Our Anniversary

Our 11th anniversary was this weekend and I can hardly believe how the time has flown! Adrian and I got a baby-sitter and went to see the new Batman movie. Heath Ledger was so amazing in that movie! Oh, it's just so sad that he is not here to receive all the accolade... I loved the Joker parts, but must say it was an incredibly violent movie. I think I'm getting more sensitive to violence as I get older and I think Adrian ended up enjoying the movie a lot more than I did. It was right at the end that I think the violence crossed a line for me, but I don't want to give anything away for everyone who's going to go see it soon. I do love Christian Bale as Batman though!! And I think that Batman has like 94% on Rotten Tomatoes, so pretty much everyone is loving this movie.

For dinner we reenacted our wedding dinner. This requires a bit of a flash back... My parents had hamburgers for dinner on their wedding day and also my oldest sister and her husband ended up having hamburgers also... You know how things just get so crazy and no one remembers to actually eat on their wedding day. Anywho, it became sort of a family tradition to get newly weds in the family hamburgers for dinner on their wedding day. When Adrian and I headed away from our wedding reception in a horse drawn carriage (I thought it was romantic :)) our carriage driver handed us a sack from McDonalds with 2 cheeseburgers in it and we laughed at the message on the bag that said something to the effect of "We didn't want you to forget these! Happy honeymoon!" So on our anniversary night this past weekend when we realized we didn't have a whole lot of time before the movie started we decided to get cheeseburgers from McDonalds and had a fun nostalgic moment together.

Happy happy anniversary to the love of my life!! Adrian you are amazing and I'm such a lucky girl!!!:)

Memory Tag

Oh why am I doing this?? I'm going to make myself cry, but I'd love to read some of our memories together... Big hugs in advance to anyone who leaves me a memory!!:)

1. As a comment on my blog, leave one memory that you and I had together. It doesn't matter if you knew me a little or a lot, anything you remember!

2. Next, re-post these instructions on your blog and see how many people leave a memory about you. It's actually pretty funny to see the responses. If you leave a memory about me, I'll assume you're playing the game and I'll come to your blog and leave one about you.

Buyers Market Blues

Now this post is in no way meant to be ungrateful for our home sale - we are so happy about that... It's just sadness in general about the state of the housing market.

In the last 5 days we've had our home inspection, a radon test (which was a detector that sat in our basement for 2 days and I couldn't let the kids play in the basement for fear of them touching it), a termite inspection, and our house appraisal. All of these have been a bit stressful, just in getting ready for them and particularly for the home inspection, worry about what we might have to fix... Well the inspection addendum came over the weekend with the list of all the things we have to fix in order for our contract with our buyer to hold. It's a pretty long list of little nit-picky type things. For instance we have to have our leaky kitchen faucet repaired by a licensed contractor - Adrian can't just go to Home Depot and buy a washer for it, no a licensed contractor has to repair it and we have to have the receipt to prove that it was fixed by a professional at closing. And there's over a dozen more things like that for us to do - well that we have to pay a licensed contractor to do.

In a "sellers market" (which is the kind of market we bought our house in 5 years ago) you could never ask for these types of things. You couldn't because there were all sorts of bidding wars going on and and seller could hold out for better offers. Oh but those days are gone. Now that we are deeply in a "buyers market" a buyer can ask for anything and get it, because literally they can just rip up the contract and move to the next house right down the street where there might be even more motivated sellers that might give them an even better deal.

So anyways I'm not going to take any of this personally. I know that our buyer is just trying to get the best deal she can and her realtor is working really hard to do just that. It's just that I'm feeling a little stressed about getting all these repairs done before closing and getting everything ready for relocating. Oh well. At least we know that in CO we will be buying in a buyers market and hopefully we'll be able to recoup some of these costs. There's always a bright side right?!

Update: Well it's Wednesday and things are looking up! When I wrote my this post on Monday I was feeling a bit whiney, but now I'm doing much better. Our buyer accepted a credit at closing towards the repairs, so yay! I don't have to start getting estimates for the repairs and that makes me happy. Also, I spent a lovely evening last night at our RS recipe swap. I always love to sit and chat with the women from our ward! It really helped my stress level! Thanks ladies!

Good News and Sundae Fast Sunday Improv

First things first, we have wonderful news! Our house is under contract!! Yay!! Our closing date is just a few weeks away. We are SO happy and relieved that it sold so quickly. Our buyer even wanted to move up the closing date so they are very motivated to move things along quickly... Another blessing. So good news! We are very excited about the move and starting this new chapter in our lives, but of course along with the good there is the bad and I'm just trying at this point not to actually think about leaving all our friends who have become our 2nd family... I'm just going to let myself be in denial on that point and deal with it all once we've packed up everything and closed on our house... Otherwise I'll be a mess and there's just so much to do...

Now to the Sundae Fast Sunday part. Every fast Sunday we try to make home-made ice-cream for sundaes, but with everything that has been going on I neglected to get the ingredients for our sundaes yesterday. Oh the horror! We seriously almost had a revolt last night when we told Sophie and Ben that we didn't make the ice cream so we weren't going to have our sundaes. Serious wailing and gnashing of teeth. It was bad. We have had fast Sundays without home-made ice cream before, but we've always had some kind of store bought ice cream in the freezer so it's all worked out. But of course we have completely run out of ice cream. I almost wanted to just let the kids deal with it to teach them a little flexibility... But after threatening the kids that if they didn't stop bugging me about the sundaes that I wasn't going to make any kind of dessert (the threat was successful), I whipped up a substitute that worked really well - instant vanilla pudding! It might sound weird, but it went so well with all the toppings and was super easy. I just might make it in the future on some fast Sundays because it went over so well. Nina just had maraschino cherries because she wasn't a huge fan of the pudding, but I bet if I made chocolate pudding she would love it. So there you go, pudding sundaes are actually really yummy!

Disney and News

Due to crazy circumstances which I will mention further down in this post I have not been able to blog about wonderful Disney World.... well until now, but still I'm going to have to do a slightly abbreviated favorite things version.

Nina
(the baby always goes first right:))
- She loved hiding in the coat closet at the condo we shared with my parents down in Florida - we seriously could not get her to stay out of that closet!

- The Bear Country Jamboree - Nina loves bears (when she makes the sign for "bear" it is so cute!) so this was the perfect little show for her and she laughed and clapped through the whole thing.

- The Nemo Musical show at Animal Kingdom - we heard this took a long time to get into, but do to wonderful drizzly weather the Animal Kingdom wasn't near as crowded as it usually is and we walked right into this show 5 minutes before it started. Nina loved it, especially the bubbles at the end!


Ben

- Seriously I think just spending a week with Grandpa made him the happiest - those 2 have a special bond and Ben always wanted to ride the rides with or sit next to "Papa".

- Ben's top rides - 1. Star Tours (of course that's a given), 2. Buzz Lightyear Ride, 3. Toy Story Ride. Ben also rode on the Tower of Terror and Big Thunder Railroad though neither of those were his favorites!:) Oh, I should mention that Ben's souvenir from our trip was a Yoda backpack. It is so cute - it actually looks like Yoda is riding around on your back.

- Ben also totally loved the character breakfast that we went to on our first day at Disney. It was called the "Supercalifragilistic Breakfast" with Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, Mary Poppins, Alice, and the Mad Hatter. He smiled through the whole breakfast and had a very cute picture taken with Tigger.


Sophie

- Sophie loved loved all the fast rides - like Space Mountain, the Tower of Terror, Everest, Big Thunder Railroad, and most of all the Rockin Roller Coaster. It was so fun to go on all these rides with her and since Adrian and I had to do switch passes so one of us could stay with the 2 younger kids, Sophie got to go with each of us on the roller-coasters. On our first day at Animal Kingdom she went on Everest 4 times!

- Sophie really enjoyed going to the Kennedy Space Center. We actually got to see a satellite launch which was awesome (Adrian was really excited to see that too) and after that we went to Coco beach. Sophie loved wading in the ocean and especially the snow cones that we got to cool every one down (man that was a hot day at the beach)!

- Collecting/trading pins - Sophie picked for her souvenir to get a pin lanyard necklace and some Disney pins, including 3 from her favorite rides (Rockin Rollercoaster, Everest, and Tower of Terror). It wasn't until our last day at Disney that she realized she could trade pins with all the Disney workers who walk around with big collections of pins - so before we left (like in the last 15 minutes) she traded 3 pins. It was very fun to see how excited she was about the whole thing.


Adrian and Jenni

- It was so fun to see the magic of Disney through our kids eyes - that really was the best part and also being able to spend such fun times with my parents and grandma was so neat. We made wonderful memories that we will always treasure.

- We both loved all the roller coasters - Adrian's favorite was the Rockin Roller Coaster and mine was Everest. I also loved many of the shows like the Nemo show - it was so well done!

- Our "Date" at the Magic Kingdom sans children. Thanks to my wonderful parents Adrian and I were able to spend a wonderful evening riding all the rides and hanging out in Disney by ourselves. It was SO fun!! We rode all our favorites like the Haunted Mansion and Space Mountain. Adrian even went on It's a Small World with me that night - I was feeling nostalgic... It's a Small World was one of my favorites as a child (I grew up right near Disneyland). That evening though I seriously had tears in my eyes when we found out the Pirates of the Caribbean was closed during our whole vacation. We hadn't taken the kids to Magic Kingdom yet at that point so we decided just not to mention Pirates to them so they wouldn't be so sad that we couldn't ride it, but I think I took it the hardest. That along with the Haunted Mansion are my FAVES!! It was so sad... But really that did not ruin our date at all, I had so much fun riding all the rides with my hubby and I'm so glad we got to do it!

(Our footprints in the Coco beach sand.)

Okay now that I've done the Disney part of the post I must mention our CRAZY NEWS. We are moving to Colorado!!! Adrian is transferring within his company to a team out there and he is so excited about the work he will be doing and we are all excited to move West closer to our families. Of course it is so bittersweet because it's going to be horribly hard to leave our wonderful friends here. We've been blessed to be friends with some amazing people and I know I'm going to miss them all so much.

We've been in a mad craze to get our house ready to sell and as of today it is on the market, so please wish us luck and maybe say a prayer for us!! We so hope it sells quickly!!

Laughing and Laocoon

I have been meaning and meaning to write up a post about our vacation, but just haven't done it and I'm gonna even put it off a little longer because I just had an inspiration for my art history pic this month. I was just cleaning our main floor bathroom (so nasty with mold that grew during our vacation - sorry for the TMI) and listening to my i-Pod when a favorite REM song came on, "Laughing". I have long thought the lyrics to that song mentioned the Greek Sculpture Laocoon, but after hearing it again for the umpteenth time I just had to go to the internet and look it up. Well it does say "Laocoon"!! Michael Stipe of REM actually studied art and art history in college (I've already added him to my cool art history lover list right below Prince William) and it made me happy to have it confirmed that he threw in a nice little Greek Hellenistic art shout-out for geeks like me!:) And here's a picture of said sculpture:

Laocoon and His Sons sculpture group, by the ancient Greek sculptors Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydoros (don't those name rock??!), from the Greek Hellenistic Period (that's the 3rd century BC)

The background on Laocoon the person is kind of sketchy. Honestly, who knows if he really existed - we are talking this was thousands of years ago, but Pliny the Younger (an ancient Greek Historical writer from the 1st century AD) believed Laocoon existed so I guess I'll trust him. (And I trust my good friend Deb who knows tons more about history than me and wrote a great couple of comments on this post about who Laocoon was.:)) Anywho, Laocoon was a Trojan priest of Poseidon who is credited with trying to warn the Trojans not to accept the Trojan Horse from the Greeks - reportedly or anecdotally he coined the phrase, "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts." (I guess Greeks have Laocoon to thank for that one...) Well, after a series of events (I need to read the Aeneid so I know what the series of event are:)) he died along with his 2 sons - they were apparently strangled by snakes... Nice, hu?! It's quite a horrible story and just the perfect type of subject matter for the Hellenistic Greeks who loved capturing high drama in their works of art.

Now for the art history side of the story... To start off I have to say I am a huge fan of the Greek Hellenistic Period! Oh lots of historians will tell you that the Classical Period is the best, but I beg to differ - Hellenistic is where it's at!! So many of the really famous Greek sculptures like The Dying Gaul, The Venus de Milo, and the Nike of Samothrace are all from this period. Honestly The Dying Gaul is one of my all-time favorite works of art. It makes me cry if I look at it too long, which I think is the point. The Hellenists liked to stir the viewer up and I love art that really evokes strong emotion. I mean just look at Laocoon and His Sons - it's over the top. Laocoon is super human with all the muscling and unnatural position. It's pretty hard to make it seem like hair is flying around with marble, but it really seems like it. One thing of note is that Michelangelo was hugely influenced by the Hellenists - you can really see it in th his amazing Sistine Chapel frescoes. Every time I look at a sculpture like Laocoon in a book and especially when I've seen other Hellenistic works in person at the Louvre and the Vatican I marvel that human hands really created them. What a priviledge it is for us to have these amazing things created by people who have long passed. I hope I get to see Laocoon in person some day and I'm sure I'll be even more amazed when I'm standing up close to it.

Isn't is crazy how a little thing like a word in a song can get your curiosity flowing. I'm glad I finally looked up those lyrics and got to remember how much I love Greek art.

We're Back

We got back late last night from our fun filled Disney World vacation! Oh we had such a good time and it was especially neat to spend the week with my parents and grandma who met us down in Florida. I'm still trying to unpack and recover from the trip, especially the long drive home yesterday, but I thought I'd post a few favorite preliminary pics.