::: 10 years :::

Jason and I celebrated our 10th anniversary on March 26!

10 years! I can't believe it. We've been married for 1/3 of my life. I'm so grateful that we found each other back at Liberty Square in 2004. Now we've got four beautiful daughters and such a happy life together!

To celebrate, we went on an overnight getaway. We've gone on two getaways in the past: once to the Anniversary Inn, where we were kept awake half the night by... er.... other guests and left at 3 in the morning; and once to a hotel in Provo, which was better, but we had to take Juno, who was currently in her body cast and woke up every hour or so all night, so still not great.

We were really, really looking forward to this getaway! How did it go? 

Well, maybe getaways just aren't our thing.

We started out at a restaurant in Ogden, Hearth on 25th. It had a fun atmosphere/vibe and they sell 20+ flavored balsamic vinegars and olive oils on tap. We tried a couple; the blackberry ginger was my favorite!

We ordered this super fancy cheese and cured meats plate to start with and it was so good. It came with three cheeses and four cured meats (one was wild boar) and also had apple butter, balsamic vinegar, local honey, and cashew butter. 

The rest of our food was ok, but not great and definitely not worth the hefty price tag. 

Then we headed to our hotel, the Alaskan Inn in Ogden Canyon. LOVED it. It was such a fun, rustic themed hotel. Plus, they serve breakfast to your room in the morning (you choose the time!) and the food was really good. I wasn't expecting much, but Jason had biscuits and gravy and I had french toast and they were both delicious. 

We stayed in the Bears Den room--don't you love the "cave" bathtub!

So why did I say getaways aren't our thing? I didn't bring any melatonin and I was struck by a major case of insomnia. I was so looking forward to a good night's sleep (Pearl still gets me up 3+ times a night) and I ended up not falling asleep until about 4--I got less sleep that night than I do at home :( We also didn't really plan anything to do in the morning and so we ended up just lounging in bed for a while and then going home. I didn't realize how pretty Ogden Canyon is--next time we go (and I'm determined we'll have a do over later this year!), we'll find some good hiking for the morning!

May goodness!

Pearl overload!

I took way more pictures of Pearl than I did of my other kids in May. Sorry, other kids. Just check out these cute little cheeks. She's already lost that newborn look that she had at the beginning of the month.

I love love love this picture of my snugglebug. She has very blond eyebrows and strawberry blond hair and you can really see it in this picture!

First sink bath after her belly button healed! She has an outie!!

 Moms and Muffins in first grade

I got to visit Tempe's classroom for their special Mother's Day program. I haven't spent much time in her class this year, so it was fun to be with her!

Mother's Day

My four girls and me on Mother's Day! New favorite picture ever.

Measuring and tracing practice with Juno

Juno loves to do projects with me and I do my best to come up with something several times a week. For this one, I traced her and Pearl on butcher paper (and she traced Ah Ah, her toy monkey, shown above) and then we measured with a few different measuring tapes and block towers.

Helena can't keep her hands off Pearl!

Sidewalk chalk festival

We go to the sidewalk chalk festival in Bountiful every year and the girls love finding a favorite drawing to pose with.

Helena's new talent

She can cross her eyes super crazy and also turn one eye in while looking straight ahead with the other. Don't worry, I asked the pediatrician and she said as long as she is controlling it, it's nothing to worry about.

and now a beautiful smile from a beautiful girl!

and one from Juno, too!

Kindergarten graduation

Helena graduated from kindergarten and is first grade bound!

Tossing her graduation cap in the air!

Helena and her wonderful kindergarten teacher!

Welcome summer!

We are so ready for summer (I'm so ready for summer). I made this banner for the girls to burst through when they got home from school, a tradition we started last year.

Quick trip to Tennessee

I took Juno and Pearl to Tennessee to visit my parents over Memorial Day weekend. It was a quick trip and it was really fun. Flying alone with 2 kids isn't the most fun, but it wasn't awful (no one threw up on me this time) and I'm so glad I took Juno! My family rarely sees her without her older sisters overshadowing her and she really got a chance to shine this trip. My brother Josh took these sweet pictures of her (plus about a hundred more).

The Allan family in front of the Nashville Temple!

Birthday date

For my birthday date this year, Jason and I had a picnic on the roof of the SLC library (main branch) and then explored the library, one of my favorite places in SLC!

Super fancy date night

Wow, I think that this a record for the longest I haven't posted anything.... nearly a whole month!! I've got some catching up to do.
First up is our super fancy date night from right before Thanksgiving. Me and my sisters-in-law had been talking about/planning this for months! Two of Jason's brothers are married with kids and we all live in about a five mile radius, so we do lots of stuff together. The Friday before Thanksgiving week, we invited Jason's brothers and their wives over for a cheese tasting night! Jason and I love going to the cheese counter at Harmon's and eating the sample and oohing and aahing over all the different kinds of cheese that we have never tried. We knew it would be way too expensive for us to buy six kinds of fancy cheese, so that's why we decided to do this as a group date!

Each of us brought a kind of "fancy" cheese. We also had two kinds of crackers, grapes, pear slices, salami, honey, toasted pecans, pepper jelly, and cherry preserves--and sparkling cider, of course. I wish I could remember all the cheeses, but I didn't write them down. We definitely had blueberry Stilton, brie, harvati, a really fancy kind of blue cheese, and a cheddar with porter. They were all so yummy!

We set the kids up (all eight of them!) with a movie and settled down in the other room and went to town making different combinations. My favorites were the blueberry Stinson with honey and pecans, the brie with cherry preserves, and the blue cheese with pear slices. It was really fun and we ate ourselves sick. I think this might need to be an annual tradition!

date night!!

I have been making more of an effort this year for Jason and I to have a regular date night. We all know how important it is to date your spouse, but with 3 1/3 kids and a mortgage, the dinner and a movie date nights of old don't happen very often! I have tried to get more creative and come up with things we can do at home or on the cheap and we've had some fun dates over the last few months.

So, in no particular order, here are some of our favorites!

1. Scooters on the Lagoon Trail. My mom gets credit for this one. Back when I was in high school and trying to figure out what to do on Friday/Saturday nights, my mom always tried to convince me and my friends to borrow our younger siblings' Razor scooters and go for a scooter ride. Oddly enough, we never did it. But now that I see how much fun my kids have on their scooters, Jason and I decided to try it! Last Friday night was a perfect fall night, so we borrowed Tempe and Helena's scooters and took them over to the Lagoon trail to enjoy the beautiful leaves. We got there just before a haunted 5k was about to start, so we got to see (and chat with) a few of the "haunts" as we rode. It was so fun! We finished up with dinner at Dickey's BBQ and "Tucker and Dale vs Evil" at home on Netflix (really hilarious spoof on "Cabin in the Woods" type movies--which are in themselves spoofs--but rated R for language)

 2. Chocolate tasting night. I saw this date idea on The Dating Divas (really great website!!) and it was so fun! I bought six different chocolate bars for us to taste--you're really supposed to get six different brands of the same kind (75% cacoa, for example) but I couldn't decide what I wanted, so I just got six different flavors. I set the table all fancy, we got dressed up, and after tasting our chocolate, we watched "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory". 

3. No picture for this one, but with the leftover chocolate from our chocolate tasting night, we made fancy s'mores one night and ate them while asking each other thought provoking questions from slips of paper in a little jar (things like "What is your greatest fear?" and silly ones like "Pancakes or waffles?") The questions were because no matter how long we are married, I can always learn "s'more" about you! Cheesy, I know....

4. There is a store nearby with a "bomb shelter" in the parking lot that you can tour. Everyone who knows me knows that I am constantly scouting out places to survive the zombie apocalypse (I watch entirely too much Walking Dead), so one night we took our three little munchkins with us to tour the shelter and then watched "World War Z" after putting the kids to bed. Lame, but we've seen all the good zombie movies.

5. One day I took the middle seats out of our car, added a bunch of blankets and big cushions from our couch, and took Jason to a secluded parking lot to watch.... "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"!! on our laptop. We stopped at Habit burger beforehand to get some burgers, fries, and shakes, and then enjoyed our own private little movie theater.
Well, those are my top five dates of the past year. It's been really fun coming up with some ideas that are more than just watch a movie or play a board game--what are some of your favorite cheap/home dates?

Birthday date 2.0

This year for my birthday we had my perfect birthday date. Jason's birthday was yesterday so I wanted to return the favor! It was a little harder because I was very specific about what I wanted to do and Jason didn't really have anything particular in mind, so I had to come up with something on my own!

We started out by going to a new burger place called Habit Burger. It was really good (the fries and shakes were to die for!) and then we headed out for the rest of the date.

Before we left, I took out the middle seats of our van, spread out a blanket, and grabbed all the big pillows from our couch. I brought an empty milk crate, our laptop, and Jason's birthday movie ("Monty Python and the Holy Grail") for our movie night. We had planned on driving up Farmington Canyon to a little secluded pull out, but the road was closed by a fire rescue vehicle (no idea why!) so we ended up in another parking lot that I know of.

Yeah, we have a nice big tv at home, but variety is the spice of life. It was fun to break out of our date rut and do something a little different!