Happy Anniversary!

This week Murray and I celebrated our first anniversary. We both took the day off work and spent the day celebrating our love for one another with various and random activities.

* We went to IHOP for breakfast. I ordered the 2x2x2 (two eggs, two sausage links, two pancakes) although I was only allowed to eat 1x1x1. It was an enjoyable breakfast.

* Then we went up to SLC to go to the Tracy Aviary. Fall is my favorite season and Monday was the most beautiful fall day. You could smell the trees in the air. The temperature was absolutely perfect. And so Murray and I enjoyed a good walk around the aviary, checking out the birds. I think that my favorite part was when we found a little burrowing owl in its home. I guess its home looked kindof like a little stage anyway, and Murray and I stood outside and enjoyed the fact that the owl was looking at us. And then we began competing for its attention. We were both dancing, making faces, and making noises to see who the owl would look at the most. He just pivoted his little owl head back and forth between the two of us the whole time. I figure he's got it pretty good. We had to walk around the aviary to see all the different species. He just gets to sit still in his home and all the crazy types of humans come and parade themselves in front of him.


* We had lunch at Tucanos at the Gateway. That is a very carb-friendly restaurant, although I almost cried when I had to pass up the grilled pineapple (my favorite) and the deep-fried bananas. Two more months... two more months...

* I had planned a stop at Ben's Cookies, which is a store I only go to in the fall because of their seasonal pumpkin chocolate cookie which is comparable to no other food in the world. Do not even THINK about the generic grocery store pumpkin chocolate chip cookies right now, because that is SO not what this wonderful cookie is. I had budgeted so that I could have half of one of these suckers and save the other half for another day. So we went in and found out that they no longer make them AT ALL because apparently they were too expensive to make. I officially hate Ben's Cookies now. How could they do that to me?

* We drove back to Provo and went to a matinee showing of The Changeling. Is it just me, or does that sound like a horror movie? Anyway. I guess it is a type of horror movie, especially for a woman like me who's about to have a baby. (It's about a woman whose son goes missing and five months later the police return a boy to her who is not her son and close the case, even though she wants to keep fighting to get her real son back.) It was an excellent movie.

* We went to Bombay House, which is where we met, and enjoyed a dinner that was not quite what we had there the first time. When the diabetes goes away, I can enjoy my chicken coconut kurma and mango lassi again!

* For our evening entertainment we went to our prenatal class where we got to learn all about labor and delivery. And we saw a birthing videos that showed four different births. I wasn't actually nervous about the delivery before I saw the video. Now... Anyway. What cracks me up about the movie is that it's a BYU production and, like, you could TOTALLY KNOW whose birth you're watching. Needless to say, I'm not going to sign up to have my birthing experience documented and show the entire world my stretch marks and private areas. I mean, seriously. After the birthing videos, we had a tour of the facilities. We're pretty excited.

* At home again, we opened our gifts to each other. Murray really outdid himself this year. This is our "paper" anniversary, and a couple artists couldn't ask for anything better. Murray did a mixed media classic painting of me in kindof a Marie Antoinette sort of era. He was inspired by a picture from our vacation this summer where I accidentally was striking a classic pose. It's so freaking cool. And in addition to that, he also painted me an enlargement of a postcard that I'd gotten in Italy and that I've always loved but that I've always wanted to be bigger! (AND he got classic toys for our baby AND he got me a book from my childhood that we'd talked about recently.) I made him a commemorative poster of our wedding day, but I'll have to wait to take a picture of it and get it up on the blog because I ran into some assembly difficulties.



All in all, it was a perfect way to celebrate our perfect day last year! This year has been great and I'm lucky to be married to Murray. I think that the best way to celebrate our anniversary is to spend the whole day together because that's what I want to do every day anyway!