Valentines Day

Well after spending a fairly uneventful week with my grandma in which I learned to crochet I'm back at home. I drove home on friday since I'd made plans with the babysitter to babysit our daughter saturday night so my husband and I could go out. I had called her cell phone on thursday night to confirm the time and had left a message on her machine. I packed the vehicle up thursday night and was in the GMC and on the road by 4:45 am mountain time friday morning. I left so early because they were predicting bad roads and snow for the last 3 hours of the trip and most of the time in Wyoming that means it will take you twice as long to get anywhere if they dont just close the roads. so I was expecting to do the first 7 hours in bliss and do 6 afterwards through snow and ice :(. Luckily that didn't happen. I was down out of North dakota and in Eureka South dakota before the sun even tipped the rise and was on my way through Pierre by 8:30. Oh what a glorious morning, the sun was shining, the snow was sparkling, the deer were grazing the cornfields, the pheasants were waking up and hoppin gout of their trees, the sunflower stalks stood silently waiting to be cut. By the time I hit mile marker 110 on Interstate though dark clouds had indeed filled the skies and snow was blowing and falling. The passing lane was solid ice. The driving lane though had two clear tracks all the way along it and was only icy in patches. The snow plows were out scraping dust off of the interstate and dropping sand. After 40 miles of this we made it into Rapid city. My daughter slept the entire way from Pierre to Rapid :). The roads out of Rapid were icy on only one side as well and there were snow plows here as well. After turning at Hot springs we made our way towards wyoming through the Buffalo Gap National Grassland (which if you ask me doesn't look any different and spectacular than any part of wyoming). Here the road was icy in patches all the way until the wyoming border, I crossed from the South Dakota bare, clean road to a Wyoming sheet of ice...where the heck are the plows people! I hate wyo's road system, miles and miles of road and none of it plowed lol. They must have cleaned off the highway between Lusk and Newcastle though for after I finally got there it was smooth sailing the rest of the way, the sun even showed it's face again before Lusk and everything again was bright and beautiful instead of gloomy. Anyways...to make a long story short (too late) I called the babysitter when I got home since she hadn't bothered to call me back (a pattern of hers) to find the excuse that her and her husband were sick. Now if they were actually sick I understand and feel sorry for them, but since I've heard this the last three times who can tell??? So after searching all day for a new babysitter and having to take hours to haul my hubby out of a snowdrift that I was going to cook our wonderful dinner in we finally found someone at 6 pm. Well, these people were recommended by another friend we knew but we didn't know them so we spent the next hour and a half at their house meeting them. The woman, Daisy, says she completely understands. Being a mom herself she would have thought it weird if I'd just let our daughter go with them without seeing. Her and her husband have two boys of their own, one two year old and one 10 month old. So after properly meeting them we made plans to have them watch Lilly on the 15th. Of course I was nervous still like I always am when I leave her with someone new lol. So after church and a potluck we piled back into the car sunday morning and dropped her off. I went home and kicked my hubby outside to work on the gate in our fence and finish it so I could go through it and promptly proceeded to squeeze lemons for lemonade, cut up chicken and fry it, and make pasta salad. Not to mention the carrots I cut up and the bread pieces I cut and buttered. Then I get this brilliant idea that it's only 29 degrees outside, the new chicken coop is just built never used, and I can take the heater out to it and prewarm it and we can have our "indoor" picnic out there. So after my hubby comes back in he went back to the office and I hauled the two heaters and the plug in extension cord up to the chicken house, I plug in one of the two to see sparks flying and it blows the fuse. Darn mice chewed up the cord while it was in the shed (where are my cats???). Not to be daunted I plug in the other one and figure it will be enough after all it's a small coop. I haul the blankets up, then some candles and a light, for now it's getting dark. After finishing all the food I collect my hubby from the back room and we carry the covered dish and covered basket out. We get there and he looks doubtfully at me and all he says is, "I'm going to go get the big heater from the house that your mom sent". I LOVE this man lol. So he troops back to the house and I set up the food on the paper plates and blankets. We then proceed to spend the meal thinking the builder who finished the coop for us is an idiot, and it's too cold for chickens until some modifications are done to it. It was a happy meal though as we ate fried chicken in the chicken coop (take that future chickens! lol) but we packed up after the main course and headed back to the house for dessert. After heating up the first batch of chocolate for the strawberries we laid in the living room laughing and feeding them to each other. The second batch followed us to the tub, which ends my narrative. :D After months and months of one adorable little girl in everything we did my hubby and I finally got some time for us....what a WONDERFUL life! lol (oh, and needless to say, my little girl was just fine and happy as a lark when we picked her up).