Fourth Anniversary, a fun project, and Invitation to a Welcomed Sealing

The interesting thing about our Anniversary falling on December 30th is that it is also a time of reflection and determination to become bigger and better people. Sarah shared a post from Facebook with me of a woman that goes through a New Years Resolution routine in which she reflects on the previous year and makes goals for the upcoming year. We discussed the highs and lows of 2021 and what we want to accomplish in 2022, and it was fun and exciting.

For our anniversary, we discussed going to our usual restaurant of choice for the last two years, Pappadeauxs, but we thought it might be pricy with the shipping for fish going up and the restaurant being primarily a seafood restaurant. So, I asked Sarah to surprise me when she told me her friend had told her about a great place to go.

She drove me to the Scottsdale Fashion Center and took me to a restaurant called Yard House. The service was amazing and the food was very good. We ordered two appetizers and two entrees, and they gave us an anniversary dessert. We got a Brookie. The food was very good.

We then went into the mall for a few minutes to Croft and Barrow, one of the same stores we went to on our honeymoon, albeit in a different location. Sarah got a call from Sabina and we made our way to Michaels and Hobby Lobby for the next phase of our day: working on Sarah's birthday calendar project. We ended up ordering new boards and getting paint markers. Sarah also called the bishop and he volunteered at Sarah's request to help us write birthday on 15 boards when we finally get them in a couple weeks.

We travelled home and began working on the project. From the previous night (I had taken an occurrence day off) we had painted all the tiles Yellow, Dark Blue and Light Blue. For the rest of the evening we used the paint markers to write the names of each member of the family and the birthday number 11 times. We ran out of ink and we had made some errors along the way, mainly because I put Spider-man Homecoming on the Bluray player that I got for Christmas. The previous day we watch Batman Begins on the Bluray to keep us entertained.

The evening of our anniversary, we went to the temple to witness Hannah and Steven Mertz's sealing, having been invited the Sunday before by them in a card. It was really neat to be able to attend a live sealing session on the day of your actual wedding anniversary. How often does that happen? Not too often. They had hot chocolate and cookies at the adjacent park from the temple right after the ceremony and we were able to really meet them and their other friends. It was quite a lovely experience.