Celebrating 8 Years Together

My husband I spent this past weekend celebrating our 8th wedding anniversary and it was a perfect mix of activities and lazy nothingness. We both took a couple days off work so we had a four day weekend together. Initially we didn't have anything planned, just the time off but as things got closer we made a rough list of things we wanted to do. Nothing really had a specific day or time that it needed to happen.

First of all we spent most of Saturday running errands and doing a bit of cleaning to get it out of the way so the rest of our time was clear. We did our grocery shopping and picked up a stack of DVDs we had on hold at the library for later plans. One thing that we meant to do but didn't was to buy pumpkins to carve later in the weekend. We specifically had an idea for using a white pumpkin but because we couldn't find any at our grocery store it got dropped of the list. Then that night we attended a Halloween Party hosted in part by my sister-in-law, Bev, where we dressed as Superboy and Wondergirl.

 (You can see how I made our costumes in last week's post.)

Then we spent all day Sunday reliving our childhood, by staying in our PJs and watching old cartoons. Admittedly a lot of the cartoons we ended up with are more from our teen years but that doesn't really matter, we worked with what the library had. We ate cereal, Honey Nut Cheerios and Boo Berry. For lunch we had dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets with mac and cheese. In the evening we had talked about ordering pizza and calling it a slumber party and getting old movies but never decided what movies would be best. So we just kept watching cartoons and ordered chinese instead of pizza because its something we did a lot while we were dating. We also snacked on pizza rolls and Little Debbie cakes at various points of the day. It was pretty awesome.

Gotta Love the Library

Monday we decide to go out and see The Last Witch Hunter because it seemed interesting and has some connections to DnD but also because it was showing at Cinetopia and I wanted a chance to try the Living Room seating. That ended up not working out for us because they lost power just before we arrived to buy tickets. We went to a later showing at Ward Parkway shopping center but had time to kill before the movie started. Since we ended up wandering around in Target for part of that time we bought another couple of Lego Minifigures and some Star Wars Micromachine blind packs. I hope to be able to use the micromachines in a terrarium like those I linked in the last post.

Tuesday was the actual day of our anniversary and we went down to Union Station to see the Da Vinci exhibit. It was very cool. It talks a bunch about his notebooks and the kind of things he drew and studied, how his studies of birds and flight lead to plans for flying machines and that kind of thing. 

Then it has recreations of a bunch of his inventions alongside the sketches from his notebooks. Most of the machines/ inventions can be touch and tried out but not all. At least for my husband and I some of the ones that sounded like the most fun to try were the ones that said Do Not Touch but that's alright. We seemed to be the only ones really interested in playing with the machines anyways. 

 There is everything from models of his plans for diving suits, to simple pulleys, to crazy war machines like the scythed cart.

We didn't get a picture of this one but they had a small scale replica and a full scale model of a different version.

After that there is section discussing his anatomical studies and how it related to his art. Following that there are reproductions of some of his paintings. Several of them discuss how he used the golden ratio in his work. It was really interesting but they didn't have an explanation of what the golden ratio is until the very end. I already knew a bit about it but if you didn't the pictures of the paintings divided up with red lines to show the ratio or spiral don't really mean much. The final little bit talks about some of his less known interests which included cooking, planning theme parties and weddings, and stage production. For an interesting read you can check out Da Vinci's Kitchen which uses notes for parties and grocery lists from his notebooks along with general cooking history to create recipes that Da Vinci may have eaten.

Overall we had a great time and got an awesome photo of me looking much to excited to be in a Da Vinci tank. It was also fun to look at replicas of things that come up in Assassin's Creed like the pyramid shaped parachutes, and they have a kid's room with blocks to build your own ideal city or flying machine. They have a basic paper gyrocopter plus paper and tape with a sort of wind tunnel where you can try it out. 

The final part of our day was supposed to be a nice dinner out but it turns out that my husband broke a tooth over the weekend and was in too much pain so we had dinner at home. I'm appreciate him hanging in as long as he did although I wish he'd agreed to go to the dentist sooner. He had it pulled Wednesday afternoon and is already feeling much better. And as a side note we had the greatest misty fall weather just perfect as far as we were concerned.

Taken using the Instaweather app

Here's to many more great years and fun times!