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when in doubt, shut up

By on March 13, 2012 in "monthaversary", Costa Rica, Debt Free!

as I mentioned, our monthaversary was on Saturday. I’ve always tried to keep at least notes of the main details of all of our monthaversaries, but I can’t say that I haven’t missed a few in the past 102 months. I think I started out with a Word document and now I have a note in Evernote, but I’ve been thinking that I wanted to try to start penning some of them here as well. {cue talking in the third person, kind of.}

abuelo and abuela were here, so they were able to baby-sit the kids along with Krista and Eddy, which meant we could go out just the two of us! we did a horrible job of capturing the evening, however. we really need to get better at that.

we went to a mall first because Christina had always intended when getting her nose pierced years ago to have a ring, not a stud, and thought maybe she could finally get something. success! only $3.

we then drove around a bit, which Christina didn’t mind at all because she got to sit in the front seat and see out as opposed to her usual perch in the back seat holding Maverick. we tried going to a kind of touristy little area that is supposed to look old, but it was completely DEAD because I think 8:00 was too early for people to be out. it was the ODDest feeling, though, like being in some sort of weird time warp where everything was standing still and we were the only ones alive or something. we didn’t stay long at all because we were hungry and didn’t find anything worth bothering with. which apparently was a good thing as Eddy told us later that there are shootouts there and such. lovely.

thus we were driving around again, discussing what we felt in the mood for and assessing the cost/worth ratio in our minds. Mr. D tends to get a little annoyed and sometimes momentarily depressed in these moments, wondering when we’ll ever NOT have to think so carefully about these things in order to maintain our debt-free lifestyle. Christina tends to think about all the people who would be happy to eat a banana peel, let alone have the extreme gift of going to a restaurant at all… Mr. D always feels this is a bit self-righteous of her. Christina is still trying to figure out the best way to handle such situations… (when in doubt, shut up, right? easier said than done) thankfully that whole scenario was not full-blown in this instance :)

in any case, we ended up at a cute little restaurant that thankfully produced some major D-LISH, which we will be happily reproducing in our little ghetto kitchen when we get back to the US. (actually, Mr. D already tried it here today, with mixed, but still very yummy, results)

since you really can’t tell from the picture, you’ll just have to come over and try it yourself to know and understand the stomach-pleasure-inducing goodness.

upon finishing up we decided to head back, but not before snagging some Nutella and crackers to sneak into our room (already had the PB at home). yes, we are totally working against ourselves in our plan to become amazingly fit and attractive.

we sabotaged ourselves with food while watching Downton Abbey, which we only got around to starting on here in Costa Rica, and now we can no longer find Season 2 anywhere. dull.

Maverick woke up sad that he had not gotten to say goodnight to us, so we went in and cuddled him back to sleep. I treasure this very short phase of our kids’ lives…

cue scary picture of us – the only other one from the evening – the end of it all, about to ingest sugar = #fail.

great, now I’m hungry again. stupid stomach.

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monthaversary Costa Rica style

By on March 10, 2012 in "monthaversary", Costa Rica, fyi, traveling

rumor has it we’re actually going out tonight! grandparents here means more freedom,
like somehow abuelo got stuck feeding Maverick last night :)

our first monthaversary on this trip to Costa Rica was the day after we got here, so we had a nice, quiet night in after the kids went to bed. it looked kinda like this:

that reminds me that we are behind on Mike & Molly. the take down of MegaVideo has greatly affected our online watching abilities. we’ve still managed to mostly keep up with American Idol (it’s only the second season we’ve actually watched) because we find HeeJun rather humorous.

otherwise we have been limited to Hulu and Netflix, the latter of which we just let charge us again for another month while we’re here. still feel like it’s a bit of a racket. if nothing else there is something completely whacked about finding stuff on there – it seems like half of the stuff you wouldn’t know was there unless you happen to see it recommended below another show or if you know exactly what you want and search specifically. I maintain that it is lame. even with Hulu and Netflix we’ve been having to use a virtual private network to trick them into letting us watch stuff, not being in the states and all. Netflix will let you in, but just severely limit what you can see. thank goodness for Hotspot Shield.

so anyway, we’ll see what fun things are on the horizon for tonight.

you can check out the back story on our monthaversary practices here.

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Keeping Special Traditions, Even When Life Gets Hectic

By on December 28, 2011 in "monthaversary", Intentionally Inconvenient, Lifestyle, us, ♥ l.o.v.e.

let’s have a little chit-chat about making and keeping special traditions. seems like a good time of year for such a conversation, no? who wouldn’t like that? perhaps green, hairy, grinch type people I guess. if that’s you then click away quickly because I’m about to give you a glimpse into a mushy gushy little tradition of ours that just might make your toes curl in disgust.

obviously you can have traditions with one other person, a group of people, and even just with yourself. traditions have a way of bonding people together and adding little bits of comfort and fun to what can sometimes be an otherwise downer day, or week.

the problem is when we let life get in the way and the fun little traditions start to fall by the wayside. then one day you look up and realize that life is running you over and you’re just trying to survive it.

well, somewhere along the way I realized that there are two fool-proof things that protect you from this potential tragedy! lucky you, I’m going to share :) it’s actually rather simple:

  1. lower your expectations [and]
  2. COMMIT!

I realize this sounds like a. a recipe for mediocrity, or b. a way to zap the fun out of it with legalism. BUT the funny thing is, if you get the right mindset, these two things balance each other out and work together to make awesome MEMORIES :)

Mr. D (aka Tico) and I
have had a once a month standing date ever since we first started dating.
(yep, there’s definitely a story behind that shirt – it has yet to be recorded, but it has something to do with a dare)

it took us long enough to become an official couple that we really wanted to celebrate it regularly and we just had our 100th monthaversary this month! that works out to 8 years and 4 months and we haven’t missed one yet.

now that I write it out, I’m kind of amazed.

but really, it just shows how well the method works.

we knew that if we didn’t commit to a specific day every month we would be scrambling around trying to reschedule all the time so that we could have the perfect date night, which sounded like an inevitable death sentence for our celebrations of “us”.

at the same time, we knew it was completely impractical to expect life to align to our ideal plans with any sort of regularity. I mean, sometimes you have babies the day before and are still in the hospital, ya know? special date nights are just not the same when you’re soaking those ever so attractive mesh “new mommy diapers” with blood… it is what it is, kids.

(this particular monthaversary was the first one we went out by ourselves after having our first child.
might have been a wee tiny bit horny…)

so we decided early on that the key was to keep that day every month sacred with the policy of not scheduling anything else. BUT when life DID unavoidably happen, to just make sure to do something a little special and out of the ordinary, even if it was only for an hour. this tends to be our fallback on those days things just aren’t ideal.

this little tradition of ours has worked out very well for us and has been a catalyst for making and keeping lots of other fun traditions as a family. (which I’ll be writing about over time – I only recently started up blogging again after one of those momentous life occasions that makes you take a step back and reevaluate what you’re doing)

so what kinds of traditions do you already have? are you going to start any new ones in the coming year? I’d love to hear about them! pop over and visit us if you’d like, maybe catch a few rays of sunshine from Costa Rica as we move down there in two weeks for the rest of the winter :)

Happy Holidays

from our family to yours!

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on days in which we all wear black

By on November 11, 2011 in "monthaversary", Intentionally Inconvenient, stuff we do

after we got dressed yesterday we realized we were all wearing black shirts. we (ok, mostly I) felt like that called for a picture. I really think if you are coordinating without even trying it a picture just HAS to happen.

this was taken at the end of a rather eventful day filled with shots, grocery shopping, and passport updating. I’ll let you guess which of those two were on our list of things to get done before our (Lord willing) upcoming escape to Costa Rica this winter. Someone seemed to be a little more affected by the shots than the other, how much of that was a mind game is hard to know for sure, but there was a lot of subsequent hobbling around.

if everything works out we will be taking this little cutie with us on our winter adventures, so you’ll likely be seeing a lot more of her before long =) she doesn’t know I’m posting this pic of her, but I saved it for just such a time as this!

yesterday also happened to be our monthaversary .

when we started officially dating we decided to celebrate every month (it was a bit of a journey to finally get to that point, so celebration was in order – you’ll be able to read about it here when I finally get around to writing it all out =)
anyway, we started dating on August 8, 2003, so for September 2003-April 2004 we celebrated on the 8th of every month by doing something interesting.
after we got married our day changed to the 10th.
it is one of our little “intentionally inconvenient” practices.
it would often be much more convenient to do something special on a day other than when the 10th happens to fall on any given month, but we knew that if we didn’t choose inconvenience over what sometimes seemed easier that our special tradition would be attacked by the realities that life always has a way of dishing out and before long we would miss a month here and then several months there.

just like anything else in life, it’s the small concessions that are the great undoing =)

while we embrace certain inconveniences, we are also highly practical.
this means not every 10th is some big eventful date night.
I mean we’ve had sick kids on the 10th.
life just happens. consistently.
so sometimes we have to get creative with our “special”. and that’s ok!
it’s good to be creative, and it’s good to appreciate the simple things in life.

last night was one of those simple nights – after the kids went to bed and after David finished helping a client with some emergency tech support, we watched ShayCarl’s beard get shaved off (gross twist with the pencil in the eye, completely uncalled for, IMO!) and the last 2 episodes of ManUp! which we find a little humorous so far. during this time we ate many yogurt covered raisins. I don’t know why, but I’ve always loved those.

the Aldi ones are probably the best =) it’s nice to feel a tiny bit healthier while pigging out on junk food. I realize this is pretty much completely in my head…

in any case, it’s about just being together doing something we enjoy and just being us.
mostly it’s always nice to have an excuse not to be working for once and get to stuff our faces with junk food on a day that isn’t Sunday =) we’re pretty simple like that…

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long time no nothing

By on September 11, 2006 in "monthaversary", fyi, us

WOE!!! That is the longest we have gone without writing anything and that is sad!!! (to me, if no one else) I’m really not sure why… oh, actually, I do have a bit of a clue – when things annoy me I tend to avoid them. I really, really, REALLY want this thing to get “fixed” and it really, really frustrates me that it doesn’t happen, so that means that I avoid looking at it :-) and it’s kinda hard to write in it with my eyes closed. Sooo. 

Let’s see. Yesterday was another monthaversary. We had our last team leader meeting for youth group – woohoo! Although wouldn’t you know it that as soon as we’re “free” then I start actually enjoying it more?!!! Oh the irony. Didn’t that happen to you, too, Rhonda? So I figure that we can still help out here and there… Point is, we couldn’t go out for lunch as it was a lunch meeting. Then David’s little 3rd grade soccer team was supposed to have a game, but it rained. We wouldn’t normally want to miss a game – it’s fun stuff – but this meant that we could start our celebration right after our meeting instead of waiting until evening! So we went to Starbucks and got coffee and walked around downtown with it. We explored lots of art and an awesome kitchen/gourmet food store that we will most assuredly visit again!!! Oh the amazing things you can buy with money. LOTS of money. I do feel that we could never be excessive in what we buy, though – it just doesn’t make sense to me to buy more than you “need” when there are so many people starving and whatnot. So then we went to the park and napped a bit, and then to Olive Garden – I just loooove their all-you-can-eat soup/salad. I always get the minestrone cause I just don’t love sausage and often not all that fond of hamburger either. Anyway, David was happy because they had the all-you-can-eat pasta bowl, too, right now and good grief they should just ALWAYS have that!!! He could have tried something different every time, if he could have eaten more than one plate. Duh. The waitress said some actually do… I wonder about their physique. I myself only managed two bowls of salad and one bowl of soup. How I wanted more. Oh yeah, and some breadsticks. I’ve never been overly impressed with those, but I do like to dip them in leftover salad dressing. The evening was finished out with a game of Myst. Well, we played it, we didn’t actually beat it yet. We had started playing it back when we were dating and not since. We couldn’t pick back up from that saved game cause we couldn’t really remember what we were doing, strangely enough. Anyway, that was so fun-ly realistic back in the day! Fun times, next month we will be half-way to five years. That’s a nice way to look at it. 

A cricket crawled on my foot again, but this time it was a baby and I was just slightly peeved. It wasn’t in the car, though, thank goodness. Flies have been pestering me silly all day. They only like to land on my computer screen, myself, or my purse, none of which I’m particularly inclined to smack guts all over. Stupid things. 

 

Just FYI we’re still exercising, yay us! though it doesn’t seem to be helping me too much…

Oh, we watched the OSU game on Saturday – duh! And that was nice. Right before half-time I thought it was going to be an interesting game! And then they scored again… David really doesn’t like “interesting” games. He prefers to be bored to tears with high leads the whole time. I think interesting is maybe ok with other teams. Just not OSU? Probably. But still, I prefer interesting. I do enjoy the time, though. I think you just might be graced by a David post this week, but don’t hold your breath :-)  

 

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