Date Day:

(n) A date that lasts all day/night. No kids. Lots of conversation, laughing and flirting.

Yesterday Ryan and I spent our anniversary on a "date day." I had a session scheduled for this month in Livonia so we decided I'd schedule it for the morning and then spend our afternoon/evening in Canon at IKEA, then go get dinner. Yes, I know... we're SO adventurous. We went to IKEA on our anniversary HAHA! We had a great time though.

Ryan surprised me before we left the house with the 16G Ipod Nano (which we're going to exchange for the 8G because I don't really need the 16G!). I've been wanting one for awhile but really couldn't justify spending money on something frivilous like that. We have a house that needs fixin' up... priorities!

We dropped the boys off with my mom and said farewell and good luck to her (HAHA!) and headed to Livonia. I dropped Ry off at WalMart while I did my session and once I picked him back up I had butterflies in my stomach thinking about Ikea. I couldn't wait to show it to him! I knew he'd love it (which he totally tried to underplay because he knew I was so psyched to show him... dork).

We got to Ikea and decided to browse the second floor before getting lunch. We got a ton of ideas for our house and it was so nice to just spend leisurely time with Ryan without bribing/coercing a toddler to be quiet/sit still/stay by us in the store. It was nice to discuss our ideas together in more than a 15 minute chunk of time between cooking dinner and wiping butts and doing laundry.

There was an annoying lady (with her husband and kid) there that kept following us and we tried to ditch her MANY times but she kept popping back up near us no matter what we did. She was so loud and every kitchen she was like "OH I LOVE this I want this one. Can I get this kitchen? I want to get this one!" Only (call me steropyical) she didn't look like the type of person in the market for a new, expensive kitchen.

We ate lunch... split a Buffalo Chicken Wrap and fries and each had a Chocolate Cake (DELISH!) and then headed downstairs to finish up Ikea.

We loaded up on lots of things:

• This playmat for the playroom.
• Three blue baskets for a soon-to-be shelf above Hudson's changing table.
• A moose and lion hand puppet for the boys' stockings
• A magnetic board for the playroom
• A paper roll and rail for the playroom to mount above the table and chairs they're getting from Ry's dad for Christmas.
• A can opener
• Tongs
• A splatter screen
• Two toilet brushes
• Tealights
• 
  

Funny story about the tongs and splatter screen... Ryan wanted the tongs and when we were in the kitchen area we couldn't find them. As we headed toward the checkout he randomly found some lying in a bin by the Trofast storage systems. SCORE!

Then... as we're in line I remembered LeeAnn buying the splatter screen the last time I was at Ikea. I said "Oh darn! I forgot I wanted to buy one of those splatter screens!" Oh well.. I wasn't about to go all the way back in to the madness of the store for a splatter screen. Well, as we inched forward in our line... what did we find randomly lying on the display rack? A misplaced splatter screen! SCORE again!

And then we found some great deals in the clearance/open box/damaged section:

• We got the Expedit bookcase for $62... it was damaged but just a tiny corner was scraped.... hell, it'll get that scraped being in my house!
• And this clothes drying rack for the basement so I can line dry some things this winter... for $1.99!!! Its missing one of the triangles on the side but hello! For $1.99 we'll rig up a rope!

After Ikea we ran into the resale shop to see what they had and then headed back to Jackson to eat at Outback.

This morning I woke up and it was strange to not have kids to wake up to! I was up at 6am but luckily was able to fall back asleep until 8. When I looked out the window I saw our first dusting of snow... I felt a bit sad that Porter wasn't home so I could see his reaction. :(