Sneaky...

I have made it a goal with the start of this school year to shed some bad habits. One of which is being late to things.

For the past almost 2 weeks, we have been able to make it to school and work on time or early, every day...I've been feeling so good about that, and my ability to get ready on time, as punctuality has been a lifelong struggle for me.

This morning, it all clicked as to WHY I've been able to do this. I told Richard about these goals not to long ago, and I think he must have thought this one was a REALLY good idea. As I was finishing getting ready this morning, I looked at the clock and it was 7:40am. That's when we try to leave each morning. So I hurridly got everything together, and about 5 minutes later, I was ready to walk out the door. A bit guiltily, I looked at my cell phone clock to see how late we were, and was surprised to see that it was 7:38! What?! Then I figured it out! Richard had set all of the clocks in our house 5-10 minutes later...SNEAKY! He must have really wanted to help me out with this goal of mine.

We've figured out that we can always be "ready" by a certain time, but then there's always those last minute things that we have to do, that we forget to take into account, that always add on those precious minutes. By giving ourselves those few minutes back, hopefully this will help us to keep getting out the door, and being on time for the rest of the school year!

Anniversary Photos

Anniversary Date

Ok, I know I'm late on this, but I think I would be lame if I didn't have some kind of record of our amazing 1st anniversary date!
As I mentioned before, Richard gave me my anniversary present early - the photo shoot. (I'll be including the pictures from that in my next post). But the joy continued into Saturday, the 22nd of August (our official 1 year anniversary)

We decided that sleep was important to us that day, so we indulged ourselves in sleeping in until 11 or 12. It was beautiful. I served Breakfast in bed to Richard - a yummy french toast casserole, and then gave him my present that I'd been working on for a long time... A hard copy of his mission emails, and then a separate book with the emails that we sent to each other on his mission. Not to brag or anything, but it was amazing! I am not gonna lie, I'm really proud of that present, it was a lot of work! And it paid off. We had fun reading the letters in both books, and I know we will enjoy looking back at those in the future, and I hope our children will too.

For our date, Richard wouldn't tell me what we were going to do (if you haven't noticed by now, he takes great joy in surprising me and dragging out the suspense...I love it!). Eventually, we ended up in Santa Barbara (beautiful!) and we spent the rest of the day there.
We first went to the Santa Barbara Catholic Mission - it has been there for over 200 years! It was so old, but very cool!
then we went to State Street - basically the place to hang out. It was fun, its just a huge outdoor mall, with great restaurants and stores. I LOVED it! And Richard actually admitted that he kind of LIKED going shopping there. If that doesn't say something about how amazing it was, I don't know what does. :) After looking at the fun stores there, we went to a yummy Italian restaurant. We had AMAZING pasta, and a delectably delicious dessert. If you have ever had flourless chocolate cake, you know where I'm coming from when I say it was TO DIE FOR!
Then, we walked down to the beach and rented a surrey, and rode around all the beachside paths. I think that was my FAVORITE part of the date. probably because of the creativity and uniqueness of that idea. It was so fun.
After that, it was late, so we went home. Richard told me on the way home that we could watch a chick flick if I wanted, so I was all over that. I was so excited! When we got home, he sat me down and told me to just relax while he got the computer all set up. Then, all of the sudden, the music came on, and pictures started popping up, and I realized that my love had put together the sweetest slide show of our past year together (during his very limited free time). I was so impressed and felt so loved and special. It meant a lot to me that he was willing to sacrifice his free time to do something that would make me so happy.
I'm so grateful for such a fun, loving, unselfish, thoughtful, funny, creative husband!