Great weekend...

I hope everyone has had a great weekend. Mine has been! It was a 3 day weekend, which is always nice. I took Friday off and spent it with Taylor. We didn't even have Grace with us! We had planned a trip to Tulsa earlier in the week. We got away from Fayetteville about 12:30 after shopping for some treats for Kelly and Harper. We didn't have any trouble finding the hospital at all. Finding Kelly and family in the hospital was another story! We did eventually find them, though, and had a good visit with them. She looks absolutely amazing to have just had an almost 10 lb. baby. They were having a good day and seemed very pleased that we had made the trip to see them. What a special family!

After our visit with them, we found the Cheesecake Factory!! It was fantastic. It's a good thing there is not one any closer! After that we just looked around in a party store for invitations for Grace's 2nd birthday that is coming up sooner than I want it to. No luck there so we headed for Fayetteville. I made it back to the house right at 8:00, just in time to watch Monk. We had a great day together! I am already looking forward to another one some time in the future and I hope Taylor is, too!

On Saturday, I was able to sleep until about 10:30. That was nice, too. Mike had been up for a while doing a little light cleaning. I started laundry and did a little more cleaning before we sat down and finished watching A Few Good Men on TV. When it was over, Mike went out to get some firewood brought in and I continued to pick up and straighten up the living room. As he was splitting the wood in the front, I started carrying it in to fill up the rack. We got it filled up and the floor vacuumed and he got a fire started. He had bought steaks earlier in the week and had them marinating in the refrigerator. He had also gotten baking potatoes and the stuff for green bean casserole to have with our steaks. He got the potatoes ready and put in the oven and mixed up the casserole and then we settled in to watch a movie. As you can see from the picture below, we have quite a collection of DVDs. We play a game to choose what we will watch. I will call out numbers from each row and then we choose from only 3 or 4 instead of the whole bunch. We actually did that 3 times yesterday. It was great! We watched a variety of movies. My Fellow Americans, The Italian Job, part of The Titannic on TV and The Sum of all Fears.
While we were watching these movies, of course, Mike kept the fire going. It was so nice to be sitting in front of the fire just relaxing for the whole day. (I did get the laundry finished, too.)

I couldn't get a very good picture of the fire with the screen on so I snapped one while he was working on building it up. We also discovered that we were out of charcoal when he got ready to cook the steaks! Never fear, though, he just cooked them over the open fire in the fireplace!! They were some of the best steaks I have had in a while. We may cook them that way more often. We love to cook hotdogs in the fireplace, too!!

Today we have had a shorter version of the movie marathon, but enjoyed every minute of it as well. I slept in again this morning so we didn't make it to church, shame on us. When I got up, Mike was just finishing up making pancakes, sausage and bacon for breakfast. It was great! He had already started a movie, Crimson Tide, so we finished it as we ate breakfast. We knew we had to make a grocery store run at some point today, but he said we could put it off for another couple of hours. He went to the closet and brought out The Guardian. It makes me sad, but it is a very good movie. When it went off, he took off the to store and I started the soup. He had been bugging me since I had printed off the recipe for the tortellini soup that Hillary had posted on her blog. I got it made after he got back with the rest of the ingredients and it was very good. Thanks Hillary for posting it!

While I was finishing up the soup, Mike was surfing the TV and found Dumb and Dumber. We finished that movie, then Mike fell asleep and I headed for the kitchen. I got it all cleaned up and now I am getting ready to get showered and watch some more TV before I go to bed!

I hope everyone else has had a great weekend, too!

Keep the Stamps family in your prayers! Harper seems to be doing better every day.