Sunday, May 24, 2009

Valentines Day

So I'm playing catch up with the blog. I know it's almost June, but I need to back track a bit and get caught up one all the "moments" that I haven't posted! I have this need to be chronological, so I'm jumping back to Februrary to get bring myself to June eventually!
Valentines Day is a special day in our house. Even though this holiday is typically for romantic love, I have enjoyed making this day a day I can show love to my girls as well as my husband. I think Valentines Day should be about taking time to tell those special people in our life how much we love them!

During the afternoon, Damon took the girls down the street to get their nails painted. I was envisioning a quick paint job and they'd be back in a half hour or so. An hour and a half later, they returned to show me their fingernails AND toe nails painted. After viewing the pictures, I realized they had gotten full spa pedicures and manicures, complete with nails painted and little white flowers on all the nails. Wow, what a treat from Daddy, because mommy wouldn't have paid for all that (I humbly admit to a bit of a Jon and Kate plust eight moment of getting a fairly annoyed at him spending that much money on the girls since they are still quite young, but later apologized. How can you be mad at a guy for wanting to spoil his little sweet girls a bit and making a fun Valentine memory?). They felt very special and loved by their daddy!
Under the dryer
The finished product
Beautiful nails girls!

For the past two years, I have made home made valentines cards/poems for Damon and the girls. I am certainly no poet, but they seem to enjoy me making silly poems for them to express my love for them. I hope I have enough creativity to continue this tradition! This year, I made a special dinner (notice I didn't say gourmet dinner). I made the girls favorite dish, chicken puffs. I tried to think of other things I could make that would be either pink or red or heart shaped and came up with coloring apple sauce pink and also made chocolate dipped strawberries. For dessert, we made rice krispie treats and cut them out in heart shapes and decorated with red hots. We got to eat in the dining room with candles and no one got burnt! We had a great evening together!

Our days of matchy matchy are coming to an end, but I couldn't resist one last possible matchy opportunity. For Valentines Day, I got the girls matching shirts and took a few pictures to make cards out of. They indulged me for a couple posing pictures

So cute!

I threw in these last two pictures just for fun. Some of our favorite books are The Little Critter Books and Megan was attempting to duplicate his little standing pose that he does in the beginning of the books...I thought it was funny!

To Cabo and Back with no Swine Flu

Well, here I am, back to real life. Obviously we decided to go. It was not an easy decsion, but we weighted all the facts and decided we were going to go for it. Can I just tell you I'm soooooo glad we went. We were VERY diligent about washing our hands and wiped down our airplane seat and our entire condo unit. We could see that MANY others decided to cancel. It was quite slow down there. We didn't mind, we had a great time! I brought masks, gloves, airborne, vitamins, my own hand soap, hand sanitizers and used all but the masks and gloves. A few people wore them on the plane and most of the employees at the Cabo airport wore them but other than that, we didn't see any!
For those of you that facebook and blog, these might be a repeat, but when I'm having a bad day or when the rain comes back, I will go to my happy place and remember what a fun and relaxing trip we had (sigh...........). So there's your warning...I'm posting way more pictures that I should but when you travel with another couple, there are sooo many more photo ops! Speaking of travel partners, thank you Michael and Lisa for being such great travel partners. Laid back, go with the flow, just here to have fun....that's what I like! Also a HUGE shout out to the greatest husband ever. He gave me the BEST gift that week (besides just going, that in an of itself was HUGE), he handled EVERYTHING! All the money, all the paperwork, all the documents and I just got to me an arm decoration for the week, it was heavenly! It was a TRUE vacation from normal life!!

So here we are on our first day in Cabo. We are not at our resort, we are just finishing up with a time share presentation. Yes, we stooped that low for free stuff. I have to say we did not go looking for this. Time share sales are a HUGE business down there and it's very competitive to even get people to the presentations. We stepped off the plane and were bombarded immediately with sales reps. I tried to steer Damon clear of them, but he had free golf on his mind, so he "went to work" so to speak. Don't feel bad for these people, because you see, 8 years ago, we were the "suckers" that bought down there, so ever since then, we have NO problem saying no and since they hounded us in the first place just to attend, we figured, why not?? So that was the airport scene. Then we checked into our resort and were heading out the lobby and Damon wanted to stop to "activate" our free drink ticket. Before I could intercede because I knew it was a ploy to get us to attend their presentation, he was at the desk and the lady was VERY intent on getting us to THEIR presentation, so what do you do? Yep, you go to both and see how much free stuff you can score: Between the two couples we got $400 cash so the guys could go golfing, a dinner cruise for four, a massage, and $400 credit for our resort restaurants (there were four to choose from). I thought that was a pretty good haul for 5 hours of "work" don't you??


Finally done with the presentation....let's get to the sun!!!


Here's a view of the main lobby from our "wait for the shuttle" spot. Lots of pictures taken while we waited. Kind of a down side to that resort. It's built into a hill, so it's quite steep from the bottom to the top. Getting around the resort is easiest by golf cart shuttle, so we waited quite a bit!
Our second night down there we went in search for the bonfire at the sister resort next to ours. Apparently there was NO ONE down there enjoying the bonfire so they turned it off and even after we pleaded and begged they still would not turn it back on! This is the best picture of my spray tan face. I thought I had a great idea of spray tanning before we left so I'd alreadyhave some color on my when it was 90 degrees out and I wanted to wear my sundress or shorts. Well, it was a little darker than I would have liked AND I forgot the whole pool factore and how the chemicals will fade the tan quicker and since it was HOT, we were in the pool a lot, so note to self, better to skip the spray tan next time!

Ahhhhh, relaxation!! Hey honey you look HOT!! He dropped 20 lbs from January to May pretty much just by modifying food choices and portions. Way to go!!!!

Lovin the sky pool. This pool was at the top of the resort, great views! They closed this pool mid week due to low occupancy...sad, we loved having it to ourselves.

Our attempt at the "Oh what a feeling", you remember the old Toyota commercials?? So, this pool also closed mid week...check out all the empty chairs!

More pool pics...you can tell where we spent most of our time!

Making our way back up the hill in the golf cart!!

Out for dinner at Mi Casa....our last mask sighting for the week...we thought it was funny!

We had the place to ourselves basically. The Marachi band played a really good Santana song!

Hello friend....so glad you guys could join us!

The boys at Hemingways. It was a really cool cigar bar. Cubans are big down there and they "needed" one for their golf day!

The wait staff wasn't very busy so we had lots of opportunities for foursome pics!

The infamous "free" golf game

Our sunset dinner cruise. The boat had probably around 40 people on it and my estimate is that it could have held around 150, but again, we made the best of it and enjoyed the lovely sunset and nice people we met! The lady that took this pictures was so funny, I think Michael was making a joke and asked if she could get "our boat" in the picture with us. She took him seriously, so here is a pic of us with our "boat" in the background.

It's an up close pic of "our boat" nice huh?....notice the helipcopter on the back of it???

The much anticipated sunset picture on the sunset cruise!

I've been on enough of these to know better than to wear a poofy dress....guess I forgot again. I ended up tying a knot in the side of the dress to keep me from giving the guests more than they bargained for on the trip!

Down at the beach! We only went in the ocean water once. The waves a had a wicked strong undertow and almost took me out a couple times. I felt much better pool side!

Out to dinner one night...Lisa thought my dress was a nice accent to the wall art!

Stayed in and enjoyed a game of cards!

Enjoying our last evening in Cabo. I think we started planning our next trip over dinner! We decided both couples passed the "test" and we'd go again together!

Last moonlit picture.....

Last group photo as we loaded up with our suitcases to go check out

Last few minutes to soak in sun from the lobby deck

Our view from the lobby deck

Last pic of us in Cabo...thank you sweetie for the best week ever! Happy anniversary!

At the Portland airport...Lisa's family brought her flowers for Mother's day....how sweet!

Speaking of sweet....oh how I missed my sweet girls!!! We were sooo happy to see them!

Grandma helped the girls make welcome home animals out of bath towels and they were waiting on our bed when we came home. Thank you Grandma and Grandpa for taking such good care of our most prized possessions!

That's all folks!! If you've lasted this long in this post, bless you! If you haven't, I understand! Great trip and Great to be back home!