Thursday, March 29, 2012

My Awesome Spouse

In his class tonight Zander had to listen to a podcast.  It was about various kind of root beer, different aspects of root beer, and what makes a good and bad root beer.  What this has to do with digital media, I don't know.  He decided to test out what he learned by buying a bunch of different kinds of root beer, and some snacks to go with it, and surprising his wife with an at home date night.  So we sat and ate munchies, and rank various root beers, and watched 30 Rock.  Marriage is freaking awesome. 
Think I said 'root beer' enough?

Saturday, March 24, 2012

Hogle Zoo

A trip to the zoo is pretty self explanatory, so I won't bother 'narrating' this post, until you get to the fun little surprise at the bottom. 
On our way home Zander was munching on the left over baby carrots.  Then he started playing 'carrot vampire' and was trying to scare the people in the cars next to us.  After trying for about 15 minutes he finally got someone to look over at him.  She about wrecked her car, then started laughing really hard.  It was hilarious.  My spouse is awesome.

Thursday, March 22, 2012

Baking with the Kids

When I was young, any time we baked anything there was always a bit of a battle over who would get to lick the beater/bowl/spoon.  It was the best part of the whole baking experience.  Zander thinks eating raw dough is nasty.  I'm ok with him thinking that because it leaves more for me.  And evidently the boys.  Looks like I'm going to have to start battling them for the beater/bowl/spoon.  With Kaiden's newfound dairy allergy we haven't been doing a lot of baking lately.  This pumpkin spice cake that we made is dairy free and delicious, whether baked or raw.



Wednesday, March 21, 2012

The Neighborhood

This is how awesome my neighborhood is.  We had one really nice warm day, and this is what happens. 

Tuesday, March 20, 2012

Z & E - The Subaru, first break down

Zander and I had gone on one or two really great dates and were planning on just going and hanging out at a park after I got off work one night. I got to the park, and it was completely empty. So I figured he was just running a little late. Fifteen minutes later he still hadn't showed up, and I was starting to worry that I was being stood up and he wasn't going to show. So I sat for another few minutes, starting to get angry that he wasn't coming to the park when he was the one who had decided that's what we were going to do. So I called him.

He immediately started apologizing, and then very embarrassed, told me that his car was dead on the side of the road between his house and the park, and he needed me to come get him. He had spent the last 30 minutes trying to get it to start. I drove over to where he was to help him out. On our previous dates he had been driving a pretty nice Galant. Little did I know that was his mom's car and he actually had a really old beat up 1983 Subaru. It was a nasty old yellow color, and seriously falling apart. I was a little taken aback by the change in 'rides', but considering just a year or so earlier I had been driving an 87 Jeep, who was I to judge? I kind of loved the old Subaru, much trouble as it caused us for the next year or so.

(This isn't the actual Subaru, but it looks just like it)

Chance would have it that as soon as I got there it started up just fine, or at least as fine as that car ever started. Once it was running he didn't dare slow it down or stop, so we drove up a little hill that was down the street, and then for some reason rode in reverse all the way back to his mom's house. Terrified me, but showed me that he knew how to handle a car, and was obviously very memorable.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Year 6

Since I'm in a Z and E memory kick lately, I thought I'd give you some of the random memories from our wedding day.


Did you know that Z was late for our wedding? The morning of he started to get dressed and realized that his suit pants weren't anywhere to be found. He had made sure to get the suit dry cleaned and had picked it up the day before, but the pants weren't there. He was running around the house completely dressed, minus pants, having a slight freak out. Thankfully his cousin Amy stepped in and ran to get the pants. But he was still late. In the mean time I'm sitting in the waiting room at the temple where we were going to be married, watching the clock and realizing he's officially late. Some of our guests had started to show up, but I still had no groom. Good thing we had cell phones so that he could text me and let me know that he really was coming and wasn't standing me up the morning of.

In the serious run around of trying to get his pants, Z evidently forgot to eat breakfast. Our ceremony was later in the morning, and by the time we got done with that, greeting our guests for a few minutes, and taking some photos, he was HUNGRY. So we stopped at Wendy's on our way to our own wedding lunch. For some reason that still makes me laugh.

Between the luncheon and the reception we had a few hours of time to kill. Rather than hanging out with all the relatives that were sticking around for both events (mostly immediate family) we went upstairs at our venue, found a huge ottoman/bench sitting next to a wall, spooned and took a nap. It was quite nice.

During the reception Zander and I were greeting our line-up of guests and having a fun time talking to everyone. Then nature called and he needed to take a little break, but there wasn't a break in the line to allow him one. His friend Brian Smith was at the front of the line, so he talked to Brian for a second and then said "Here Brian, take my place for a minute", and he dashed off to take care of business. So there I was at my own wedding, standing with Brian instead of Zander. It should be mentioned that I'd never met Brian before, and he's really hard to understand considering he has Down's Syndrome. People that it was pretty awesome though.

The people who decorated our car did a serious number on it. Easter grass strewn all over inside, whipped cream and cookies on the windows, and Mt. Dew cans tied to the back. (have you ever tried to get Easter grass cleaned up out of a car? I was still finding it for about 3 years) Something in my head decided that it would be a really easy way to get the cookies and whipped cream off the car if we just used the wiper blades. This might have worked if it hadn't been so cold outside and the cookies had literally frozen to the window. So rather than cleaning everything off, the wipers broke on the dumb frozen cookies. But not before they smeared whipped cream everywhere. We couldn't see a thing. Thankfully my friends parents had some clorox wipes in their car and helped us get things cleaned off so that we could drive safely to the nearest car wash.

The next morning we were supposed to leave on our honeymoon. We accidentally got up late, for some delusional reason tried to take some money to the bank even though it was Sunday, couldn't find a parking spot at the airport, and ended up missing our flight. They were nice and moved us to the next day. By this point I was really really hungry. We hadn't really had dinner the night before, and hadn't even had time to eat any of the desserts either, though they had packed a box of them for us to take with us, and we sort of ate them for breakfast. Anyway, hungry Em starts getting grumpy. So we went to find me some food, not remembering it was still pretty early, on a Sunday morning in Utah. NOTHING was open. We drove to 3 or 4 places and they were all closed. We finally found a Subway that was open, and start ordering, and they were out of the bread that I wanted. I almost cried. Thankfully they had food in general, so I was mostly happy.

We decided to just head to our apartment and hang out for the day since we obviously weren't flying to Mexico yet. It started snowing really hard on our way from Salt Lake to Orem. Remember how our wiper blades had broken the night before? Well evidently I forgot and tried using them anyway. They obviously didn't work and just about scratched the windshield. We had to stop in Lehi and try and find somewhere to get new wiper blades.

That night we wanted to go out to dinner somewhere nice, not remembering that it was still Sunday and we were in Utah County. We drove to three restaurants before finally finding one that was open. It was Macaroni Grill. We didn't really want to eat there, but it was open, and had food. It quickly turned into one of our favorite restaurants.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Hogle Zoo

We took our first trip to the zoo this year! I've been wanting to go for a while, it just hasn't worked out yet. The weather was BEAUTIFUL for us today, and minus some hassle with the stroller (flat tire), we had a fantastic little trip. Nicole and her little boys joined us, and Noah had a lot of fun having his friend Paxton at the zoo with us.