom thinking luxuriant showery thoughts, I turned on the hot water and was surprised to discover it would only turn about a quarter of an inch. That massive quarter-inch turn brought forth a fountain of hot water! No, actually it didn't at all. In reality, the flow of hot water was a mere trickle. I busted up laughing! Dustin came in and said, "Well, I guess you're taking a tub!" I then tried the cold, which was, of course, a gush, a wellspring, a super-flow of freezingness. Perfect!!! I reduced the cold so the ratio was the right temperature for a shower and the trickle trickled slightly more so than the hot did all alone.

Hmmmm..... I wondered what the shower would be like because at that rate, the tub would take 30-45 minutes to achieve a depth tolerable for a bath. I went for it! I turned on the shower and the water was so slow in coming that I could literally see the shower head fill up with water before it finally came out of the holes. BUT, it did the job. It created a slow flow of water that, with the help of my fingers, actually could get the shampoo out of my hair. And it was warm. And I didn't have to wait for 45 minutes.

Good times... good times.

I don't think I've taken a picture on my camera since February. That's the last pics I uploaded onto my computer. Isn't that weird? I'm feast or famine in the picture department. Oh well. I did bring my camera and we even snapped a few shots. So, enjoy, because I, apparently am in famine mode and this might be all you get for a while!

Our cute little room. Apparently the other people's rooms were just one room. Lucky us, we had a separate "living room" complete with a table and chairs.

The veiw from our room... it was most tranquil.

Dust snapped a little photo of me. I think I look rather freaky-skullish, but whatev... I don't post many pics of myself on here, so I decided to go with the Skeletor look...

And a little self-timer smoochy-smoochy for the Captain's Log, Stardate 2009.06.06....

Friday's Fabulous Five

Is it seriously Friday already? I can't believe it!

1- Kids are out of school as of Wednesday.... and I've heard it said that, "That which does not kill us makes us stronger." I can DO this summer thing! I CAN!! I CAN!!!!

No seriously, we had a rough start to our summer on Wednesday, but I held my ground and became "Drill-Sargent Mother" and I think we're going to make it! Which leads me to my number 2 fabulous thing....

2- CHORE CHARTS!!! OH, the power of a good example!! I've been studying and taking mental notes on my friends who are good moms and make their kids do chores. Oh sure, I've made my kids do them too, but I've always been very inconsistent about it, and I HATE the battle. It's always a battle and I'm a lovah, not a fightah. So, incorporating my notes and mental observations of my good-mom friends, I made a chore chart yesterday and I feel VERY good about it. The kids now know the rules. They can't do anything fun until they've done their chores. And guess what? Ella got up this morning and came upstairs totally dressed and brushing her teeth! She had made her bed and cleaned her room before she even came upstairs! Mac still gave me a little grief, but the rules are set so there's much less room for argument! I told you I think we're going to make it this summer!!!

3- So I mentioned a while ago that I needed a new dryer. Well, actually I just mentioned that my dryer has been making a "rather strange and shockingly loud noise lately" and that was clear back on January 14th. Well, that "strange and shockingly loud noise" got worse and worse. Here's an image for you... just imagine turning on your dryer and the noise being so great that you may as well have a 747 jet engine in your basement. YEAH! It was awesome! It got to the point where you couldn't carry on a conversation if the dryer was on. Seriously. That's a noisy dryer. Anyway... off and on since then I've been perusing craigslist.com to see if I could pick up a good, used dryer. After all, a dryer can easily last 20 or 30 years (as did the jet engine one... it had to be made in the seventies... avocado green... beautiful!) and if I could pick one up that was just a few years old then I could be set for a long time! So, I've checked periodically and yesterday I found two! One was $65 and the other, $100. I liked the $65 price better (obviously) but the $100 one seemed a better dryer. So, I asked the $100 guy if he might consider going down to $65 and he said, "Sure". Really? I thought. Just like that? No haggling? Wow!

So, we loaded up in Dustin's work truck and went and looked at the dryer. Beautiful, it was. Only about 7 years old, white (bye, bye avocado!!!), clean, complete with a light!, and best of all.... QUIET! $65 later, we became the proud, new-used owners of a Kenmore 70 series, large-capacity, Quiet-Pak dryer!!

There is a universal truth that you can't know the good without experiencing the bad. Let me tell you how true this is! I've mentioned how you don't know how awesome closets are if you've never really lived without closets. And now I'll tell you that you don't know how WONDERFUL a quiet dryer is until you've lived for six months with a 747 in your basement. Seriously, I came down to check on the kids after Dust put them to bed and I didn't even know the dryer was on until I came close to it and heard the little ping of buttons, zippers, etc., tumbling around inside it. I could've sat down and wept right there. Blessed, peaceful, soothing, quiet, white noised dryer. Best $65 I've ever spent!

4- It's our anniversary tomorrow. Last year was ten years and we decided to do something we hadn't done before. We went out of town for the weekend. My mom and dad kept our kids. Because of that GREAT weekend last year, I think I made a decision without even realizing it. I NEED to go out of town for our anniversary... without those darling little humans I call children. Love 'em to death, and it's now a anniversary requirement to leave for at least one night, just D and I.

So, this year... the big eleven... we're going on a little jaunt to the mountains. We are staying in a "riverfront" room at a lovely place with a dinner theater thingy. I am very much looking forward to it. YEAAAH!!!!!!

5- (Dang. This is a long list. Or, long stories on each item. Are you still with me? Ok.) So, number five on my list today is my friend, Maria. Maria, over the course of the last year and a halfish, has become a sweet treasure to me. I am so grateful for the things she has taught me.

We were at the park yesterday for the last of our of Mother's Group activities (that Maria perfectly planned and excellently executed for over a year!), and another little gal, Destiny, was asking if there were any good babysitters we knew of in our neighborhood. We talked about who we knew of and then we mentioned our swap-weekends. We told how we would swap kids once a month for dates and one couple would go out Friday, and one couple would go out Saturday, each keeping the other's kids. It was a perfect arrangement. We touted the benefits and Destiny looked dubious. I realized then that it was a rare situation, indeed. All the components were a perfect fit. Maria's kids and my kids are all the same ages and play very well together. Our youngest two are best friends, and our middle two could rightly be called such as well. With endless imaginations and creativity, these children have a blast. We trust Maria and John and they trust us. We have a lot of similar ideas about child-rearing so we know our kids would be well cared for and treated fairly. It is a rare thing to find such compatibility.

And, my friend Maria and her cute little family are moving this weekend. Well, Monday, technically. It's a very bittersweet thing. She is going to law school, where I'm sure she will prevail. She's one of those people who excels. It's just what she does. So, I have no doubt that she'll conquer law school with excellence. But I will miss her so much!

And so, my number five Fabulous thing in my life this Friday is Maria. An incredible friend with a powerful mind, endless talents, a beautiful heart and a tough hide. She's taught me to stand a little stronger, worry less about the things I can't change and change the things I can, trust myself more, learn my mind and then speak it!, get off the fence, be a little more organized about things, and decide what I want, make a plan and do it. In short, she is AMAZING!!!

So, thanks, Maria! I love you and know you'll ROCK this law school thing!

Anniversary Weekend

So, as many of you know, we went out of town without our children for our anniversary last week. If you are a parent, you know that anytime you get to go somewhere as a couple without your kids, it's a thing of beauty. We were lucky enough to be able to go for two nights and the better part of three days. My parents kept the kids. (Special thanks to Mom and Dad for your awesomeness! You SO TOTALLY ROCK!) We went to a small resort kinda place up Ogden Canyon. It was wonderful! When we go on a car trip without our kids I always marvel at the fact that I don't have to turn around and fix anybody's seat, pillow, blanket, food, toy, DVD or anything else! I can just sit, face forward, the whole trip and talk to my husband uninterrupted!

I wanted to do a quick recap of our trip so I will remember it in days to come! First of all, the drive down was nice. We enjoyed each other's company, Dustin and I. We arrived at the place we were staying, checked in, checked things out, and then left to go find some food. We ended up driving all the way back into Ogden, which is not really that far... maybe 15 or 20 minuets. We went to the Olive Garden. We were ravenous by the time we got there, so the breadsticks and salad tasted better than they EVER had! Then, our meal came. Dustin's was fine. A bit of a letdown he said, but fine. Mine was HORRIBLE. I ordered Parmesan crusted tilapia. There was something wrong with the fish. It was so nasty... it had some weird chemical flavor to it that I still cannot quite put my finger on. I also thought perhaps freezer burn? Anyway, it was nasty. They took it off my bill, but that doesn't make up for the weird things it did to my stomach that night. That's ok though. There were no major bathroom episodes, just strange stomach action.

We went back to our studio (yes, it had a fully equipped kitchen too) and flipped through the T.V. and found a movie to watch. We don't have T.V. at our house so flipping through T.V. was novel. I fell asleep with my head on Dustin's side, and, for a wonder, he stayed up almost two hours later than me! Miracles do happen, ladies and gentlemen.

We woke up kinda late... about 8:30, got ourselves ready for the day, ate granola bars, blueberries, and strawberries and headed out! We drove around the little valley we were in. It was breathtaking! We went and got some lunch at a little place right on the beautiful Ogden River. It was the best hamburger I'd had in a long time. Then we went into Ogden and wandered a bit.

We made it over to the Salomon Center and played a bit of glow golf... Miniature golf in black lights, then we just walked around.



We decided to go to a movie. So, we bought tickets for Iron Man. We had about an hour and a half to kill before the movie, so we went and checked out the indoor surfing thing they have there... FlowRider, it's called. It was AWESOME! I wanted to try it really bad, but didn't have my swimsuit. We will definitely be going back sometime. Check it out...

That guys works there... most people don't look so graceful. They just eat it... a lot! It was highly entertaining. A guy that was there with his son told us to go check out the indoor skydiving place. I was glad I saw the surfing thing first. I thought I was excited about Flowrider until I saw IFly! Holy MOLY!!! I REALLY want to try this one! This is also the instructor and he was amazing! I had just gotten my camera out, and then he finished, but you get the idea.

Oh how I wish I had the rest of the footage of him. It was SO cool. Oh well, I'll just have to go back and try it myself!

So, we killed enough time, went an watched Iron Man... loved it! Then we left and got some food at a place called Rumbi Island Grill. The main course was ok... but I got a side salad that was killer. MMMMmmmm.... I'm wishing I was eating it right now!

Went back up to our place and got a free movie rental from the front desk. We rented Hot Fuzz. It was hilarious! After it was over we flipped channels for a bit and then decided we were tired.

We got up the next morning, read for a bit, and got all showered and dressed. Then we packed up, sadly. I was bummed that our little getaway was drawing to a close. We drove into Ogden again to get some food. Stopped at a beautiful waterfall in the canyon...


Continued on into Ogden and went to the Village Inn for breakfast. I had a REALLY yummy breakfast that was REALLY cheap! ($4.89) I was thrilled. Dustin liked his too. Village Inn... who'd have thought?

After we ate I really wanted to go rollerblading. So we vacillated between blading on Weber State Campus or the Ogden River Parkway. The River Parkway won out, and I'm so glad! It was a beautiful paved path that followed the Ogden River out of the mouth of the canyon. It curved in and out of thick trees. It was simply delightful. The only bad part was it is not a loop, and we went downhill first. So, we had to go back up to get to our car. This ended up being not as bad as we thought except right at the top. We were both huffing and puffing by the time we got to the car, but we felt good to have squeezed in some exercise!

We took off the blades and were getting ready to leave town... but my mouth had a hankerin' for a Jamba Juice. We asked around and found out that the only Jamba Juice around was way out in Riverdale. We had time, so we went on a long and winding quest, and finally found it. Taste buds were satiated, and we had our little treat for the car ride home.

We got to my parents' house and realized that we did, indeed, miss our kiddos. We were happy to see them, hug them, and kiss their little faces. We jumped right back into parenthood with kids fighting all the way home. What more could a girl ask for? ;)

Happy Anniversary to Us!

We did it! We've hit the ten year mark! Ten years ago today I was a blushing bride. Isn't Dustin cute! :)

A quick history: Dustin and I met when we were in college, January of 1997. His roommate, Justin, was dating my roommate, Britta. All of Justin's roommates would come over to our house all the time because, according to Dustin, it was a house full of HOT girls! (there were 8 of us in our house) At the end of May a group of us started playing volleyball, Frisbee, and roller blading together. I was impressed with his roller blading moves and he was an AWESOME Frisbee player. We started hanging out, just he and I. The more I hung out with him, the more hyper he got. Strange word choice you might say? Well, he was. I thought he was kinda crazy. We sort-of dated for about two weeks and then I moved home for the summer. I was a little overwhelmed by him. He called me for a while in the summer, and I was, frankly, not that interested.

After a while, he stopped calling. I felt kinda bad about that, but I wasn't as excited as he seemed to be. Meanwhile, that whole summer he and Britta were hanging out because Britta and Justin had broken up. So, when I moved back down for school and back in with Britta, Dustin was always around. We were just friends, and he was cool with that. He was still as "hyper" as ever. In fact, we had rules that Dust had to follow when he was at our apartment: 1) No fast movements 2) No head-butting 3) No biting. Yes, I said biting. You'd just have to have known him then to understand that one. We tried dating once more. That lasted for about a week, and I said no.. we've just gotta be friends.

Sometime around October he asked me if he could take me swing dancing. I didn't really want to go. I did a swing dance with a kid at an Institute dance and I thought it was lame. I am not a dancer. What I didn't know was that it's all about how good the person leading is, and Dustin is an AWESOME lead. We went swingin' despite the huge paper I had due in two days (that I hadn't started). I will never regret that decision. I hate to sound cheesy, but he literally and metaphorically swept me off my feet. I saw him in a whole new light that night. After that, we went dancing every Thursday. After two months of this, I finally agreed that we were dating. (Britta argued that he was already my boyfriend much earlier than that because I was buying him clothes.) I found some footage of us dancing that I thought you might enjoy- (hee hee!) Check this out.

Ha ha! I thought that was fitting.

Anyway... he proposed on February 2. I asked him if I could think about it. (I was pretty much a jerk, yes.) I finally said Yes on February 8. For six days I unknowingly tortured this sweet man. In my defense, it was a big decision and not something I wanted to say yes to if I wasn't totally sure. At any rate, we got married June 6, 1998 and it's been an incredible journey!

I am so grateful that Dustin patiently waited for me to figure out that he was my match. He was always so good to me, and continues to be such. I love you, honey! Thanks for the best ten years of my life. Here's to the next ten years and beyond...