A Decade After "I Do"

I'm all about cheesy titles. ;-)

That's right, today marks ten full years of marriage around here. That's so wild!!! This is what I woke up to this morning...

Okay, so that's not really true. When I got up this morning there were still sewing machines and equipment strewn all over the table. I had hemmed the pants for James' new suit last night and still had some sleeves to shorten on another dress for Katie. So when I got up this morning, I fixed her sleeves so I could get the house cleaned up again and the beautiful flowers displayed on the table instead of the stove. ;-)

This is the inside of the card from the kids.



Got a few other things done around the house this morning, then had devotions and headed into town for our anniversary lunch (with the kids, of course) at the Olive Garden. It was soooooo good. :-) Since it was a special occasion we decided to splurge and get an appetizer. Don't try the smoked mozzarella fonduta. It was so "smokey" you couldn't even taste the cheese. Or the bread. Ha! Oh, well. The waiter was kind enough to take it off our ticket, so we learned what not to order and it didn't even cost us. Aside from that venture, the meal was fantastic. :-)

We left the restaurant and headed to the airport to drop James off. That's right, we decided to celebrate our 10th Anniversary by putting James on a plane and sending him away. Ha! Okay, so that wasn't exactly the plan. This just happens to be the big month for District Conventions around here--three of them this month. We knew they would be during our Anniversary (and the kids' birthday next week), but when we made the schedule we were really hoping that we'd ALL be going on these trips and would be able to be together. Unfortunately it didn't work out that way this year! That's okay--God knows best. James flew to Arizona for the Convention over there this weekend (praying they have a GREAT one!) and will be back on Monday.

The kids and I came home and got busy on school. And, as is customary when James is away (which we seem to be experiencing a lot more than usual of late! Ha!), we have a pizza party. We played a game earlier, then put the soda fountain in use for the first time in ages. An orange-cherry soda for Sam, a cherry-vanilla coke for Kate, and a raspberry-cherry coke (?!) for Joe. I went with a cherry coke this time. :-)

Anyway, since I can't BE with my husband for our anniversary, I thought I'd at least post some pictures of the big day. :-) The quality is quite poor, of course (we don't have a scanner so these are actually pictures of my pictures!), but it's the best I can do. :-)

I LOVED that bouquet. And the way it smelled. :-)

The girls...
The guys trying to keep James OUT of the church before the ceremony...
And the girls trying to keep me IN.
James getting the big brother look from Jon...
Ummm... The photographer (or somebody???) said to swoon. I've never been a very good swooner. Ha!
Not sure how this happened. I'm pretty sure James wouldn't do this sort of thing now. Of course, the girls would scatter quickly if he tried! He and I have both put on a few pounds since then, you know. ;-)
With Mom & Dad


The whole party!

You know... looking back, I wonder about a lot of the traditional things people do at weddings. Why in the world do we do them?! Feeding each other cake (much less the rather bad start to marriage by cramming it down one another's throats)--where did that come from?! Probably some Pagan thing. Ha! If Katie gets to marrying age before the rapture I hope we can just do what she wants to do instead of what everybody else has done for the past century! Still... I think I won the cake cramming thing.

Here we are standing in line waiting to talk to all of the people. I love that part. :-)
And here we are at an auto place in Canon City, after driving all the way down that winding mountain road with the horn blaring every time James tapped on the breaks. The car trasher guys had tried to achieve that at the past several weddings, but finally pulled it off this time.
I remember we were stuck behind a little old couple coming down the canyon road. We couldn't pass them but they were driving pretty slow, so we kept HONKING at them (to keep from crashing into them) for miles and miles. Ha! "What jerks!!!," I'm sure they were thinking.

I had Katie take a picture of James and I together at the airport today, but apparently the sun was shining pretty directly into the camera lens. Besides, looking at the picture seems to indicate that the years haven't been very kind to us. Ha! I think we can do better than that on another day. ;-)

And one last picture. My goal was to hold the flowers so you could see how huge the arrangement actually is. Unfortunately, my ape arms make it appear as if it's no big deal to hold them down low enough to see over... Ha! Oh, well. :-)

What... Again?!

How has it already been 5 days since I blogged???

I remember Saturday well because it was such a grand and glorious day. :-) The snow from Thursday and Friday was just soooooooo pretty! We spent most of the morning trying to dig our way out of the yard so we’d be able to make it to church the next morning. It felt great to do some shoveling! I’m sure I would tire of it quickly if I had to do it all the time, but it had been years and I thoroughly enjoyed it—the work, the feel and smell of the snow-air, the memories of doing it as a kid… It was great! And we were able to get the van out. :-)

The weather that day was GORGEOUS. Bright blue skies and lots of sunshine. It was cool, but comfortable--the perfect day for playing in the snow. :-)

I was loving all the icicles, especially the ones hanging from the trees.

James went to run some errands and when he got home he had an inner tube with him! WA-HOO!!! I went out with the kids for a couple of hours and worked on getting a good tubing hill going in the yard. The first route was great, except I couldn’t get the track to curve away from the big wooden leg of the play fort at the bottom. It was only a matter of time before somebody was going to plow into it head first at full speed, so I started another track. This one was better anyway… but it ended directly into one of the metal legs to the trampoline! Ha! We have enough yard to make a good kiddy slope, but there always seems to be a stationary blunt object awaiting them at the bottom. And it always amazes me how kids have no concept of bailing out. I don’t remember having to be told to bail out before running into a post, fence, building, etc. when I was a kid. After some coaching the kids finally started working on it, but were usually too late. Oh well. We had some serious fun and no serious injuries (Katie might argue that), so it was all good! Anyway, here are lots and lots of pictures of all the fun!!!

This was one of Joe's first runs--Katie giving him a push.

Didn't turn out so well. Joe is a lot better at biffing it than he is staying on the tube! Ha!



Katie's first run. Ha! Looks more like the tube stole her hat and gloves and went down solo. Maybe she was going on faith, not wanting to see what she might crash into at the bottom?!
She got the hang of it after a while...


...but had real problems going down straight--she couldn't seem to keep from spinning. :-)


You can tell by Joe's clothes that he had already crashed several times--and was obviously about to do it again.

But look! He actually did stay on a few times!

We talked James into joining us for a couple of runs, too. :-)

Sam wasn't all that interested in getting in on the action, so I had him get on my back and hold on for dear life while I jumped on the tube...

That was all it took--he was hooked. (I love this picture!!!)


After watching Sam go down with me the kids decided maybe it would be fun to ride double. Of course, the first time they sat down together, then wondered how to get started. Ha!


Finally figured it out

The boys cruising down the hill


And after having rammed into the leg of the trampoline. It's directly behind Joe... wrapped in an old, cushy comforter by that time since it had become apparent that if anybody actually made it to the bottom of the hill they were going to hit the metal post. Ha!


As you can see, Saturday was one of the best days of our lives. :-) LOVED EVERY MINUTE OF IT! I must say, however... I was sooooooooooo sore on Sunday after helping shovel and all of the playing. It was worth it, of course, but my back and legs sure let me know about. How sad. Oh, well. "It is fun to get old!"

We had good services on Sunday. I cried throughout the whole Sunday School lesson on the rich man and Lazarus and the torments of hell, thinking about a certain backslidden friend who I’d just come back into contact with. Shed lots of tears and prayed lots of prayers for him throughout the day.

I wasn’t tired on Sunday afternoon, so I opted out of my usual nap. By service time that night I was really regretting that decision! Due to some last minute rescheduling it ended up being just a business conference instead of a regular service and, boy, did I have a hard time keep my eyes open. ~whew~

Monday was the big house cleaning day. This is week three of my “clean the house up on Monday” attempt and I have yet to actually get it all done on Monday. That’s okay—it’s still a good goal and I feel like I’m staying on top of things so much better this way. The only “chore” left now is the ironing. I’m sitting here looking at it… and deciding to blog instead. Ha!

Yesterday was library day. The kids were THRILLED to get their own library cards for the very first time. I’ve always just checked everything out on my own card, but due to some confusion with the account last week we decided (at the urging of the library guy) it was time to use separate cards. It gets confusing when you have 40 or 50 books on one card and something goes wrong, you know?! The kids got their usual piles of books and I picked up a few for myself. So far I’ve set aside two of the books I’d checked out. The first one had a bad word in it (“Christian” fiction—can you believe that?! I was furious!), so it got set aside after about 10 pages. I’m about three chapters into the second book and it’s okay, but I’m having a hard time really getting interested in it. I really like the super suspenseful stuff and this doesn’t have the edge-of-your-seat inducing quality about it. Not sure if I’m going to try to stick with it or just move on to the next book. Maybe I’ll give it another chapter or two to capture my attention.

After the library we went into town to the thrift store. We haven’t been there in a long, long time—probably because we haven’t really needed anything. I wanted to go look for suits for the boys though. They grow out of them so fast and I LOVE being able to buy them for $3 to $10 at this place. They didn’t have anything that would work this time, but we did get a nice, long black skirt for Miss Rue. :-)

We made another stop or two before heading back to the mountains, so we didn’t get home until about 3:30, I think. That meant late afternoon school for the kids, but they didn’t have any problem with it and finished up with enough time to do some more reading before bed.

Today it started snowing again!!! Wa-Hoo!!! We’re having WINTER this year and I couldn’t be happier. :-) Katie and Sam spent several hours outside today. Joe goes out to play, but is always back in before too awful long. The inner tube has been a big hit and they’re having a blast out there. Of course, most of their time today was spent making snow bricks in Tupperware and building forts with them. Oh, the glories of being a kid in the wintertime!


I finally took it upon myself to do some mending today. I’ve had a few things sitting there for MONTHS and I finally decided today was the day. A dress somebody had given us for Katie years ago (when it was way too big) just needed the buttons replaced (it had big, gaudy pearl looking ones, originally), so I dumped out my button jars and found four buttons that actually matched one other and the dress. I did the first button, showing Katie what to do, then let her do the other three. It felt great to finally have that done… only for her to try it on and discover the dress is too small now! Ha! That’s just sad. I told her she could wear it Sunday anyway after all her hard work, then we’ll pass the dress on to Abbie. (Em, you may want to straighten the buttons a little bit when you get it—it was Katie’s first time! Ha!)

Katie has been doing some cooking lately; beef strognoff one night and tuna casserole another night. Tonight I cooked oven fried chicken and company chicken (it was a huge pack—cooked half one way, half the other) with mashed potatoes and some FANTASTIC gravy (big accomplishment for me!), corn, and biscuits. Katie made dump cake for dessert and it was sooooo good hot from the oven, but I was too full to do any more than just sample the it. Maybe in a little while. :-)

Right now I’m listening to Katie’s music coming from one end of the house and Sam’s snoring from the other. That kid is a GREAT snorer. I can’t imagine what he’ll sound like when he’s a grown man! Got some things to do tonight (the ironing??? Nah, probably not!), so that’s it from here. But first, another few pictures of today's snow. :-) I love snow best of all when it lays heavy on the pine trees like this...

Sister Susie Sittin' on a Thistle

Ah, yes! I forgot when I wrote up that post below (which you simply MUST go look at, if only to see pictures of the SNOW!!!!!) to post a picture of Joe and his new DOUBLE gap.


Yep, he yanked the other tooth out last night. I don't know what's come over him (it wasn't very loose, but he just works and works and works until he can yank it out!), I just know we're going to have to put a stop to it or he's only going to be able to eat mush by next week! Hey, that reminds me...

He made up a joke yesterday and it was actually good.

"Hey, Mom... What do cannibals eat if they don't have a fire? Give up? Ramen. RAW MEN? Ramen? Get it???" Ha! James and I actually laughed (a first?!) and Joe didn't end up on another joke ban (also a first?), so he was quite pleased. I even let him call the General Overseer at HQ to tell him his joke. ;-) Of course, I got on the phone afterwards and asked Dad if he knew what Ramen is. "Uh... not really..." Ha! Oh, well--it was a good joke anyway!

Today we've been tormenting Joe and trying to get him to say as many words and phrases with "s" and "th" in them as we can think up. It's quite entertaining, especially considering the head start he already had with his previous lisp. :-) His new teeth are already coming in and it shouldn't take too awful long for them to fill that big gap, but for now I'm really enjoying this!

SNOW! SNOW! SNOW! SNOW! SNOW!

This is THE BEST snowfall I've been in many years (excluding, of course, Ladies' Retreat in Colorado... and being stranding on the WAY to Ladies' Retreat in Colorado a few years ago--that was a good snow, hu, Tammy?!) and I'M SO HAPPY!!!!! Oh, the wonder of it all! ~sigh~ I can't imagine a day much more BEAUTIFUL than this one. :-) :-) :-) :-) :-)

Believe it or not, I actually gave the kids the day off from school. We'll make up for it on Saturday, but it just seemed wrong to not take full advantage of the miraculous SNOW! The kids spent quite a while out playing in it today, giving me some wonderful all alone time. :-) Then I made a chocolate cake and it was about time for lunch. Left-over spaghetti from last night and some elk stew from the other day.

The snow was still coming down and looking oh-so pretty.

After lunch I decided it was time to whip up something that might go really great with our chocolate cake. Here are the makings of a truly delectable dessert...
That's right--SNOW CREAM!!! Wa-Hoo!!! (Sam's has a chocolate syrup smiley face with a cinnamon mustache, in case you were wondering...)
I went out and played with the kids for a while this afternoon. Oh, what I wouldn't give for an inner tube!!! It would have been sooooo perfect. The snow was too powdery for snowballs or building anything, but it would have been just right for tubing. We'll have to be better prepared next time! Still, it was SO gorgeous.

Out the front window...
The back window...
And the boys' window, down toward the gate...
It's really tough to get a good picture of our house because of how it sits on the hill... But doesn't it just look like the best little place in the whole wide world a person could be on a snowy day???

At about 4:00 this afternoon I went out to measure just how glorious it really was...
DO YOU SEE THAT?!?!? Nine and 3/4 inches!!!! WA-HOOOOOOOOO! I can't even remember last time I've had a snow like that in a place I actually lived. IT'S SO AMAZING!!!! And as far as I know, it never has quit snowing. Maybe we'll have a full foot by morning!!!! ~gasp!~ Can you imagine how fantastical that would be?! Oh, be still my heart!!! :-)

I took Sam with me and we walked down to get the mail. We already knew it, but that little trip confirmed that there was NO WAY our van was going anywhere tonight. We MIGHT be able to make it down the mountain, but there would be NO chance of making it back up. I hated the idea of missing church tonight, but what could we do? And besides, why would I go into town where there was no snow to get stuck away from my house where there IS all of this glorious snow?! So much better to be stranded here than there.

James made some tasty pork chop strip thingies for dinner and I made some fried potatoes and corn to go with it. Yum!

I played Whoonu with the kids, then a couple of games of Candyland before tuning in to the CPMA service going on in Aurora tonight. Sometimes I think my brother is about the coolest guy alive. Like tonight when I was able to be there "live" and be so blessed by Brother Van's service about Fields of the Wood. As it turned out, our church ended up cancelling tonight anyway so it was great to be able to take part in that one. And I was so happy to see that Kristin was there! I've been praying for that girl. :-)

I just pulled my third dessert of the day out of the oven a minute ago: White Chocolate Blondies. I haven't tasted them yet, but they smell sooooooooooo good!!! :-) I'm letting the kids watch a show before bed (it's a snow day thing, I guess!), then I may start into my next book. ~sigh~ What a great day!

I'M SO HAPPY!!!

That's about it. Oh, wait! When we took the kids to the library on Tuesday I discovered that they DO have some Christian books there! I had looked when we first moved here and I couldn't find anything at all, but apparently they've had some good donations or something. :-) I picked up two Dee Henderson books and started the first one that night (I was good and went to bed at midnight--I'm so much more responsible than I used to be! Ha!) and finished it last night. Now I've got another sitting next to my chair calling my name. ~sigh~ Can life get any better??? :-)