My husband is more sentimental than me...

...and I like that.

I started out strong: I got up on Valentine's Day and made pancakes - all by myself. (Be impressed. I've never done that before.) I even cut them into heart shapes. And I put my homemade Valentine card at his plate.

Later, I got to talk to the real Jason via Web cam. We played some games together and chatted for a while before he said that he had looked for some red velvet cake in the chow hall, but there was none to be found. Instead, he made due with the dessert available. I said it was too bad because I know how much we both like that flavor of cake and laughed at an inside joke, but it wasn't until after we had said good-bye that I realized the real significance of the red velvet cake.

That was the flavor of our wedding cake. Most couples save the top layer of their wedding cake to eat on their first anniversary, but not us. Our wedding cake was only one layer, and it was so delicious (thanks, Mom!) that we decided to eat it while it was fresh. How could I have forgotten about such a prominent wedding tradition? I thought about it the whole time we were at the Mud Room...

Erin of the Mud Room specially ordered us a rice bowl to paint and make a semi-matching set. Jason painted a dragon on the other rice bowl, so I needed to figure out how to paint a dragon. The only one that I could even come close to was Trogdor the Burninator. By the time it was completed, I had decided to see what sort of fancy desserts were available at Cold Stone Creamery.

Success! Cold Stone had some red velvet petite fours covered with dark chocolate. Mmmm! We gave one to Jamie and Dustin and ate one ourselves while drinking out of our sweet toasting glasses.

Happy anniversary, my sentimental one!

Letting off steam at the Mud Room on Thursday

Mud Room...where everyone knows your name...

Well, I'm not sure if the Mud Room lady (her name is Erin, I think) knows my name, but she definitely knows who I am when I come in. She's trying to get a special bowl so that Jason and I can make a bowl to match the one that we made when I visited him at Ft. Sill. And she knows that Jason is in the military and that he is deployed and was very welcoming when we came in to make some Christmas presents.

One present we made was for Jason's mom, Ann. She collects teapots, so I thought it would be nice to paint a teapot. She decorates in Americana, so Jason thought it would be nice to paint it red, white and blue stripes. It started out simply. Jason would design it and paint the lid, and I would paint the big portions on the teapot. But no painting project with Jason is ever simple. Jason likes to put a lot of love and effort into the pieces he works on...so much love that I eventually had to take the teapot away from Mr. Perfectionist so we could leave the Mud Room.

Mud Room with Mandi

I was looking for fun on Friday evening, so I called Mandi to see if she was free and wanted to go to the Mud Room. She said yes, so I met her there.

The Mud Room has a neat service project going on right now called Cup of Kindness. You get free studio time to paint when you purchase and paint a mug to be given as a gift for a cancer patient in town. In October, every person hospitalized for cancer in any of Columbia’s five hospitals will receive a Cup of Kindness. The Mud Room is donating the glazing and firing of mugs painted by the community and Jackie O'Roarke, a cancer survivor, is sponsoring the project.

I think our mugs turned out great! I wanted to make a happy mug, so I painted mine with yellow, my favorite color, and added flowers. I wished that Erin didn't have to work; aside from being tons of fun, she could have written, "I've got sunshine on a cloudy day..." in her neat handwriting. I was singing that the entire time we were painting. LOL Mandi painted a calming mug. It reminded me of the sea, waves washing over each other, lots of shades of blue and green.

After the Mud Room, we headed to Pizza Hut for some dinner. We tried the new Tuscani pastas. Mmm...yummy! Convo at dinner was good, too. I'm defintely blessed to have a been-there, done-that friend for this deployment. She totally gets what I say and where I'm coming from. I love hanging out with Mandi!