FHE or FME?

Family Home Evening has quickly turned into Family Maverick Evening.

Monday Maverick Melanie should be my new name. Feel free to shorten my amazingly awesome alias alliteration to M3.

It takes about 16 minutes round-trip to drive to Maverick from our house, which is plenty of time for our FME lesson. We do simple activities from our Newlywed FHE book and truly enjoy our drive together while talking about real grown up stuff and wishing one day we would actually act like real grown ups. The drive home is much more enjoyable because I have my GIANT "small" cup of FROZEN YOGURT and Dan has his GIANT"giant" soda! Come home and watch Castle. Yes, I'd say FME has become quite succesful!

Happy Birthday Estevan

HAPPY BIRTHDAY WEEK STEVEN DANIEL

I'm glad your birthday was on a Thursday this year. I'm also glad that it was on the first day of school. And on a full day of work. And on a day that we had church meetings until 9. Why would I be glad that your birthday fell on such a day? So that we could celebrate it Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and also the following Wednesday! What a fun week! I made you a card with all the good words written in it, so here I'll just say:

Your hair is brown and so are your eyes

you sing and dance and tell me I'm your prize

You're as tall as a door and smart as a whip

The shirt you wear has a grizzly on it

Your nice and sweet and cute and tough

And made of all that good Radford stuff.

You joke so much it makes me chuckle

I especially liked our cowboy pictures with the buckle

Your number one husband i believe thats true

you make me feel like I'm the best there is for you.

Hope 26 is the best birthday yet

if it's not then I guess it's time for me to fret

I love you trillions you sexy man of mine

Being with you has been awful mighty fine!

Side note: I think I may have come close to perfecting the horrible cursed PIE!

Brigadoon/Phelps Lake

Yes, you've heard me say it before, but we L.O.V.E Jackson! The last time we went we took my beautiful mother along. She had this secret hidden place for us to discover. She used to work at "this place" when she was 18ish and wanted to hike to the same places she used to way waay back then. :) One problem. It doesn't exist anymore! The cabins, the beach house, the bridge, the homes, the road....They are all gone! We hiked high. We hiked low. We hiked all around trying to find it-atleast 6 miles of wandering. Luckily the BEAUTIFUL scenery more than made up for all that walking. We decided that my mom was living in Brigadoon and that we can only return in 100 years. Thanks mom for showing us Phelps lake! We will definitely be returning!

Be jealous!

We have had so many fun adventures and traveled so much while Dan has been out of school! Oh how we hate to see our 7 week break go!

Good news though, Dan planned a 'surprise day date' for me last weekend and it was perfect! We started out at Mesa Falls. (The date we never had because I kept ditching him every time he asked me to go when we were dating haha). la la la, change of subject :) but Steven Daniel packed and made us a picnic (I even got an 'I LOVE YOU MEL' on my sandwich). Could he be any cuter??? Straight from Mesa we headed to Yellowstone again, one of our FAVORITE places!!! We were in awe of all the beauties we kept discovering ....................especially.............the.......... GRZZLY BEAR! And I'm not talking about the type of bears that Dan thinks he sees, (what we know as dogs haha) but this is a real life GRIZZLY BEAR!!! And that is the part that you are suppose to be jealous of! You jealous? :) It walked RIGHT in front of us, we're talking like, less than 15 ft away. I had such weak legs! Luckily we were still in our car, we were about to get out to start hiking down to the lower falls of the Grand Canyon, but were stopped by the bear walking out of the forrest towards our trail. Our timing was perfect!!! It was as if Daniel paid that bear to walk past us as part of the date! We got the O.K. from the ranger that it was safe to hike and so we did. It was beautiful and we wanted to tell everyone we passed that we just saw a grizzly bear and they didn't! haha. But this was by far our most animal packed jellystone trip ever! We stayed there 'til sunset and then ate in West Yellowstone at our new favorite pizza place, 'Wild West.' We had so much fun spending the ENTIRE day together. We played 20 questions the whole time and laughed the whole time! I love being married and I love steven daniel. Oh, and he loves me too! :) Thanks a whole heap for the best 'SURPRISE DAY DATE' ever!! and to the grizzly bear, thanks for not disappointing!

Okay, so that is our wonderful Grizzly bear. Now here is where our date began.

Mesa Falls.

Our picnic

The photographer and his assistant

Then it was off to Yellowstone. These bottom 2 pictures were actually taken the week before our date when we went to the Playmill with my work. We saw Beauty and the Beast and then ate at Wild West! oh it was perfect!

And some of our animal sightings

What a perfect day and I sincerely hope you are all jealous! :)