Happy Birthday, David!

Today is David's birthday! He was fortunate enough to be able to schedule himself off this weekend at church, which freed us up to be able to spend more time together than usual and do some things that we've never done before and others that we always enjoy. It's been a 2-day celebration. Saturday morning we took Allie for a walk to enjoy a beautiful fall morning.


After that we went out for lunch. Since we've been eating healthy lately, trying to avoid all the fattening things we enjoy so much, we decided to do a "taste of" kind of lunch. We made a stop at Pei Wei to split the lettuce wraps appetizer...


And then we continued on to Zantigo's to enjoy the hot chillitos. Yum!

After that, we drove to Minneapolis where we found the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. We'd never been before, but have heard that it's a great place to take pictures. So, we actually planned ahead and brought the tripod. Did I mention how beautiful of a day it was?

Birthday continued...

Following our photo shoot, we headed down to the Mall of America for a little shopping (that turned into more than a little shopping). We enjoyed composing Christmas lists as we meandered the mall. We finished up with dinner at David's favorite (fast food) Mexican restaurant, Q'doba. We used to have one just down the road from us when we lived in Michigan, but now that we live in Minnesota we've had to drive to the west side of the cities to get to one. David was thrilled when the Mall of America gave him a Q'doba for his birthday present!

Later on when we got home, we cooked up some s'mores on the grill (since we never got down to the campfire Friday night). We discovered that if you put the chocolate on the graham cracker on the grill while you toast the marshmallows, the chocolate gets all melty by the time the marshmallows are ready. It's really messy that way, but delicious!

Today has just been a relaxing day. It's kind of rainy and overcast, so just a good day to stay in and curl up in fleece pants and a blankie and watch football. We went to Famous Dave's for lunch to redeem David's birthday certificate for a free desert. FYI the Khalua Brownie Sundae was much more than we could handle.

Back to Weight Watchers tomorrow, but it's been a fun and yummy birthday weekend!

Worship Arts Fall Party

We had a Fall party for the Worship Arts department on Friday night. We did grilled pizzas for everyone. Here's a math problem for you: David made 8 batches of dough. We made 5 pizzas per batch. Melissa made two more batches of dough at the last minute, giving us 5 more pizzas each. How many people were at our party? A LOT! Our grill got quite the workout and was chugging out pizzas 9 at a time until after 8:00. But we had so much fun. We had a fire in the back yard to make s'mores, there was a crockpot of caramel to dip apples, several people got together to play games, and others enjoyed a few rounds of bowling on the Nintendo Wii. It was a great night together and a good opportunity to get to know some of our new volunteers and their families.