Eight

We turned 8 yesterday.

Don't we look it?

Heh.


When we were first married, I didn't really like the newness of it, the adjustment.  I don't like change and upheaval, and I used to think, "I can't wait until we're just 'old shoes'."  And now, well, we're still babies, but the shoes are feeling pretty comfy and broken in.

We decided we needed to have a cheap date to celebrate, because I think we're just not go-out-to-a-fancy-dinner kind of people.  Besides, we're always broke.

So in the afternoon, we started by enjoying the fruits of our marriage-- our cute little boys.  We headed off to the park with some lemonade and a "special treat" that mommy baked for the occasion.  And a banana for Evan, of course.

But real life always intervenes, doesn't it?  We weren't even there 15 minutes when some wasps came out of one of the pieces of playground equipment and stung Jonah on the hand and face.  He was hysterical, of course.  We went to our standby emergency sting remedy of picking some plantain leaves from the grass and chewing them up to put on the stings.  That helped quite a bit, and if it were just his hand, I would have left it at that.  But the other sting was right over the bone at the bridge of his nose, near his eye, and we knew that might swell pretty badly, so we packed up quickly and drove back home.  He cried all the way home, but as long as he held the leaves on, the pain wasn't so bad.  (I'm tellin' ya, that common weed is a miracle cure for stings, praise God!  I know it sounds like an old wives tale, but we've relied on it many times and it works great!)  At home I gave him some homeopathic Ledum (another miracle cure!) and he stopped crying and felt fine after that.  It didn't even swell very much at all.

As long as we were home, I went out and milked the goats a little early so that would be out of the way as we went about our evening.  Then we drove back to town and dropped the boys off to play at a friend's house for the evening.

We recently discovered this great little taco stand, right there in the small town where our church is.  We pretty much never eat out or do fast food, but if we do, this is where we go.  These tacos are the real thing!  (Midwesterners  have no idea what a real taco tastes like.)  These tacos are made by actual Mexican people who know how to do them right. They're just like the tacos we used to get at the migrant-worker-run roach coaches "back home" in Oregon.  I just can't rave enough about them, and the sauce, heaven help me, the sauce.  I could drink it (and burn my ears out), it's that good. I wish I knew how to make taco sauce like that.

Anyway, enough raving.  We got tacos, see?  That's where I was going with that.  Cheap, healthy, and delicious-- prefect for our cheap anniversary date.

Then we argued about discussed where to go for a picnic.

We decided to drive the 35 minutes to a nearby small city so we could go to a waterfall park there, and besides, there's a big hardware store there as well.  Nathan needed to pick up a few things for a job the next day.  Then, as long as we were in the area, we went into Goodwill to get him a couple work shirts (and I found a really cute white maternity shirt, which I would have bought except for the "totally see-through" part.  Hrm.)  So yeah.  Very romantic, no?

We got our errands done quickly, and went to the park.  Where we found that we couldn't get in, because it's only open in the evenings from 8:30 to 11.  It's a lighted, man-made waterfall dealy that is supposed to be really cool, except we've never seen it because we've always been unable to get in for one reason or another.  Phoo.

So we hiked up the hill outside the gates and found a nice spot to spread our picnic blanket and stare up into the branches of this gnarled, old, windswept maple.

...and where we could also look across to this old tree with a very cute, little, barenaked butt.

Oh, how I laughed, and Nathan rolled his eyes.

But we enjoyed our picnic during which we did not have to also put food in the mouths of our ravenous little baby birds and we could talk at leisure about whatever we wanted to.  It was fun, and we were both glad we didn't opt for the standard dinner-and-a-movie date.

And we hiked back down the hill to go get our little birdies, who someone else fed.  They had so much fun, they didn't even miss us!  We should do that more often, obviously...

Eight is good.