Happy Anniversary

Friday, July 25th, was our 16th anniversary. It's hard to believe it's been so many years. We're starting to be like the commercials of those older couples where the sense of past is evident. Our kids are now 9 and 6 and there's definitely some wake behind our boat.

When I got home from work on Friday night, Helen and the kids were freshly bathed after returning from one of the nearby county water parks. Helen was dressed up and had a nice dinner ready. It was almost like Ward and June Cleaver, except Ward wore suits to work and I wear shorts and sandals.

After dinner, we all finished watching Rocky and a family favorite - Sugarland at SummerFest which we recorded off of the MHD channel. Before we got HD tv, my friends with HD told me that they rarely watch non-HD anymore. Now, we're the same way.

On Saturday, I played tennis early and the family went on a run\walk. The rest of the day was my favorite kind of day - uninterrupted organization. There were no other kids coming over and bothering us and no prescheduled activities, so we had a productive day of getting things done.

We went through all the boy's clothes to figure out what we need to buy for the new school year. We got the boy's rooms decluttered and I fixed a number of nagging things around the house.

Today, we plan on attacking the playroom - the mother of all clutter. The garage sale\giveaway that I've been pushing for the last 2 years may finally get done. I really wanted it to be one of Helen's goals for the Summer, but she gets overwhelmed by unwieldy things like that, so I'll have to keep inching it towards the finish line.

On Saturday night, Helen and I went out for an anniversary dinner. We have a reciprocal babysitting agreement with a neighbor, which is great. We setup the babysitting over a week ago, but struggled as the day approached to figure out what to do. We wanted to go out to a nice dinner, but nothing was really appealing to us. We finally settled on a restaurant near us called Grace 17:20.

I'm notoriously anti-foofoo, so I was a little skeptical going in. But everything was so good. The ambiance and the service were great. The ingredients were obviously fresh and the flavors were wonderful. We decided that there's a difference between going to a nice restaurant where the food is prepared by a "real" chef as opposed to a seemingly nice restaurant with somewhat expensive food prepared by an $8 an hour cook.