Valentine's Day

It's that time of year again when the sweet smell of baking fills the air (in our kitchen at least) and our lucky neighbors and friends wait by the door for their "surprise" door-bell-ditched-because-we-go-to-too-many-houses-to-chat sugar cookies!  Austin got to help frost and decorate his personal allotment of cookies with a germ-segregated bowl of icing and a knife he could lick as often as desired.

 

I was also delighted, once again, to find a giant cookie of my very own.  That's how I'm sure Rebecca still loves me.

Our other annual tradition of sending Valentines's Day cards is also going strong.  With the yearly background checks required for adoption home studies, we're pretty used to getting fingerprinted.  So our cards this year featured them.

You may have caught on to our scheduled rotation of duties for the special Valentine's Day dinner and date as well.  This year, Rebecca was assigned the dinner, and I the date.  She somehow prepared a delicious lasagna while frantically packaging and delivering cookies.  For dessert, she make these awesome jelly-filled puff-pastry things. 

For our date that weekend, I took her to the Banff Mountain Film Festival in Ogden.  It was a showing of several different adventurous documentary-type films.

Now, on to the portion of the blog you've all been waiting for.  "What over-the-top masterpiece did Rebecca create this year!" you are surely asking yourselves.  Well, without any further ado, here they are! 

Neopolitan-scented cold-processed soap with heart motifs

Exquisite home-made card

Four-layer, museum-grade scroll-saw puzzle

The puzzle is hard! It's taken me 3 sessions of 2-3 hours each and I've only completed 2 of the 4 layers!  And I've had to cheat by looking at the photograph!  At least it gives me an excuse for why I haven't written in my journal...in the past several months....

This was my card to Rebecca.  Nothing extravagant.  Just a google search for "adventure" and some text slapped on.  The inside said "Happy Valentine's Day to the most romantic wife ever!"  She thought it was worth adding to the blog...so I guess that means it was good enough.

Our January Activities

This January has been disturbingly warm and dry in our area. We are very concerned about having enough water this year based on the lack of snow we have seen. Additionally, it has made it hard to go out and do the fun winter activities we love like sledding and snowshoeing.

Still, we have tried to do some other fun family activities. On the thirteenth we went bowling with a couple of Nate's brothers and their families. The bowling trip was actually our Christmas gift to one of Nate's brothers.

After bowling we headed to the BYU Museum of Art to see the M.C. Escher exhibit there. Since Austin has been learning about perspective during our art lessons this year, he was very interested in the way Escher's work played with perspective to trick the mind. He also really enjoyed the tessellations Escher created. Furthermore, it was interesting to see some of the wood blocks used to print Escher's work. We all enjoyed exploring the exhibit together.

Last weekend we headed to the circus. I had never been to the circus before. I remember as a kid seeing commercials for the Barnum and Bailey Circus and wanting so badly to go see it, but we never did. So, I was actually pretty excited to go see the Jordan World Circus event we saw some advertisements for. We ended up buying a family pass since that was less expensive, but it also came with more children's tickets than we needed. So, we let Austin invite his friend Sarah to come with us. Neither Austin or Sarah had been to a circus before either, so of all of us, only Nate had ever been to such an event previously.

We enjoyed watching tightrope tricks, motorcycle tricks, animal tricks, and other various acrobatic tricks. Both animals and people flew through rings of fire. Skilled horsemen hopped on and off galloping horses, hung upside-down off their sides, and stood up on their backs as they raced in circles. Daring ladies climbed up ropes and hung from them in various difficult poses. A speed changer went in and out of various outfits in mere seconds. Some ladies did tricks with hula hoops, and some hung high above the ground from rings or cloth ropes. Austin's favorite part was watching the groups of two, three, and four motorcyclists raced around in a spherical cage without crashing. He also loved watching guys fly from a motorcycle powered swing into the air, do flips and/ or shoot through a ring of fire before landing in a cloth. (The pictures from Nate's phone didn't necessarily turn out the best, but they give some idea of these stunts.)

Four motorcyclists zooming around inside the spherical cage together

Man flying off the motorcycle swing and through the ring of fire

I particularly liked watching the guys doing tricks on the horses. These tricks were far from anything I would ever be comfortable doing on horseback.

Rider jumps on and off a horse as it gallops around the ring

Watching the elephant and tiger tricks were also pretty cool. As were the other things involving animals...but then I have always been into that sort of thing. Nate especially enjoyed seeing a lama jump through a hoop. Some goats and dogs rode a miniature horse as it trotted around the ring at another point in the show, which started me wondering if I could ever teach a dog to ride a horse...

The tightrope tricks were amazing but made me feel incredibly nervous the whole time. One of the guys who was jumping rope on the tightrope actually did fall during his first attempt, but luckily caught himself on the rope and pulled himself back up.

We all had fun, though the kids were quite tired by the end of the show and quite ready to go home and get to bed. Sarah fell asleep during the second act.