Our Anniversary

Just wanted to post a few pictures of how Paul and I celebrated our anniversary. We have been married 13 years and been good friends for 22! Wow how time flies when you are happy!


Paul arranged for us to go up Logan Canyon to stay overnight in a lodge and snowmobile. It is so wonderful to rediscover the adventurous, fun loving people we still are under parenthood! We had a blast! Even digging out was fun. Thanks to Trenton and Whitney for watching the kids. It is so good to miss them every once in a while.

Yep! We're old fogies

In our ward Sunday bulletin, they post a family history challenge each month. This month we have had a lot of fun waxing nostalgic and discussing the topic. The assignment is to list things that you remember that your children would not know anything about. We came up with an extensive list!

• vinyl records (I owned Thriller, Grease, and Sleeping Beauty) I used to dance and get in trouble for making the records skip and scratch.
• cassette tapes for that matter
• Easy Bake oven (I always wanted one)
• Snoopy Snow Cone machine
• Weeble Wobbles
• Big Wheels
• The dolls that grow hair and then it sucks back into their heads
• Barbie heads for make-up and hair styling
• Manually changing channels and volume on the TV
• TV shows as: Brady Bunch, Fantasy Island, Romper Room, Love Boat, Buck Rogers, Dukes of Hazard, Welcome Back Kotter, Mash, Hart to Hart, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, Murder She Wrote, Muppet Show, Family Ties, Scooby Doo, Charlie's Angels
• Movies: Star Wars, Better Off Dead, War Games, Dark Crystal, Sixteen Candles, TeenWolf, Back to the Future, Footloose, Rocky, Superman, Somewhere in Time, Fame
• drive-in movie theaters
• typewriters and why they ding
• carbon paper
• rotary dial telephones with coiled cord
• Atari
• having to go to an arcade to play video games like Pac Man
• using tickets at Lagoon
• 49th Street Galleria
• Roller skating at the roller rink
• Station wagons with rear facing seats and no seat belts or car seats, no power anything or ac, rolling down windows manually
• clogs
• thongs (the shoes)
• long white socks with stripes on the top worn with shorts
• stirrup pants
• peg legging your jeans
• bleach spotting jeans
• rockers and wavers
• mullets (yes Paul had one)
• feathered bangs
• hair to heaven bangs
• Having free rein of the neighborhood until dark
• Not having a computer, Internet, cellphones, microwaves, etc.
• Carrying dimes for the pay phone
• glass pop bottles

Even though many toys and shows are being recreated as "retro" they're just not the same.

We just realized that most of the people who read this blog wont know half of the things we are talking about. If you do, give us a shout out so we don't feel so alone in our old age.

Memories

We were sitting around on Sunday thinking about all the memories we have from the old house. I thought I would get them written down in a semi-permanent place. Since I spend much more time here than in my journal, here it is:


Paul

• throwing kids into the Love Sac
• kids jumping from the basement stairs landing into the Love Sac
• storing all our Christmas decorations in the basement shower
• kids racing from the fridge to the couch with Jordan yelling "Look out guys, I'm gonna go speed!"
• how beautiful our Christmas tree looked in the front window
• games of HyperDash in the back yard
• process of landscaping the backyard including the kids playing in the thatch, tipping over the bobcat, laying railroad ties (Brooke being 5 months pregnant), laying sod, building the playset, digging out the old sandbox, planting the garden and the apple tree that we never got an apple from
• golfing with whiffle balls
• how the kids would get up on the wall and spin around the fence posts before the fence was put up
• kids deciding the pantry was the romantic place when they caught Mom and Dad kissing in there and would shove us in there any chance they got
• playing hide and go seek - we would list the places we looked aloud "not in the closet" Jordan would yell "no" from his hiding place as we said each place we looked

Brooke

• how much the kids loved jumping on the trampoline with the sprinkler underneath
• themed birthday parties: pirates, frog, shark, princess
• kids playing on the fake rock in the front yard no matter how many times we asked them not to
• our Jumanji garden
• Jordan spending the majority of his outside time in the raspberry patch eating. Once I sent out a bowl of raspberries for him to pick more, the bowl came back empty, he accused "You know I love raspberries too much!"
• the sandbox provided many pockets full of sand to dump on my bed as I sorted laundry
• building snowmen in the front yard
• watching the kids blast off to the moon on the rocket rider
• how proud I was about putting up the chain link fence (with my Dad's help)
• Paul hurting his back multiple times shoveling snow because we didn't have room to store a snowblower in the garage

Christian

• my favorite place to hide was under the table between the couches
• unwrapping Christmas presents under the Christmas tree in the living room
• cutting down the quakie in the front yard

Jordan

• having a Christmas tree for a night light
• counting lights on the tree until I fall asleep
• doing flips into the love sac
• Christmas quilt tradition in the living room
• raking leaves and jumping into them

Emma

• sliding down slide into the leaves
• boys pulling Emma around the yard in the little blue sled