Anniversary Adventures in Food

For our special meal, we ate at the Melting Pot...a fondue restaurant. It was expensive, but I had found a $25.oo gift certificate online which helped out a lot. One day we're going to go back for dessert.
Some of our appetizers to be dipped in cheese sauce.

We chose a spinach cheese sauce

Ghirardelli's ice cream we split. Very rich, but good.

To die for pizza from Giordano's. We ate there twice and almost ordered a pizza to take home with us.


Free appetizer due to a coupon we found in a tourist book. It was good, but the pizza was the best.

Anniversary Adventures part 2

Spencer and I visited downtown Disney one day while we were in Orlando. We had always wanted to visit, but never had the time while we were at Disney World. We had a relaxing time wandering through stores and tasting some great ice cream from Ghirardelli's. After a time we decided to go rest on a bench near the water. While we were sitting there, we got the bright idea to take pictures of ourselves holding the hot air balloon. It was difficult to pose correctly, and I'm sure people were wondering what in the world we were doing.

An older couple walked past while we were doing our artful photography, and the man commented, "Oh, I see what y'all are doing. Do you want me to take a picture of both of you holding the ball?" Sure! We were happy to comply. I had to show him how to work the camera and change the display setting so he could look through the eye piece instead of the display screen of my camera. After he took the picture, he said, " I think that is really good. Y'all should like that." As you can see in the last picture, we aren't holding a thing.

That picture actually made our day. It may be our wacky sense of humor, but we got a kick out of it.

\ Picture of us taken by the gentleman.

Spencer with our rich, but yummy ice cream.

Anniversary Adventures part 1

Spencer and I went to Orlando for our anniversary this year. It seemed like something "interesting" or funny happened every day. I think I'll start with the biggest and most interesting one first although it happened last.


We were happily heading back to NC when we realized that the Daytona Speedway was right off of I-95. Spencer thought it would be a great place to see, so we took the little detour.


There is a $24 charge for an Imax show, a guided tour of the place, plus a few other things, but we were ready to get home. All Spencer wanted to do was see the track. A lady emp

loyee there kindly told us that we could go up into the grandstand for free, so we happily headed out there. We climbed all the way to the top, and looked out over the horizon. It's a huge track. As we were gazing over the horizon, Spencer noticed that a big gate (in the middle of the grandstands) was open. It looked like it would take us to the infield. Thinking that would be pretty neat, we we decided to head over that way. After discussing whether the route under or on the bleachers would be best we took the cooler route, the one down under. We climbed back out onto the grandstand right next to where the gate was when a golf cart came flying around the corner, and screeched to a halt. It sure made me jump. When the security guard jumped out, Spencer said, "I guess we're not supposed to be here, huh?"

"You're right about that, and I'm going to throw you out!" replied the security guard.
"We didn't know that we are not allowed to be here. No one told us that we couldn't be," was our reply. (Let me mention that we were always respectful although we were definitely spoken to otherwise.)
The security guard pointed to a group in the first section that we had been in originally. "Do you see those people over there? Do you see them over here? NO! They are where they are supposed to be! You don't see THEM trying to come over here, do you? Didn't you see that sign that said no spectators beyond this point?"
"No sir, I didn't." I replied respectfully.
"YOU didn't see that sign?
"No, sir."
Spencer said, "I saw it, but I thought it was for when the races were going on because it said spectators."
"NO! Spectator means you. We have that sign to keep you safe. YOU are a spectator, and I'm going to throw you out."
(I'm not exactly sure what we were spectating since there was absolutely nothing going on. I guess if we were waiting for the track to melt from the heat, that would have made us spectators.)
"OK, I guess we'll leave then," I replied.
"NO! I'm going to throw you out!" was the retort. "You can come back tomorrow," He said as he let us through the unlocked gate. Spencer all the while was taking pictures. I guess we made his day. It must have been boring around there, or something.
My recommendation to Daytona would be to look up the definition of spectator and change their sign to say, "Authorized personnel only beyond this point." Oh, and maybe they could let their employees inside tell people that they are only allowed in the very first section of the grandstands. That would have been nice to know.
That was definitely a first for me, and hopefully a last. Spencer kept teasing me about stopping at all the race tracks that we passed on the way home. I've never really had the desire to go to one, and now that this happened, I don't have the desire to go to another one.

These were evidently the original bleachers from the first section that was built. I got a kick out them.

I guess this is what getting thrown out of somewhere looks like.

"You can come back tomorrow."

Today, Spencer and I are celebrating our 9th anniversary. It's been a strange day as far as anniversarys go because we both had to participate in a funeral service of a man who was special to us. We are planning to get away next week to celebrate though.

For those of you in the Rio Grande Valley, and a few other places through out the United States,...there's a special to fly to and from LA for $15 each way. You have to book today (April 15) by 6:00 pm. Service to LA starts in May, and there are various dates available at this rate. http://airfare.travelzoo.com/north-american-airfare/569410?utm_source=top20_us&utm_medium=email_top20

Announcement

I've been thinking about this for a while, and some of you have been complaining that I don't put things up here often enough. Therefore, I am going to try to copy my status changes that I put on Facebook onto here. It should at least keep you with a new sentence to read every day.
Here is my status from yesterday along with a little updated information:

Mourning the loss of Duane Duran this morning, but what a day for him to get to see Jesus.
His viewing will be at Shingleton Funeral Home Tuesday night from 7-9, and the funeral will be at Trinity Baptist Church at 11:00 on Wednesday morning followed by his burial in New Bern.

We will greatly miss him.

Cousins

This is for my sister, Revka. Her girls came to Brittany's soccer practice the other night and enjoyed playing with my kids that weren't practicing.

Spring

Chicken Brittany

Brittany thought that all the pinestraw we raked up in our yard looked like a chicken nest. She's the chicken in the nest.

Joe and Sarah's Wedding Celebration Party

Sarah and Joe finally were able to have a wedding shower/reception. Here's some pics.

Beach Theme

Guests put messages of wisdom in a bottle

They also signed the picture frame. This was before all the guests finished signing it.

Of course there was food.

Joe's sister signing the picture.

A honey-do whistle.

It didn't take long for Sarah to start wearing that one!

A classic. How many mother-in-laws do you see LITTERALLY pointing a knife at their son-in-law? My husband said that she needs to quit talking with her hands.

Joe's dad talking.

Joe's mom and sister

Joe's cousin. She and Joe's mom were a tremendous help getting things ready.

Half Way to Nowhere

Yesterday my husband decided that today would be a good day to take the kids on a trip down to Wilmington to see the battleship. Around 9:30 we were on our way, and you couldn't have asked for more beautimous weather. Our children were quite excited and traveled the two hours quite well. Before we got on the ship, we ate a Burger King lunch complete with Kids Meals (a treat for them.) The kids were quite impressed with the ship, and the deeper inside we got the more excited the baby got. They had a great time, and the only mishap was that Addison messed her diaper when there were no bathrooms around.

Trying out the bunks. I would have felt clausterphobic.

Mixing up the baby.

For some reason Addison would not look at the camera.

Our trip on the way back home however, began with my husband's super sensitive nose smelling something amiss. "Does Addison have a stinky diaper?" was his question. My reply: "She shouldn't. I just changed her." Only, I turn around to see that those Huggies weren't hugging too well. There was this mustard colored stuff coming out the side. I got my things together to change her, thinking that Spencer wass going to pull off to the side of the highway, but he just kept driving. The next time I turned around there was a bigger blob of mustard colored stuff coming out the side of Addison's leg and it was still expanding. My husband decided to stop.

After we got that little problem taken care of, Spencer started worrying about the possibilities of a gas station being nearby. For anyone that knows him very well, this is not an uncommon situation. He doesn't worry because he might run out of gas in the next 50 miles, it's more like the next 50 feet. I told him that I did not remember seeing a gas station on that stretch of road, and thankfully, I did not know how low that needle was. I was already praying as it was. We did spot a gas station that was so out of date that there were still individual pumps for each type of gasoline and when Spencer paid for the gas with his debit card he had to wait for the woman inside to get off the phone so they could use the dial up connection to put his card number through. FINALLY, we were headed on our way home. After 30 minutes we realized that we had once again followed our usual tradition of taking the scenic way home. We didn't recognize the road...nor the highway signs....nor anything else for that matter. We were once again in middle of nowhere. I looked at Spencer and said, "I don't have a clue where we are. He said, "I know. We're half way to nowhere. That sounds like a country song doesn't it?" I had to agree with him.
We decided to take the highways that were marked North and pray we didn't end up too far off our target. We finally saw the name of a familiar town nearby and were happily speeding our way home (hoping we were really going the right way), when a car in front of us pulled off to the side of the road. As we passed him by, we noticed that there were lights on top of that car. They promptly began to flash their luminous blue color and followed us down the road. To make a long story short, the Highway patrol man told us how to get home, but in April,Spencer has to figure out how to get back to where we were lost......if you get my drift.
In spite of the way it ended, we had quite a bit of fun, and it definitely was a day we won't forget anytime soon.

Brittany Killed Biscuit

At Christmas Brittany fell in love with Biscuit. Biscuit is a life size "Fur Real" dog. She will obey commands, and does pretty much everything except eat and poop. Tonight unbeknownst to us Brittany decided that Biscuit needed to take a bath with her. I went to help Sierra get her bath after Brittany was done and noticed that the floor was pretty wet and the dog pretty bedraggled. At first, I thought Brittany had wiped the dog down, but then realized that the very wet floor was actually the result of the water running out of the dog that had been submerged. Unless a miracle happens, Biscuit is pretty dead.

Birthday Month

Even though February is known for Valentines Day, it seems that the boys have designated February as their month for birthdays. We've had a party every Saturday this month exept for the last Saturday. No it's not going to disappoint me not to have a party to go to this coming up week.

Zach turned 8 this year. Even though there's a six on the cake there are two little candles added beside it. He knows how to add. He had a great birthday week. We first took him and two friends to Chuck E Cheese and then had a sleep over for them. Somehow he ended up having brownies made in his honor at Papa and Mema's house, a Transformer cake another night at our house, and it seems like something else too. I think he definitely felt like he had a birthday.

The little Batman boy here had a birthday the next weekend. My husband and father in law were asked to dress up as Batman and Robin. I think they had a little too much fun with that.

What did I say about too much fun dressing up?

This is my very cute nephew's 2nd bithday. Almost all of his cousins made it there.

My husband turned 31 this year. I made my first carrot cake (pictured below) for the occasion. Evidently our baby thought the frosting on the cake was so good that she bit through the candles trying to get all the frosting off of them.

This last weekend our kids went skating for a birthday party. They liked it so much that it will probably end up as a Family Fun Night activity one Thursday.