What a great Weekend

Can I just say it was so nice to be with Ben for the whole weekend! We get busy during the week, and time seems to fly when we're apart, but man was it fun to be together. We had a really fun weekend at home, with just the right mix of good friends, good food, and relaxation! On Friday night we got together to hang out with our good friends Jake and Erica. Actually, the real reason we went over to hang out with them was so we could play with Gavin...basically the coolest kid ever. If I could guarantee that my kid would be as cute and cool as Gavin, I might actually consider having a kid, but because I just can't guarantee that, I'll stick to hanging out with Gav on the weekends! I thought it would be a fun idea for Gavin to play with my camera, and boy was I right. He had so much fun taking self portraits of himself, I wasn't sure I was ever going to get the camera back. He got a little mixed up with the direction the camera needed to be facing, and I'll be honest, I was a little worried he was going to blind himself with the flash, but it ended up being ok! In addition to playing with the camera, we had some serious running races, we took a nap on the floor together, and Gav got a big kick out of repeatedly waking Benny up! (so Gav calls Ben "Benny", and for some ridiculous reason it's totally stuck with us, so I'm always calling Ben "Benny" now, it's kinda funny)







Saturday morning we slept in....of course (another reason why I can't consider having kids any time soon!). Then we had breakfast at our favorite little place downtown. We have a tradition that every conference weekend we go to Penny Cluse for breakfast before the first session on Saturday, but since I'm going to Bennington over conference weekend, we decided to go this past weekend. For those of you who are local....you have to check this place out. I promise it's worth the wait!

After breakfast, we of course had to do a little shopping on Church Street. (Just as a side not, this past week I worked 12 hours at BR, sold $6000 worth of clothes for them, and probably didn't even break even after I made a few necessary weekly purchases. Too bad we don't work on commission. At what point do I need to cut my losses and quit??)
Saturday afternoon we spent relaxing and catching up on some Friday Night Lights episodes. Such a great show btw.
Then we enjoyed a lovely evening at the church for the YW broadcast. I love my calling in the Young Womens. We have the best girls ever.

Sunday was full of church, games and naps. It doesn't get much better than that. I'm pretty sure I killed Ben at St. Petersburg, but we ran out of time to really seal the deal. (Thanks Mike and Kristin for introducing us to that game. If anyone is looking for a good two player game, we totally recommend it! And btw...don't judge it by the box, I know it looks weird, but it's tons of fun!)

I'm so glad that I'm down to only 5 more sleeps alone! I'm looking forward to spending the weekend in Bennington, enjoying General Conference together, and shopping at the outlets in Manchester!

Easter in Lake Placid

For Easter Ben and I decided to go to Lake Placid for a nice relaxing weekend away from home. Ben had been in Bennington all week, where he is complete a one month rotation in outpatient internal medicine. I was feeling really sad, and pretty sorry for myself that he had to be away for the whole month...so I decided to plan some fun weekend trips for us to take! Somehow I was able to justify "needing" the trips since it was going to be so hard having him be gone! (I know, faulty logic, but any excuse to get away)

Thanks to our good friends Rick and Vanessa, who had already been to Lake Placid, we had plenty of ideas of things we wanted to do, and a great Bed and Breakfast we wanted to stay at.

We thoroughly enjoyed out time there....although we are planning a return trip, sometime next December or January when more of the Olympic venues will be open.

We had tickets to the NCAA Hockey Championships which ended up being so fun. Three of the four teams in the finals were from either Vermont or NY, so there were tons of fans, and we felt a loyalty to the local teams.

We had planned on taking a tour of the Ski Jumping track and the Bobsled track, but were told it wasn't really worth our time since there were no athletes training at the time. We also brought our skates and planned on skating on the Olympic Oval rink, but it was shut down for the season.

We stayed at an awesome little B&B only a couple of miles from downtown Main Street. It was called the Winterberry, and we would definitely recommend it to anyone visiting Lake Placid.

Sunday we attended the local branch, and enjoyed some great Easter talks. To end a great trip, we enjoyed some beautiful snow and sunshine, and went snowshoeing! Neither Ben or I had ever been before, and lets just say, I'm hooked! I've already been shopping online for my own gear!

Overall, we had a wonderful weekend. I'm really looking forward to April 9th when Ben will finally be done in Bennington. We're both totally fine on our own....but it is so much more fun to be together. I guess being apart makes us appreciate one another even more than we already do!

Why was this possibly a good idea??

With all the blogging of healthy recipes and diets that everyone is on these days...I thought it important to share with you my dieting strategy....a straight diet of Cadbury Mini Eggs.
Why I thought it was a good idea to buy 5 19oz bags, I'm not exactly sure, but here are some of my thoughts on the subject:
I am basically obsessed with this candy, and I wait all year for Easter to come around so I can eat them. When Valentines day is finally over, I anxiously await the arrival of the Mini Eggs to the grocery store. I then proceed to eat a concentrated diet of mini eggs for close to a month straight, trying to over dose on them so that I can stand to wait a whole year before eating them again.
It finally dawned on me this year that instead of eating them non stop for a month....why not stock up for the whole year, and enjoy their chocolaty goodness all year round. With a helpful tip from my friend Erica who opened my mind to the beauty of FREEZING mini eggs, I then proceeded to go from store to store, trying to locate sufficient mini egg storage for the year.
(Let us also discuss the fact that if you are planning on adopting this strategy....make sure you wait until AFTER Easter to stock up. All grocery stores sell their Easter candy at 50% off the day after Easter.)
So now that my freezer is completely packed full with mini eggs, I feel confident that I will not have to face any serious mini egg withdrawal for hopefully quite some time.
And did I ever mention Ben's food storage idea?? He thought it would be most beneficial to stock up on boxes and boxes of cookies since they are loaded with calories, and don't go bad for a long time. So along the same thought process...I'm really just padding our food storage. You never know when it might come in handy!
Bottom line...it's a good thing I have a gym membership and that I love to work out.
Happy Easter!

HE PASSED!

So....best news ever. Ben passed the boards. Not only did he pass (he was worried...I wasn't) but he did awesome and is very happy with his score. Can I just say it is a huge relief to know he's actually going to become a doctor! I can't even really imagine the pressure of taking an exam so difficult and important, but I'm just so happy that it is over, and that he can sleep a little better now! I have to admit...I was a little surprised by how nervous he was. To say that I am the "stressed" one in the relationship is kind of an understatement. I lose sleep over giving a Young Women lesson, and get nauseous about a piano lesson where I'm not sure how to help my student! Ben is definitely a calming influence on me, and helps me take a deep breath and recognize what is really important and worth getting stressed about. So you can only imagine what my stress level was at when he started feeling sick to his stomach and losing sleep over finding out his score! All I can say is I am so thrilled it is over, and feel so blessed that he passed!



In honor of his great score, we decided to go to Outback! Nothing says congratulations better than a steak! (The fact of the matter is I don't even like Outback that much, but we did go there the day we found out Ben got accepted to Med School, so it only seemed fitting to go there to celebrate his board score!)

Best Vacation EVER

As I'm sure you can tell from our slide show, Ben and I recently returned home from a week long vacation in Mexico. Ben had been studying like crazy for the Medical Boards, and I had been teaching so much that when we found out my vacation time lined up with his vacation time, we decided we had to get away. It was a much needed break together, that I'm not sure we'll get again any time soon. We left on Sunday morning at 6am. Our travel agent told us the flight was oversold and that we needed to get to the airport as soon as it opened. We were there, bright and early at 4am, only to find out that the UNITED counter doesn't eve open until 4:30!!

Whatever the case.....we got our seat assignments and were very happy to have no problems.

We arrived in Cancun and had an hour long drive to get to our resort. The weather was beautiful and the hotel was incredible. It had opened up only a couple of months earlier, so everything was new and beautiful.

The food was great at our resort. I love all-inclusive places because you don't have to worry about anything once you get there. Breakfast was definitely our favorite. They had great omelets and the best peanut butter in the world. We ate at a couple of the specialty restaurants; one French and one Caribbean. They were kind of snobby at the French restaurant and wouldn't really explain to us what we were ordering. I thought I ordered a steak, and asked for it cooked medium well, and then we over heard someone else order what I had previously ordered, and the waiter said it was a "little chicken"! In the end it was a steak, but I did feel pretty silly when I thought I had ordered my "little chicken" medium well!

The pools were incredible. They were so beautiful and seriously humongous. We kind of preferred the pools to the beach, although the water was pretty cold both places!

We opted to not go on any excursions this year. We did a couple of great day trips last year, but we were so tired out, that all we wanted to do was relax by the pool.

In terms of recreational activities we did end up playing a lot of basketball, tennis, mini-golf, and worked out in the awesome gym they had.

Overall it was a phenomenal trip. We are so hooked on Mexico, it's hard to even picture us going anywhere else on vacation. Since we both speak Spanish we have a great time interacting and talking with all the employees. Being there brings back so many great memories of my mission, it is so fun to remember that time of my life.

So, basically bottom line is Mexico rocks, and we think everyone should vacation there at least once in their lifetime!

Peer Pressure

So, I've basically given into the peer pressure that surrounds me and decided to join the world of blogging. It's not that I actually have much to blog about. Ben goes to school everyday, and I teach a ton of piano lessons everyday...and that's about it! We don't have any cute kids to take pictures of....so that means our blog will be filled with really boring self-portraits that are mostly entertaining only for ourselves, but I just decided I needed to be better at documenting what's going on in our lives. We love to travel, and somehow between our busy schedules manage to get away quite a bit. Since I'm terrible at writing in my journal, and I have the world's worst memory, I thought blogging might be a simple way to keep up on what we're doing.