The Hills Are Alive and The Great 16 Hour Date

Jim and I had the rare opportunity to take an entire day out last weekend while his parents were here. We had been waiting for this weekend for a couple of months and were so excited when it finally got here. (For all of you who live near family, I realize you completely don't understand. However, I'm sure you can imagine how much you'd miss the free babysitting if you lost it! For us, "Free Babysitter" is truly an oxymoron.) We started the day by sleeping in until 7, which was awesome, and made sure we were out the door before 8 (when the girls get up). We headed to Starbucks and enjoyed an extremely long time talking on the outdoor patio, which was an awesome way to start the day. It was so nice to get used to the idea that we had all day together and no agenda to stick to but things that fell under the category of "whatever we want to do, we can do it." Ahhh.

Next we went to Target to start a baby registry for our families. We haven't registered for anything since before Grace was born, and I have to admit, it was fun. We are so excited for our little guy to get here! Jim, who hates to shop, was an incredibly good sport. However, he kept trying to get me to register for completely random things, just because the process was supposed to be "fun", then he made me promise that I wouldn't go back and delete them later. I think he was just testing my threshold for willful submission. For sure he was trying to mess with me- but I showed him and went along with it. I think we're the only expectant couple in America that are registered for silly string, but, whatever. ** Jim, if someone does actually give us silly string, you are so going to get it...** After that we hung out in the mall for a while (we tried to stick to doing anything with air conditioning for most of the day, since we were going to be outside all night). Then we headed to Curry Masala for lunch which was, as always, really good.

We had planned on going to a movie that afternoon. I had assumed we'd be seeing Evan Almighty, Jim had been hoping to see...Transformers. I was a little shocked, but yeah, I get it. Boys who loved Transformers as kids will grow up to be men who flock to see Steven Spielberg make it into a "real" movie. After a solid 25 minutes of previews (which were really violent) the movie began, and it fulfilled all our expectations. It was mentally numbing, full of random inappropriate content for a movie targeted to little boys, and tons of over-the-top violence. And yes, it had really cool special effects that gave Jim the dose of nostalgia he was hoping for. I was so glad when it was over! I had to keep finding reasons to leave the theatre, but I got through it. We chilled out at Borders for a while after the movie, then grabbed a little food at Applebee's before we headed to the park.

Here we are at Hills Alive, an awesome free Christian music festival that packs 40,000+ people in Memorial Park every year. I used to go to music festivals all summer long and wonder why all those old people (a.k.a. anyone that brought a chair so they could just sit down and listen to the music all day) even came, since if you weren't going to hang out in the mosh pit you might as well stay home. I am now happily one of those old people. Well, I can't get too hard on myself for judging all of them, since at the time I'd never experienced pregnancy.




Here's Bebo Norman, who I love so much we named our dog after him. You'll notice that while we're not standing next to the stage, we were very, very close to being in the standing section, making us slightly cooler than the people sitting extremely far away from the stage in their chairs all day... Jeremy Camp played after Bebo and although we love him, my pregnant self needed to get back to some air conditioning, so halfway through his set we trekked back to our mini van and headed to Bostons before we went home for the night.

It was so awesome to spend the day just hanging out. It went by (as always) way too fast. We loved having a whole day set apart for just "being" together-- something highly valuable to us and very hard to come by in this season of our lives.