The Fourth Saturday

The fourth Saturday of January fell on the 25th - which also happened to be mine and Jon's 10 year anniversary of dating!

Every year Jon and I celebrate this anniversary by re-creating our first date in some form, or we mix it up and still do "fast food and a movie" but we pick something besides Taco Bell, and we go see a movie currently in theaters. (8 years was Sherlock Holmes and In-n-Out, Last year was the Squeeze Inn and Les Miserables)

THIS YEAR I had great plans. I was going to rent out a private screening and have them play Cheaper By The Dozen (which Jon wouldn't realize until we were there) and I was going to arrange to have Taco Bell food waiting there for us, or brought in during the movie. No expense and effort would be too much for celebrating 10 years in an epic way!!

Except that it turns out arranging a private screening is REALLY REALLY expensive. And if you don't already have your movie in the right format, you have to add an AV package for it to work with the projectors, and THAT is also really expensive. We're talking thousands of dollars here.

So I let Jon in on my plan. We decided instead to do our traditional "dinner and movie" date, but step it up and make it fancy.

First, we went to McCormick & Schmick's for dinner - which we had never been to. Thanks to some gift cards from Christmas we were able to dine in fanciness! It is definitely in our list of top 10 favorite restaurants. Everything was fantastic. Jon and I shared an appetizer of sushi grade seared tuna and an avocado tartar, then after delicious salads and awesome sourdough bread, Jon had the seared sea scallops and I had the stuffed Atlantic salmon. OH MY. So delightful.

Afterward, we headed over to Miabella for gelato. They have a really good sorbet selection, so I always have some good choices too :) We decided to take our gelato on a stroll as we went around The Fountains and back to our car.

 Well for a Saturday night it was getting pretty packed (as expected) and apparently parking was in high demand, because some old man started following us in his car (presumably to get our spot which he assumed we were walking towards) but seriously he was right behind us at a creeper pace following us at 3mph - a young man and his 7 month pregnant wife! - to our car... I mentioned quietly to Jon that we should just keep walking and walking. So we passed our car and went WAY down to the other end of the parking lot, and then crossed over to the path on the other side and walked ALL the way back. This guy would not give up! And he never even asked if we were headed to a car, or if he could have our spot. He just creepily kept following for a good 5+ minutes, which felt like an hour! Finally I think he figured we were just enjoying our date and so he split off in search of another parking place. I was just amazed at his stubborn insistence of following us like a stalker when Jon and I were just trying to enjoy our dessert. We had a really good laugh about that one. And were thankful that we were in a nice area and did not get kidnapped or shot :)

Next, we were going to go see a movie - BUT there was nothing that looked very good in theaters that we haven't already seen :( We decided instead to back up to our 8 year wedding anniversary that we just celebrated in November, and used our gift card to Color Me Mine and paint some pottery!!

We had never been there before, and had NO plan on what to paint.

In case you have never been there either, I will do a brief summary.

Color Me Mine is a "paint-your-own-pottery" studio. They have the pieces there ready to go and you pick out whatever you want to paint. Once you buy your pottery, you pick out your paint colors. Then you get to work! The possibilities are endless and when your creation is done, they clean up your mess and glaze your pottery during the week for you to pick up a few days later.

Jon and I picked out a chubby cookie jar for our family since we have never had one.

The colors we picked were a soft lime green, sea mist, and teal, with black for accents and writing.

Jon painted most of the jar green. Then I painted the lid and the front oval.

Jon added some embellishment to the knob on the top:

I did the wording on the front, and Jon worked on the decorative vines: 

 

 

We had a lot of fun creating together and designing everything as we went!

 Me with our finished cookie jar! (painted, but not yet glazed)

ages 26 and 28 - 10 years after our first date

We were super happy with the finished product. The glaze made all the colors pop and it looks so cool!

 Right now we have a candy stash in there, but we're looking forward to having our own kitchen again someday and filling it with delicious cookies :)

It was a great way to celebrate 10 years of togetherness and have a keepsake to launch us into the next 10 years - and beyond!