Anniversaries, first days, and adorable little painters.

Tim and I celebrated our 12th anniversary in August.  It's so cliché but there really is not a day that goes by that I don't feel grateful that I'm married to this chap.  He's smart, quirky, funny, helpful, kind and good.  So very, very good.  We match up on so many different levels that we rarely find anything about which to argue.  I did well for myself. 

We went to the Idaho Shakespeare Festival's production of Sweeney Todd.  Musical productions carry a bit of nostalgia for us, since so many of our first dates and newlywed date nights consisted of us getting student tickets (keyword: cheap) to operas, musicals, concerts and the like.  We've even seen Sweeney Todd together before - in fact, this production carries an extra bit of nostalgia for Tim because it was when he first held my hand.  I have no recollection of that moment, but hey, what else is new?

If you enjoy really awesome music with really awesome (witty) lyrics and have a decent tolerance for the somewhat irreverent, you'd probably love anything by Stephen Sondheim.  He's brilliant.  Though I must say the staging of this production was slightly more offensive than the one we saw in Provo 13 years ago.  Slightly.

So here we are.  Twelve years of marriage. 

 

And, in other news, the girls started school.  Aren't they cute?

 

I was glorying in the fact that I am probably only one year away from riding my bike solo - I've been towing kids so long I might just fly over the handlebars without the extra weight to ground me.  This year I've got Eve on the tag-a-long and the plan was to ride bikes to and from school until the weather turned cold.  Notwithstanding the weather had not turned cold, a week later Anna decided that more than anything else in the world she wanted to play the cello in the school orchestra.   So now we drive them to the bike path and they hoof it.  Boo.

 

So now I spend my days with this little critter.  She's adorable, if not demanding.  Here she is concentrating all her efforts on an art project I planned for the first-graders.  She painted with such care, I felt sure that kids two years her senior would be able to master this project.  Not so.  But it was fun anyhow.