This year to celebrate our 5th wedding anniversary we went to dinner at Cucina Toscana and then spent the night at Anniversary Inn.

Dinner was a lot of fun and expensive BUT amazingly delicious. Cucina Toscana is considered one of Salt Lake’s finest restaurants and has received numerous awards. If you are looking for the best Italian food in Salt Lake, this is the place to go. I look forward to going there again.

We have spent every anniversary so far at Anniversary Inn. It’s a nice bed and breakfast with themed rooms. Our stay this time wasn’t the best (the room was cold and our upstairs neighbors played FM 100 blaring loud for 3 hours in the middle of the night) but we still had fun.

Joey spoiled me this year with anniversary gifts. He bought me two cookbooks from America’s Test Kitchen:

and a Garmin Nuvi 1200:

What a happy surprise. Thanks honey!

I thought I would share some things I am thankful for:

• My relationship with Christ
• My husband – he loves me for who I am and puts up with me
• My family – they are always there for me
• My job(s) – a source of income and enjoyment (for the most part)
• My house – a place to call home
• My health – I am healthy and I hope I never take that for granted
• My Grandma – she has taught me so much but really taught me to love Jesus
• My friends – it’s always fun to get together with friends
• My hairdresser -I am thankful that I can afford to have my hair colored and cut
• Foodnetwork – fun to watch and a great way to get new recipe ideas
• Facebook – a great way to stay connected to friends and family
• My cats – especially when they curl up on my lap

I hope you have a great Thanksgiving!

This weekend Joey and I attended a marriage conference titled “Weekend to Remember” by Family Life. I’ve heard about this conference before (they come to Utah frequently) and have always been interested in going. Who wouldn’t want to go to a conference titled “Weekend to Remember”? Well, I’m pretty sure Joey was not as excited about the conference as I was but he willingly went (without any electronic devices except his AT&T Go Phone – a large sacrifice on his part) and we had an amazing weekend.

I learned a lot. It was an emotional weekend. It was a fun weekend. It was nothing I thought it was going to be but was definitely worth the money and time. I would recommend this conference to anybody married. I would recommend it to happily married couples, newly married couples, couples who have been married for years, couples looking to take their marriage to the next level, remarried couples and even couples thinking about divorce. If you are married, you need to go!

It was a great weekend and hard to come back to reality but hopefully now we are on a better path to marital bliss (even with all of reality’s distractions!).

Today I went to get my hair cut and I told my hair stylist I needed a change. She didn’t have time to color my hair (and I didn’t have money to color my hair either) so we looked through some magazines and decided to layer my hair a little bit more.

I love getting new haircuts. Too bad I have trouble letting my hair grow past my shoulders.

On July 21, Joey and I had our pictures taken at the International Peace Gardens in Salt Lake City by Dave Ward from Remember4Ever.

I especially like how Dave did this picture:

I love that it’s on an angle and the lighting is perfect. He took so many great pictures it was hard to choose but here are copies of some of the other pictures we bought:

And this one is probably my favorite:

I would totally recommend Remember4Ever for your next family picture. They are a great family to work with and their pricing is very reasonable. We will definitely be calling them in the future!

Joey and I went on a short Baja Mexico cruise this month. We left the Thursday before Easter and came home on Easter Sunday. It was a nice spring break vacation.

It was windy when we embarked from San Diego (can you tell from this picture?) and it stayed windy pretty much the entire cruise.

The staff on the ship were great. Our room steward did a great job tidying up our room every day and night. We especially liked the towel animals he left us:

Our headwaiter was great and the food was delicious. However, there was more silverware than I knew what to do with on the table:

We stopped at Mexico the second day of our trip. Joey and I took a shuttle with a very entertaining tour guide to a town called La Bufadora to see the blowhole. It was very interesting. Joey actually got wet trying to get pictures/video of it. When I saw that the ground was wet I didn’t want to get too close.

On our walk to and from the blowhole, we walked through a strip of little shops where everybody wanted you to come in their shop. I wish I would have taken some pictures or video of this. It was very, very interesting. Every shop we walked buy they’d say:

“Ma’am (or sir) just a mexican minute to look at my store. You don’t have to buy anything, just look…you need a watch? look at these watches…”

They sold mostly jewelry, watches, purses, wallets, churros, fresh fruit and candy. Oh, and you can’t forget all the pharmacies that were there. They handed us lists of medications we could buy without a prescription. Just crazy.

As it was getting closer to the time our shuttle was leaving, we started telling the people that we didn’t have much time so, they proceeded to say:

“Just a mexican second to look at my store”

They just wouldn’t stop! Ahh! Anyway. I ended up buying a nice shell necklace for $10. Not bad I guess. We had authentic mexican food – carne asada taco, fish taco and a shrimp taco – before getting on the shuttle. Yummy!

After we saw the blowhole we went to the oldest winery in Mexcio and tasted a couple of wines. They were delicious. A nice couple at our table took this picture for us:

After we got back to the ship we changed into our bathing suits hoping to get in the hot tubs (since it was too cold to go swiming) and they ended up being full for quite a long time. So, this was about as much as we did in our bathing suits – sat by the window and had a margarita.

That night was formal night. It was fun to get dressed up and go to a nice dinner. They even sang happy birthday to me.

The next day was our “Fun Day a Sea”. They had different activities all day long. So, we went to a towel folding class. It was a lot of fun to learn how they make all those towel animals. Now when we have guests we can leave them a towel animal on their bed Here is Joey making the puppy dog:

I think he liked making the elephant the best:

Here are a just couple pictures of us on the ship:

Sunday morning we had breakfast and then sat on deck for two hours waiting to debark. We were the last group of people to debark. I think that was the most sun I got the entire cruise.

All in all, it was a great cruise. I think my next cruise will be longer, warmer (Caribbean maybe?) and with more people. Anybody interested? In a couple of years of course.