30 Things 2014: Thing #2—Impromptu Pizza Party at the Park

Everything tastes better when you eat it outside. Even if you're a nine-month-old and you have to make do with a kale-spinach-apple teething puff bar.

Sometimes you have everything in the fridge to make (1) minestrone and (2) tacos, but what you would rather do is go for a long walk with the family in perfectly lovely spring weather. Sometimes this perfect walk doesn't get to happen until 5:00 p.m. Sometimes you have to choose between forgoing a walk to make dinner or forgoing dinner to take a walk.

A frugal family would stay home and start boiling those vegetables. In fact, an awesome family might do that.

But there is more than one way to be awesome. We decided halfway to the park to turn around, grab some food for Charlie, and then walk past the park to the local pizza place, Capital Pizza, home of the weirdest pizza crust and mostly unpredictable levels of cheese. It also happens to be delicious.

I would just like to point out two things: (1) David's hair is magnificent; (2) you can't tell, but Hollie's shorts are covered in pink flamingos. Grandma Hollie finds all the raddest clothes.

We took the opportunity to bask in the sunlight at the local elementary school and let Holls slide on slides, wandering over for bites of pizza at her leisure.

Okay, so Thing #2 wasn't anything epic. But you know, it was awesome for us. There are few things we feel like we are managing well in our life right now, because so much is happening all at once (good things, mostly, so we really don't want to complain). We try to stay home and cook our own meals, for the sake of health and the sake of money. But there are some springtime late afternoons that you don't get to relive later, and you feel like you might waste them hunched over a stove in a dimly lit kitchen.

So we opted for an impromptu pizza party at the park.

This may be hard to see, but there was this moment when David made me laugh so hard on the walk home that I threw my head forward and all my pizza toppings came off on my face. I have a pizza beard that looks like shadows from my hair, but I promise it is cheese and tomato sauce. Also, somehow we left the house with two children younger than age 3 and brought ZERO wet wipes. Not even a napkin. And we were still several blocks from home! So David did what any tender husband would do—he pulled our brand new smart phone (the first we've ever owned) out of my own pants pocket to document my disgrace. (Also, the pink shirt was a Valentines' Day gift from Davey. He also got me knee-high striped tube socks. It's frightening how well he knows me.)

Awesome Thing #2: Dance, laugh, and run around with pizza slices in our hands—ACCOMPLISHED

30 Things 2014: Thing #1—Eat Ice Cream Cake, Fly a Kite

Cake, glorious cake!

It's that time of year again when the Grovers binge-blog about 30 Awesome Things in 30 Days—our way of celebrating the month in-between my May birthday and Dave's June birthday. It started in 2012 when I turned 30. When we realized that David and I would both be 30 for a little over 30 days, we decided to make the most of those days by fulfilling goals and doing "awesome" things. It made what I thought would be a scary milestone birthday a month filled with activities and dates and friends and very good memories. We did the whole thing over again last year, and we'd like to make this an official yearly tradition.

We're playing with some new ground rules this year, though. I am trying to finish my dissertation, and David is studying for his qualifying exams. We are also getting ready to move to eastern Idaho in late July. We're busy people!

Since we don't want to feel guilty doing awesome things, we've created a daily to-do list of what needs to happen before we are allowed to relish life with an awesome thing from our list. Here, for the sake of documentation and for the sake of making our friends hold us to it, is our daily of list of what must be done before Awesome Things:

• Emily must dissertate for three hours (scheduled from 9 a.m. to 12 p.m.)
• David must study for his exams for three hours (scheduled from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.)
• We must have family prayer and scripture study (scheduled at lunchtime, 12 p.m.)
• We must have personal prayer and scripture study
• Laundry must either be put away or in dirty clothes hampers (this one is mostly for Emily)
• Dishes must either be in the dishwasher or the cupboards
• Dave and Emily must both exercise five times each week
• On Sundays, we dedicate our regular three hours of dissertating and studying to attending church and fulfilling our church callings

There are some Awesome Things that must be done between the hours of 9 a.m. and 5 p.m., so we have to be very strict in rescheduling our study hours for those days. We hope this gives us our evenings back, too. (We've been in the habit recently of accomplishing very little until the kids go to bed and then binge-working from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m. It isn't healthy.)

Other rules that have changed this year is that we don't need to do an Awesome Thing every day. If we are burnt out on one day, we can do a couple of Awesome Things on our list on a more open day. We aren't forcing ourselves to blog everyday, either, unless we feel like it. So we might have catch up blog posts that list a few different days' worth of Awesome Things.

(I know none of you care about these changed rules, but I'm typing them up for the sake of family history documentation.)

I'm going to let David blog about our list of Awesome Things that we are compiling, but feel free to leave us comments about ideas you think we should try. We want to do a lot of local activities in order to start saying goodbye to Lubbock, and we also have a Houston/San Antonio trip and a quick house-hunting trip in eastern Idaho between now and Dave's birthday. So please recommend some Awesome Things for us!

I've already bragged about Awesome Thing 2014 #1 via ye olde social media, but I can't say enough about it. I told David I didn't want him to buy me anything for my birthday this year (we're saving money to eventually put a down payment on a car or a house—whichever we need first), so instead he put all his creative energies into making me an epic homemade ice cream cake. He got my favorite ice cream (Baskin Robbins' chocolate peanut butter ice cream) and put it on an Oreo cookie crust with a thin layer of creamy peanut butter between the two. After the ice cream, he put a vanilla-almond cake layer he made from scratch, followed by homemade peanut buttercream, chocolate ganache, and chopped roasted salted peanuts.

This picture barely does the cake justice. It gets better each night, too, especially the midnight pieces.

We also did more than eat cake on my birthday. Blowing bubbles and flying kites is a great way to make you feel younger, as anyone who grew up watching Mary Poppins knows.

Charlie-by-Barley picking leaves and looking all grown up in the outfit Grandma Grover sent him.

I feel like Hollie looks a little toddler here . . .

. . . and a grown up preschooler here. I spend all of my days lately vacillating between the two versions.

Hollie was my little helper whenever the wind wasn't in our favor. She liked to "catch" the butterfly and help send it back into the air.

We didn't quite get the little guy to the highest heights, but flying kites is always more fun when you're trying to tackle a real touchy wind. It's once you get a kite stable that flying kites suddenly gets boring, amirite? I mean, how long are we going to stand there staring at that kite way up in the sky? The one that isn't threatening to spiral out of control and konk my two-year-old on the face? That's where the action is, my friends.

It was so touching that someone would take the time to invent not only this cake, but the process of how to make and put it all together. It was a laborious process! And we're grateful for good friends who helped us eat it, too! I've been having ice cream cakes ever since I was a teenager—my good mom has always made sure I've had one, because she knows I love them. But this was the first time anyone has ever made me one, and I have to say: it was truly awesome.

Awesome Thing #1: Devour a homemade chocolate-peanut-butter ice cream and, also, fly a kite—ACCOMPLISHED.