its long, but I never post so who cares.

I can't tell you how often I go to delete this blog and for some reason, I never do. I think it feels like its such a part of me and deleting it would be like losing a friend I've been close to for the past 9 years. So here I am, occasionally posting and you're stuck with me ;-) 

April has felt incredibly long in good ways and bad. Our van has been having a bit of an attitude the past couple of months and no one, not even our mechanic, can figure out what's really going on. Many break downs, many warning lights, many trips to the shop (and many dollars later) we think we've fixed the critical stuff, but we're not really sure. 

That aside, I guess its been a good month. Thankful for amazingly good health really since October. Our 3 older kids have battled maybe a sniffle here or there, but no actual long drawn out sickness since early October. SO thankful to God for that. 

Jason and I celebrated our 10th Anniversary on the 3rd! His sister flew up for a visit and she gave us the amazing gift of a whole day off to ourselves. I can't tell you how fun that day was. We didn't do anything extravagant, but we did some fun, adventurous things, checked 1 thing off our 2014 bucket list and we were together, which is always a plus. 

I feel like its cliché to make comments on Anniversaries about how the years have been good, bad, ugly... and everything in between. 

I want to take a moment to probably annoy some of you and say that God has been so good to us. I can't in good conscience look back and talk about ugly months. Or bad ones. Sure, I can dig up trials and ways that our faith was strengthened and times when we felt beat down and desperately calling out for God's mercy. Those things have been trials that we've walked through together though; hand in hand, learning as we went along. 

I don't say that to brag. Its not us. We're not "super couple" at all. We love and serve an amazing God and the peace and joy that we have in our home is from Him. Nothing else. 

It has truly been the best decade of my whole life. I'm over the moon in love with my husband and I know he is with me. We love to be together, we're excited to serve God together in any way we can, we have 4 amazing kids that bring daily, minute-by-minute sanctification ;-) and we're hopeful that the future is filled with much more learning and growing and good changes. Only God knows and I'm cool with that. 

So anyway, on to our day out. We first went to a local, organic restaurant that Jason had told me about way back when we moved to WA in '09. We tried to go one Saturday morning and learned that you have to either wait close to (if not longer than) an hour or come during the week when everyone is at work. I have never had such yummy food. From the iced coffee down to the french toast and pancake bar, I was in heaven. YUM. 

We parked our car in Jason's spot he uses during the week and decided to 

walk through the city. Seattle isn't *that* big and so we knew we could get all 

over the place on foot and not have to fuss over the car. 

Best decision ever. In fact, when I took the kids back a week later, 

we did the same thing and loved it. 

We went to the 73rd floor of the Columbia Tower and saw the 

breath taking views! If you're ever in Seattle and wanting to go to a high 

point to see the City, don't do the Space Needle. You pay too much and 

don't actually have that incredible of a view. Go to the 73rd floor of the 

Columbia Tower. Its only $12 and its amazing. You won't regret it. 

We had so much fun. After Seattle we went to a theater where you watch a movie and get served dinner in your seats, which is a cool experience. 

We saw the movie Divergent and had a super yummy meal. 

I'm so thankful to Jenny, Jason's sister, for her willingness to do this 

for us and stay with our kids while we got out to celebrate. 

She did a rockstar job and the kids are still talking about the fun they had with her. 

I have more posts from April coming, but didn't want to cram too much into one post.