We've Been Busy!

We've been pretty busy the past few weeks!  But I have to start with out most recent excitement:
About 5:15 this morning, we woke up to a loud noise from outside.  It sounded like squealing tires and then a loud crash.  I got up to look out the window and the only thing I saw was what looked like a muffler laying in the street.  I figured someone had taken the turn by our house too sharply and either lost something out of the back of their truck or lost a car part.  Kyle got up to look and we noticed the muddy tire tracks leading out of our yard.  Yep, out of our yard because someone had driven THROUGH our yard!!  We figured they must have been headed south because of where the tracks led so we looked north to see how long they had driven in our yard to discover that our mailbox was gone!  The thing lying in the street was our mailbox!  The wooden post to the mailbox was in pieces all over our sidewalk.  Then we noticed something lying across the street in the neighbor's yard-it turned out to be a tire!  We didn't know if we should call the police about this since we hadn't seen it happen.  We figured that without a tire, this person couldn't have made it very far and we thought we'd go look for the car to get a license plate number.  As we were following the muddy tire tracks in our car, a police officer was heading the opposite direction. It turns out that our next door neighbors had called the police because their car that had been parked in the street had been hit.  So what we guess happened was this: The driver was probably intoxicated and swerving/driving on the wrong side of the road.  (The car they hit was parked facing north and the driver was going south.)  They then lost control after hitting the car parked on the street and veered into our yard, knocking out our mailbox and knocking the tire off their car when they went over our curb.  The police had found the car parked at the bottom of the hill with no one in it-the driver had abandoned the car and took off-probably to avoid an OWI.  Looking at the tracks in our yard and from the street, we're thankful the driver gained enough control to miss driving into our house!!  Had they done that they would have driven right into our bedroom where we were sleeping!

Here is where our mailbox USED to be..

All the tire tracks in our yard/on our sidewalk

The remains of our mailbox

Other than that, here's what we've been up to lately, going back to Valentine's Day:

-On Valentine's Day Kyle and I celebrated by going out to dinner at one of our favorite restaurants, The Latin King.  I had my favorite chicken spedini amagio and Kyle had the pasta trio-yum yum!!  Then we came back home and had some chocolate covered strawberries from The Chocolate Storybook and some wine we brought back from Arizona last spring.  We had a really nice day together!  I so love Valentine's Day-and I think everyone can make it a special day to tell someone you love them!

Valentine's for my kiddos at school 

Kyle's Valentine's Day gift-the 14 days of Valentine's Day, which he got all in one day :)

A close-up of some of Kyle's gift

Another close-up

My Valentine's Day gift-the best gift a girl could get-homemade roses!  Kyle made them from coffee filters that he dyed pink-isn't he the best?? :)  And a coupon organizer!  I think he picked that to make his own life easier too-now he won't have to stand in the middle of the aisle at stores waiting for me to sort through my crazy amounts of coupons :p

All of our lovely Valentines :)

Mmm-chocolate covered strawberries!!

-That same week, on Friday, Mom and I met Kathy at the downtown Marriott hotel to help her with her booth at the Des Moines Metro Opera's Wine and Food event.  Kathy was invited to come and she got some excellent exposure!  People kept coming back for more treats and the dark chocolate champagne cake balls were the favorite!  It was a really cool event.  There were tons of vendors with samples: Splash, Berattas, Olde Maine brewery, Ginos, catering companies, wineries, and more.  As a vendor, we got to walk around and try out some goodies ourselves which was fun.  Kathy made 1,000 goodies all together.  She had mini sugar cookies, mini cupcakes in red velvet, chocolate with pink champagne frosting, vanilla bean, and chocolate with chocolate frosting, and cake balls.  Luckily for us there were some leftovers :)

Signs I made for Kathy's booth 

Kathy's booth-lots of yummy treats!

Mini cupcakes and a chocolate gnoche cake

Cake balls

Sugar cookies

A shot of the room we were in

Down our row

Mom refilling some treats

This was so good!!

Simply Delicious!

-After helping Kathy with her booth, the Anderson's headed to Rochester, Minnesota to go to the grand opening of Wildwood Sports Bar and Grill, the restaurant our brother-in-law, Jim, recently opened.  We rode up with Aaron, Tina and Vinny and got there Saturday afternoon.  We spent the afternoon hanging out with everyone at Jim and Nicki's and watching Natalie and Oliver perform songs for us :)  Then we did a little shopping while the kids were napping.  We headed to the restaurant around 6 and it got pretty busy while we were there!  Opening a restaurant has been a dream of Jim's for a long time and we're happy for him to have this opportunity!  It sounds like he has been pretty busy so far and the food is wonderful!!  Jim tries to have some sort of wild game on the menu so for his grand opening he had fried alligator and there is always an elk burger on the menu too!  We tried a little bit of everything and had a great time with everyone for the weekend!

I know you can't see this well, and I'm SO disappointed about that, but I had to include this because you can see them with their little guitars and they were playing those, singing and dancing away for us!  Such little performers!! :) 

Fried alligator!  I was brave and tried it out-it was pretty good!!

My delicious sourdough bacon burger with sweet potato fries

Kyle ordered The Holstein-has a fried egg on top!

Caramel Apple Crisp a la Mode

Crispy Crusted Cheesecake with fresh berries and whipped cream!

The sign in the dark..

-The next week our friend Erin had her baby so we went to visit with them and meet little Grady, then Kyle and I headed to the mall!  We've been saving up some shopping money for a while and finally went out to spend it!  It's amazing how fast your money can go but we both got some things we've been needing/wanting for a while.  I obviously got TWO new pairs of shoes!!  Ohh how I love shoes!  I wore them out of the store and everything-just like I did when I was little haha  We brought Belle a treat home..

 

Sweet potato cookie-no wheat for our allergic girl!  She's so stinkin' spoiled.  She'll be in trouble whenever we have kids haha!

Belle loves Mike!

Until next time!!