Ten Day Tour

The last ten days may have been the Top Ten days of the year so far. We’ve spent a lot of time together as a family, what with Melanie’s birthday, Easter, general conference, and a cancelation of my Thursday afternoon class all taking place within the same week. It’s been really wonderful. Here’s a rundown of some of the things that have been going on.

Melanie Hits the Big 3-0

As I quipped on my Facebook profile, my days of making out with 20-something girls are over—Melanie turned 30. We spent almost all last week celebrating, to some extent or another. More than anything, we splurged in the food department by eating out a bit, which was nice for Melanie because she is almost exclusively the person to do any cooking or preparing of food in our home. Our big indulgences were Famous Dave’s and Reangthai, a nearby Thai restaurant. We hadn’t tried the latter restaurant before, but we really enjoyed a Thai restaurant we had tried in Atlanta and were hoping for something similar. It wasn’t nearly as fabulous as the Atlanta restaurant, but it was pretty good. Probably not worth the price.

On Melanie’s actual birthday, we got bagels for breakfast at Panera Bread, went to a movie (How to Train Your Dragon, which was the only family-friendly movie of even remote interest to us), went shopping at a variety of places, and had the aforementioned Thai food for dinner. In the midst of it all, we stopped by Lucy & Leo’s Cupcakery, which Melanie had been wanting to try for a long time. Melanie tried a chocolate peanut butter cupcake, Eddie and Peter both had a Cookies n’ Cream cupcake, and I had a carrot cake cupcake. They had a nice texture, some crunchy around the edges, but they weren’t as fantastic as you would hope, especially Melanie’s (unfortunately).

And that was it, basically. The fun didn’t completely stop after Melanie’s official birthday, though. The cupcakes had served as a birthday cake of sorts on Mel’s birthday, but I made her a raspberry cheesecake a couple of days later, which is her traditional birthday cake of choice. We also continued to have really nice meals, even when we were eating at home. One such meal was a decent knockoff of Café Rio’s unbelievably delicious salads, made with beef roast, fresh sprigs of cilantro (mmmm!), freshly made guacamole, and more. ‘Twas muy bueno!


Easter
We had a fairly low-key Easter, but it was still lots of fun. Eddie and Peter both quickly found their Easter baskets, which had some candy and, for fun, some swimming goggles in them. The Easter bunny also left a big bottle of bubbles, a Connect Four game, and some new shirts/ties for Eddie and Peter. I was pleased that Eddie and Peter both wanted to try on their new clothes, even though we weren’t going anywhere right then that would require wearing such fancy clothes. Likewise, they really enjoyed wearing their swimming goggles around the house, even though they weren’t too interested in wearing them yesterday when we went to the swimming pool for the first time this year. Here are some Easter pictures:








Other Random Bits of Fun
Some other fun and/or interesting events of the last week include the following:

• Last Tuesday, Barenaked Ladies released their new album, the first since the departure of Steven Page. BNL remain Melanie’s and my favorite band, and they play significantly into the history of our relationship, so it was really cool that a new album came out the week of Melanie’s birthday. Naturally, I think the new album is great, but it does stand out as one of their most unique albums. That hardly needs to be said, with Steven Page’s conspicuous absence from the band, but it is more than that. I hope to write about it in greater detail sometime in the near future. Then again, every time I’ve said that about something, I haven’t done it, so who knows. You can listen to at least a couple of the band’s new songs via their MySpace page. Check it out.
• Up until a couple of days ago, Edison has never pretended to get married. I know you hear frequently about kids saying they are going to marry their moms, but so far this hasn’t happened to us. Well, Edison surprised me the other day when seemingly out of the blue he wanted to pretend that he and I were getting married. He “drove” us to the place to get married (which is as specific a location as he made it), we held hands, and I even let him put my wedding ring back on my finger. Then there was nothing left to do but spin. I held his hand, and we spun around in the living room for a minute. Kind of funny.
• Probably only Melanie and I can appreciate this one, but I had to laugh when Peter nodded for the first time just a couple of days ago. His way of saying “yes” has changed a lot over the last while, but he’s very consistent in whatever he does. For a while, it was a simple “mmm-hmm,” with the latter syllable quickly rising to a squeak. Then he went through a period of saying “yes,” never “yeah.” Now he always says “yeah,” never “yes.” So, it cracked me up when I asked him something the other day and he just stared at me very somberly and nodded his head, all so seriously. He hasn’t done it since, but we’ll see if it becomes the next trend.