Celebrating The Day We Met

Four years ago today, Brett and I met playing Human Foosball at a singles ward activity. It's such an LDS cliche' to meet and marry someone you met in a singles ward, so sometimes we'll make up crazy, random stories of how we met each other. But, in the long run, how we met is irrelevant...I'm just happy we did!
Anyways, since we don't really do the Valentine's Day thing, we usually try to do something to celebrate our "meeting anniversary."

This year, we went and saw "Taken," which was incredible. What an intense movie! After that, we tried a new restaurant called "The Counter." It's this semi-upscale burger joint, where when you sit down, you're given a clipboard with a sheet of TONS of choices allowing you to build your own burger. I was blown away with all the stuff you could pick. The food was amazing, but if you plan on eating there, come hungry! Here's what my burger looked like before I dug in...

(Keep in mind, this is the smallest one you can get!)
To finish up our evening, we went and did a session at the Salt Lake Temple. It was a great end to a fabulous day.

More Macy

I feel like I have so much to catch everyone up on with Macy. She is constantly coming up with new things to keep me on my toes...I can't even start to think what things are going to be like when she starts walking. That's right...we've got a pro-crawler in our midst. She actually took her first steps last week, (three little wobbly ones) but has since to take anymore. She'll stand herself up, then get this huge smile on her face, laugh, and then sit back down and crawl away. I think she just likes the fact that she can crawl at super speed and doesn't want to be slowed down with something so minor as learning to walk.

People keep asking me if she has said her first word yet, and I never know exactly what to tell them. She "talks" all the time...it's just that none of it makes any sense. There are lots of times when one of us will say something and she'll act like she's repeating it back to us and get a couple of sounds right, but I don't think she's officially said her first word. She nods like crazy and always makes some noise along with it that often sounds like the word yes. I'm going to have to try and get some videos so you can all see what I'm talking about. My favorite is when we ask her what a sheep says...she'll always say "baa baa."

We're still working on teaching her some sign language, and she's got a few signs that she'll do all the time (eat, more, all done, bath, puppy, nap, airplane and milk) and others that she'll do after we do them. She'll also learned to blow kisses, although it just looks like she's smacking herself on the side of the head.

(PS-I know these pictures have nothing to do with what I'm writing, but they're piling up, so I've got to start sharing them.)
She has recently starting throwing some really wild tantrums. I just keep hoping that it's just a phase. I can't bear to think that we've got a 13 month old diva...what will she be like at 16?

This Little Piggy, Revised

The other day while doing dishes in the kitchen, I overheard Brett doing the "This Little Piggy" nursery ryhme with Macy. However, his version sounded a little different than the one I grew up with. It went a little something like this:

This little piggy had roast beef,

This little piggy had...oatmeal.

This little piggy went to the market and had something else,

This little piggy went "wee, wee, wee" and went home.

So it might not make it into any Mother Goose books anytime soon, but at least we know he's good at improvising!

Love...

Love Him...

Love Her...

Love Them...

Love Us...

Love This.

Disaster

So yesterday I was supposed to take dinner over to a family in our ward whose mom had just had surgery. No big deal, I figure. I'd just make everything up before I went to work, have Brett stick it in the oven and have it be done just in time for me to run it over to their house by 5:30.

But, as you know, things in life rarely go as planned.
The disaster began when I walked in the door after work. My wonderful husband had followed my cooking directions perfectly; the food was in the oven and had only about 2 minutes until it was supposed to be done. The timer goes off, I grab the pan out of the oven, pull the foil off and find a gigantic, soupy, disgusting mess.
The dish (which I've made hundreds of times and have never had a problem with) is basically cream of chicken soup, water, rice and chicken breasts. When it's done correctly, it looks something like this:

Mine wasn't even close to that. It was more like 4 pale chicken breasts floating around in cloudy water with half cooked rice stuck to the bottom of the pan. So I see this and my heart stops. I literally have 15 minutes before I have to deliver dinner to a family of four. What am I going to do?
First I go through my options...order them a pizza? No, not enough time.
Try to make something else? Again, not enough time.
Run away to Hawaii?

Okay, (sigh)...no.
Finally I decide to transfer everything into a smaller container and cook it for at least a few more minutes. 10 minutes later, I'm still staring at a runny mess. I have about 5 minutes until I'm supposed to be there, so I decide to make do with what I've got and hope the family doesn't recognize me when I drop the food off. I throw everything into my strainer (yes, the thing you use to drain water off of pasta) in a lame attempt to get rid of the excess water/soup, throw it into yet another casserole dish, load everything into the car and drive over to deliver the mess.
On my way over, I'm contemplating how I could leave the food without them knowing who gave it to them. I passed a couple of neighbor boys and thought about giving them each a couple bucks to run the food over there, but decided against that. Then I seriously thought about just leaving everything on the doorstep, ringing the doorbell and running away, but then realized that my name and address were on the bottom of the casserole dish that was holding my dinner mess, so they would eventually find out who the lame-o was who gave them crappy food and doorbell-ditched them.
So now I just have to figure out how to not run into this poor family for at least a few months until they forget about the awful dinner the Carters made for them. I suppose if I can't come up with anything, there's always Hawaii, right?