We are enjoying some wonderful time with family in Utah! We are here for two reunions and some summer fun. I'll write about the reunions in the next couple of posts, but I wanted to post about our 10th anniversary and the 4th of July before I forget.
Our 10-year Anniversary was on July 6. Jared's mom came up to watch the kids in the afternoon, and we had her bring her paddle board so we could have a lil paddle board date on two of the pretty lakes close to our house: Roesiger and Bosworth. This has been a Washington bucket list item for a while. The lakes here are gorgeous. One of the lakes is a 10-minute drive from our house, which has us considering an inflatable paddle board purchase. In theory it seems like it could be dreamy to wake up early and watch the sun rise from the middle of the lake before heading back and starting my day with the kids. In theory.
When we got home it was time to get everything packed into our car and drive 14 hours down to Utah. So, maybe not the most extravagant of 10-year anniversaries, but we had a lot of fun together and will be doing some sort of trip soonish to celebrate. If we didn't have a nursing baby we would have done a bigger trip on our anniversary, but with the timing, the plan is now a shorter trip once Alice is weaned or nearly weaned. The main goal this week was to celebrate a wonderful decade together, and we really did. I won't get too sappy here but I did a lot of happy crying the day before our anniversary writing out all the things I love about Jared. He really is a special guy. Got me a great catch 10 years ago and I feel very lucky and happy about the life we've created together.
We reflected on our last decade together and talked about what we want our next 10 years together to look like. We realized that these next 10 years will be the ONLY decade of having all our kids living at home for the entire decade. It was wild to realize that even though we're in the thick of parenting littles right now and it truly doesn't seem like there is an end in sight, there's only one more decade of being in the absolute thick of it. And then in the next decade kids will start to move out and there will be many more decades of Laura-Jared time after that. It feels in many ways like these coming years will be the prime years of our family life, and we really want to appreciate and enjoy them. So instead of making big goals for things we want to accomplish before our 20-year anniversary, we settled into the idea of finding a job and a home in Utah in a few years, and then being really present and enjoying our family. What a wonderful time of life.
Now for the 4th of July! It started out like this:
And continued like this:
And then ended like this:
We spent the afternoon of the 4th at Grandma Lambert's house, enjoying a hot dog lunch and playing at her neighborhood lake. It was so much fun and felt like a "real" fourth of July with yummy food, some water play, and time with family. Alice wasn't feeling too well so we tried to head home at a decent hour to get her to sleep:
And after she was in bed we put off a few little fireworks. 5-year-old Jack's favorite part of the evening was poppers and sparklers so I'm glad we didn't spring for anything too big. Especially since our small town goes absolutely NUTS on the 4th. We've only ever really celebrated the 4th in dry locations, so maybe this is the norm in lots of states, but we've never experienced any firework culture quite this robust until we moved to our rural town in Washington. Aerials everywhere. And not just a few per house. We're talking hour-long aerial shows happening at multiple houses on every street near us. The sky exploded in color all around us for a good 2-3 hours. Our next door neighbor and our neighbor across the street both had literal truckbeds completely full to overflowing with enormous fireworks. Our next door neighbor either tampered with his or got a defective batch because there were several aerial fireworks that exploded on the ground instead of in the air, so that was terrifying and the point at which we decided to head in for the night.
