The Jolleys Go Out

Update: I felt pretty yucky after I posted this and made it sound like we had the best weekend ever. Meanwhile, there was the sickest, most senseless tragedy in Las Vegas Sunday night.

We lived in Vegas when we were first married. We were married there. We know lots of people there. But even if we hadn't, we all have a connection to this event.

Monday morning, I started getting texts from Vegas peeps. A lady from our Vegas ward was texting me to try to get a hold of her son who is serving his mission here in New Jersey. He had emailed her in the middle of the night to see if his family was okay.

Anyway, we have been sick over it. And the stuff from this post was from before that. Just wanted to clarify so that it didn't appear insensitive to what is going on right now.

Here's the original post:

Dan's job requires that he occasionally attend nice dinners at nice restaurants with nicely dressed and nice smelling people. This is a bit of a contrast to what he comes home to. A bit. Honestly, I think there's nothing better that a businessman or woman can do for their career besides have kids because kids keep you humble. Dan can attend an expensive multi-course meal on the Hudson River overlooking the NYC skyline, but then he comes home to an overly excited child, awaiting his arrival so that she can show him what she just did in the potty.

Not that Dan would ever be anything different than well-grounded anyway; it's one of his best qualities.

That being said, I think Dan recently noticed that he and I were having extremely different cuisine experiences as of late. I guess I was too busily buried beneath corn dogs and mac and cheese to notice, but a few weeks ago, Dan announced that we were going to dinner Friday night, and we were going somewhere nice.

And not even somewhere nice like Red Robin or Chipotle or Olive Garden or "not fast food" nice. Like actually nice. He took me to Il Cappricio, an Italian place near us. We got dressed up and ordered appetizers and entrees and listened to the piano player and basked in the cloth napkin-ess and multiple forks-ness of it all.  A man had the sole job of brushing away our crumbs from time to time, and I almost reached over and touched his wrist to give him a knowing look. Because I know that job.

It was a little too nice to take a picture of without looking a little ridiculous, but I did take a picture beforehand to show my sister my jewelry, so please excuse the awkward selfie (which I don't really believe in).

We ate a perfectly wonderful meal. Dan had the lamb and I had fettuccine, and it was delightful. It came time for dessert, but we decided that we had had enough pretending and scooted out of there to hit up our fave ice cream place, Last Licks. If you ever visit, you must eat here.

What a terrible picture. It doesn't even show the ice cream.

Of course, leading up to this meal, I had been on this eating plan called Bright Line Eating, where I didn't eat flour or sugar for like 45 days or something. So this wonderful meal was not a friend to me for long and I was up most of the night sick from it.

We had several hours on Saturday morning before conference started (East Coast!) so we got into the conference mood by spookifying our house for Halloween. Yes, those two things don't go together, but we had lot of fun family time, and that does go with conference!

We have a motion sensor spider on the front porch, and the girls love getting spooked by it. They are Dan's girls and do not scare easily like their mother.

And then we watched conference. Oh conference, I love you! Just the refresher we need every 6 months. Some of my favorite quotes came from the Women's Conference the week before. Sister Joy D. Jones said: 

"The Lord assures us that when we have virtuous thoughts, He will bless us with confidence, even the confidence to know who we really are." 

And there were so many other gems too. 

The kids were all over the place for conference, but I did convince the girls to let me paint their nails and that kept things quiet for a bit.

This picture was taken by none other than my budding photographer, June Jolley. I taught her everything I know. Clearly.

The next morning we hosted a bunch of ward friends at the park by our house for a conference brunch. Dan the Man made four types of quiche (plain, ham, bacon and sausage--clearly we love pork), and I made two kinds of monkey bread.

Regular:

 and pumpkin spice (with cream cheese filling):

The kids were able to play with their friends, and the adults ate themselves silly and it was a lovely morning.

Lastly, Harris finally obtained his helmet to correct his wonky head issues. Honestly, is there anything cuter than a baby in glasses or a helmet? I die.

The End.