romance and a birthday

To celebrate the anniversary of our first date my husband and I have several traditions.....

Thursday......
1. My husband always calls me up and asks me on a date the same way he did the very first time. I always giggle and accept just like I did 17 years ago.

Friday......
2. We stay in a hotel or a bed & breakfast and have a night all to ourselves (That's not what we did for our first date, but it is a really fun tradition anyway!)

This year Dave brought chocolate dipped strawberries and sparkling apple cider. We went to a nice restaurant for dinner and later we ate cereal in bed while we watched a movie. It was awesome and it's so nice to have older kids who can babysit overnight. All the kids slept in our room and ate popcorn and ice cream in our bed....grrrr!

Saturday.....
3. On our first date Dave ordered a full steak meal with all-you-can-eat-salad-bar. I got an order of 3 scones. He was rather shocked especially because I only ate 1 of them, but when he found out it was because I was nervous and had wanted to go on a date with him for several months he was good!

......so every year I make scones to celebrate our first date and we eat them with honey butter!

Saturday night........ we had been asked to chaperone a Sweethearts Dance for about 3 dozen of Dave's seminary students. They decided to boycott the school dance because of all the dirty dancing and immodesty there. It was so great! Everyone was very modest and had a really good time. They had great decorations and refreshments and lots of fun activities going on. They even did professional pictures. I'm happy that there's a good group of kids doing good things since Akayla will be dating soon.

Dave and I had a lot of fun dressing up and dancing. We don't get to do that very often!

Sunday was Leandra's first birthday.

It's really hard to believe she's already 1!!

She loved eating her chocolate cupcake and making a big mess. She was definitely not as dainty as some of our children have been. She picked the thing up and shoved it right into her mouth!

You would have thought it was Christmas the way we were all gathered around to watch her eat her first bite of chocolate! Every little thing she did made us all giggle and just think she was the cutest kid ever born!

It was a super fun weekend!

good things:
my sweet hubby cleaned up all the chocolate mess!
hot scones & honey butter
friends who came to our rescue so we could enjoy a night out
dancing with my favorite person