Catch up!

Let's see, where to begin. . .


Last Friday Paul was in charge of our date. He drew the envelope date that I had done last year. This is where he comes up with multiple choices for me to chose from for dinner, activity, and a treat. For dinner, he gave me options on how we would make a dish with chicken in it. I decided on making asian chicken. We had some breading to use and some kung pow sauce and fried up bits of chicken. It turned out SO GOOD. And was so easy.

Then for the activity I chose to go see this movie:

And I bawled my eyes out. I didn't really know what to expect with this movie. I had heard good things about it, but then I was worried that I would go in with too high expectations and then not like it as much. Nope, I LOVED it. And Anne Hathaway's version of "I Dreamed a Dream" was amazing.

Then we got some warm drinks afterwards. It was great!

Last Friday it was my turn. The date was to make homemade doughnuts. I went out and bought some doughnut pans because I didn't really want to mess with frying them and figured I could be a little bit healthier by baking them. Besides, there are tons of recipes for baked doughnuts.

For dinner we went out to get sushi. We've been good at keeping this tradition of getting it once a month. And we've found a place not too far away that is so good and hardly ever busy. We're pretty sure the workers recognize us because the past couple times they have given us free appetizers while we wait for our order. Can't complain about that!

We made crumb doughnuts and cinnamon sugar doughnuts. They were delicious. Absolutely delightful. 

While we waited for those to cool, we dyed easter eggs.

Mom, the yellow one is the Star Trek symbol. Paul made it just for you.

Other things to catch up on:

-I'm two week into a Whittier girl's fitness challenge. It's a 10 week challenge that has 4 daily point you can get for working out, keeping a food journal, getting 7 hours of sleep a night, and drinking 64 oz of water. We're also doing biweekly challenges on top of that which are no eating 3 hours before bedtime, only one hour of media a day, eating 2 servings of fruits/vegetables a day, no sweets/treats, and getting 30 grahams of fiber a day. We report to my Mom every week. We all pooled in $20 at the beginning for the grand prize at the end of the challenge. Each week there is a weekly winner who gets  $5 gift card somewhere. It's been good motivation for me so far! It definitely is a challenge, but that's the point. I just finished the 2 week challenge of no eating 3 hours before bedtime, and now I'm onto the one hour of media a day. Wish me luck, and I better WIN! (by they way, we didn't let Mom participate because we knew she would win no questions asked. She didn't deny it either when we told her that was why she couldn't do it with us. Ha! But she's been a great motivational coach!)

-Hmm. . . . what else? Work is going pretty good. It's busy but I really like the people I work with. I feel really blessed to work for a company that is family oriented, and that is only 3 minutes away from home.

-Is that it? I should do better about keeping a list of little things I could write about on here because when I actually sit down to do it, I forget! Sorry. I'll try to be better.

That 70's Date

Date night: 70's theme.

I drew it, planned it, and it didn't go as planned, pretty much at all. 

That happens sometimes I guess.

Here's how it went down: We knew we needed to go to the temple. Things kept getting in the way (I feel terrible saying that, but it's true!) so we made the commitment to go Friday night to Salt Lake, since the Bountiful temple is currently closed. So I planned our date around that.

We were going to start out with dinner at good ol' Schlotzkey's Deli. I found out that restaurant started up in the 70's and Paul has never eaten there before. I looked up the address for it in SLC and alas, we couldn't find it. This made me feel like I didn't read it correctly, so I had to call my dear Mother and teach her how to use google to search for it. (Since we still don't have smart phones) Still couldn't find it. By now I was getting irritated because 1-I was hungry, and when I'm hungry pretty much everything irritates me, except food. 2-I felt silly that we couldn't find this dumb restaurant. 

So we went to Chipotle instead. 

It turned out to be a good choice because Chipotle is never a bad choice.

Then we rushed back to the temple and decided at the last minute to do initiatory work instead of a session, and actually, I think that was inspired because there were SO MANY PEOPLE. Turns out that not only was Bountiful closed, but so was South Jordan. Turns out a lot of people decided Friday night was a time to go to the temple. I had to stand in line for a locker. I felt bad for the workers there, you could tell they were not expecting a crowd that big. 

I'm still glad we went and we both knew it was something that was a good choice to make. 

By the time we got home, we were too pooped to do the rest of our date, which was going to be tie-dying shirts.

So we did that in the morning. Here's some pictures with a 1977 instagram filter to help us stay true to the decade.

They turned out pretty good! We plan on wearing the red white and blue ones on the 4th of July.

It all still turned out to be fun, just not as "planned", but sometimes life just happens.

We've Landed on the MOON!

Last friday's date night was going to the planetarium! It was very enjoyable and FREE! That was the best part. We went to the Clark Planetarium down at the Gateway. I knew they had light shows and the IMAX theater there that you could buy tickets for, but I had never walked around and looked at all their free stuff. It was really cool! And I learned a lot. Below are a few pictures of the night:

Lightning! I tried not to think about how many germy hands had touched that thing.

Clouds. I could have stayed and played with that stuff all night.

Ok, the picture below was what we found at the end of the planet display. We went through all the planets and read facts about them, and once we got to where Pluto is in the galaxy. . they had taken down all the stuff about it! But it was still so obvious that it once was a part of the display. Who cares that it's not considered a planet anymore? I would have still liked to learn about it! Once I saw a tshirt that had a cartoon of Pluto on it and it was making a sad face and written across the top was "It's ok Pluto, I'm not a planet either." It was funny. And so was this display.

And below was the end of the free stuff. There were little photo ops that made it look like you were either on the moon or on Mars. Paul did a really good job of catching me defying gravity:

Seriously. He got it in the first shot. I tried to get the same effect with him on Mars. Below is a collage of how well that went with my photo taking skills:

I gave up after about the tenth time. Guess that's not my talent.

And that was our date!

Date Catch Up

I keep forgetting to blog about the past couple date nights we've had. They've been good ones, let me tell you!

First, back on the 18th, we had Barnes and Noble date. This was actually really fun. The date was to go to Barnes and Noble (or any bookstore, really) and find some random trivia books, order something from their cafe, and then quiz each other.

Turns out the Barnes and Noble cafe is quite the place to be for a date on a Friday night! It was actually hard to find a table. There's only like 5 things on the menu that aren't some sort of coffee. I've had their "creme" caffeine-free things before and really liked them, but the ones at the Layton B&N were NOT that good. Boo. I wouldn't recommend getting those next time. Other than that, it was quite fun. Paul quizzed me on some Disney trivia (I bombed most of it.) And I read random facts out of some book that had a title like "Useless facts you don't really need to know." AND I quizzed him on facts from "The Hobbit", and it shouldn't be a surprise to many that he actually knew most of the answers! What a weirdy. :) We actually spent quite a bit of time there! We are nerds.


Next date night was on the 25th, and we had a sleep over. Ha ha, like we don't do that every night. Paul was in charge of this one and he tried to bring us back to how sleepovers went when you were a little kid. Remember how fun it was to have a sleepover with your best friend? We set up our air mattress and ordered pizza. He then let us watch a "chick flick" because he knows that's what most girls would do at a sleepover. So we watched "Ever After", a personal favorite, and he actually liked it! Then we made some candied popcorn with a packet of strawberry jello (really good! But really sticky.) And did what boys tend to do at sleepovers, and played a video game on our wii. Ha ha.

We tried out our new double sized sleeping bag that we got for Christmas from my parents and it was nice and toasty! Made us ready for spring so we can start going camping. All in all, it was another fun date night!

We had come to the end of the date ideas in our jar, so we sat down again and did some research and found a BUNCH of new ideas to try. We saved some from this past year that we really enjoyed (and seasonal ones that have to be done in warm weather) but I'm excited that we found so many new ideas! It will continue to be a surprise as to what we do this coming year.

Next post: One of our NEW date ideas that I was in charge of. Pictures and story to come soon!

Sweet Cinnamon

Since we have basically been buried in snow (13 inches! More on that later. . .), we decided to be hermits this past weekend and just stay in. . oh wait. We do that most of the time anyways. Whatever.

Paul was in charge of date night this past Friday and we made cinnamon rolls! It was a perfect activity to do while being snowed in.

The rest of the weekend was spent cleaning, and going to see this movie:

It was about the tsunami that hit Indonesia in 2004. . and it was a true story about a family that was there. SO GOOD. But really emotionally draining. I would highly recommend it though.

The cinnamon rolls were pretty much gone by Monday, the snow started to melt a little because temperatures got up to a balmy 23 degrees today. .and next week it's supposed to be above freezing! I'll be ready to wear shorts and a light jacket because that actually sounds warm right now. How sad.