Sweet 6-year anniversary!

Several months ago I got a call informing me of a free Bahama cruise I could have for coming to hear about a travel company's offers. Ryan and I decided to go for it and after a relatively painless hour of high-pressure salesmanship, got our "free" cruise including airfare. Since we've always wanted to go on a cruise but were never willing to lay down the money for one, we considered ourselves pretty lucky to have come across this! Fast forward to last week, we were able to go on our 3 night Caribbean cruise a few days before our 6-yr anniversary. Perfect timing for a child-free getaway!

Can I just say it was pretty much awesome! My mom was also awesome and flew out here to watch the boys for the weekend, all by herself (which is a pretty brave thing to do!). She said they did pretty well (besides the 5am child-crying-in-the-hall episode) and she enjoyed being able to spend time with them.

Ryan and I tried to get our money's worth out of the cruise (we did have to pay the taxes, gratuities, etc). I think we probably did a little bit of everything. Looking back, it may have been beneficial for us to have gotten more sleep, but there was so much to do, we stayed busy most of the day.














One night we decided to join the drunk people for a little karaoke. We sang a duet from Grease, that we accidentally started off an entire octave too high. Ryan ended up having to sing a lot of it in falsetto which was great for comic relief but terrible in pretty much every other way. It must have been memorable because for the rest of the night random people kept coming up to us commenting on our performance. A couple of 30-something ladies said we were "an inspiration". A couple of teenage boys recognized us later on the dance floor and said "that was awesome!!" Nice. I hope we inspired all the rest of those on the ship who can't carry a tune to get up and make fools of themselves. It was really fun though!
Other fun included winning the adult speed climbing competition. I took gold in the women's tournament and Ryan got silver in the men's (though he lost by less than a second to a guy that brought his own climbing shoes on the cruise with him!). We also enjoyed the formal night and I was able to make one of my high school prom dresses modest with a little Shade shirt (you gotta love those!) We were able to get some cute pictures of the two of us all gussied up. And of course I had to add a picture of our favorite towel animal the cleaning staff folded and hung up in our room. It's a monkey, although its face looks unmistakably robot-like.

Unfortunately we didn't take any pictures at the ports: Nassau, Bahamas and Coco Cay (Royal Caribbean's private small island). At both stops we brought our snorkel gear and headed out into the crystal clear ocean waters to snorkel around and check out the sea life. I loved that part of our trip! It was so relaxing!!
Oh, and one other favorite part of the cruise for both of us was unlimited access to delicious food. On the two port days, we wouldn't get around to eating breakfast until 10am. So we would fill up on delicious breakfast foods and then head out to do fun stuff on shore. We would get back to the ship around 4pm, starving, so we would order room service- fruit platter, steak sandwich, Mediterranean chicken salad, etc. Then, our dinner seating was at 6pm, and the food was really good each night, so we would stuff ourselves- Filet Minion, lobster bisque, escargot in butter-herb sauce, roasted duck, etc. And of course, before bed we would find something else to eat, whether it was suckling pig (no joke), pizza, a midnight BBQ, or more room service. Yeah, it was awesome!

And just to make our anniversary even more awesome, we had a Wicked experience yesterday. It rocked! We highly recommend it.


I love anniversaries!! And I love Ryan. Happy six years, and many more to come!

When the Mom is away, the boys will play!

So a week after we got back from our trip to VA, I was packed and off to Girl's Camp for 4 days to be the camp nurse. I'm in the YW presidency in our ward and so I wanted to go and hang out with the girls and plus I thought it would be fun. It was a lot of fun! Being the nurse wasn't too hectic either. I had to teach a few first aid classes and be in charge of several girls prescribed meds. Other than that, most of my nursing duties consisted of passing out Ibprofen, dealing with minor cuts and then mosquito bites. The last day got a little hairy though when one of the girls had heat exhaustion and wasn't recovering. She kept passing out and was starting to have minor seizures. In the end we had to take her to the ER where they pumped her full of fluids and were able to release her about 6 hours later (which is pretty quick for ER standards). I guess I missed all the fun though, because the nurse I left in charge at camp didn't stop moving that night. While I was gone, there was an outbreak of poison ivy, 3 girls burned their fingers in the fire and another girl was starting into heat exhaustion. I felt kind of bad for leaving her with all that when I got back from the hospital until right when I was about to get ready for bed I get a call that a girl had somehow got glow-stick fluid in her eye. 15 minutes of flushing and an eye patch later I sent her to bed and called in for the night. Overall, it was fun time and I enjoyed getting to know some of the girls and leaders I otherwise would not have.

So while I was away, the boys went to babysitters on Wed. and Thurs. and then Ryan was home with them on Fri. and Sat. I was somewhat nervous how that would all go, but Ryan said it went pretty well and they had a fun boy weekend. When I got home on Saturday the boys were really glad to see me, but I could tell Tate wanted his dad more than usual (which is not always the case for this momma's-boy). So it ended up being fun for them and good bonding time.

Since I don't have any pictures from camp I looked on my camera to see what I could add to this post. As I flipped through picture after picture of unknown shots it became clear that someone had quite a fun photo shoot. That someone being our 3 year old and that photo shoot consisting of 90 pictures (yes I counted them)! Grant is usually not allowed free range of the camera, but like I said when mom is away...
Here is a sampling of some of his shots. They range from portrait, to candid, to artistic. I think we may have a budding photographer on our hands :)