Halloween

This weekend was just what I needed: quality time with my husband. I feel like since we're so busy during the week, him with school and me with work and group activities, it's important that we make time for each other whenever we can. Friday he showed his love for me in a major, major way. I was baptized by my pastor at EastLake's worship night. Worship night is basically a party for our church...lots of songs from the band, communion, and baptisms. He'd had a crappy day at school and had a rain cloud over him the entire day, but he still came because he knew it meant a lot to me for a family member to be there at my baptism. He still has some comfort issues with church in general, which is fine. I will never force him to come with me because that will be the quickest way to get him to completely shut down. I know that he sees East Lake as a pretty safe place, so I will just hope and pray that with time he will have some of those issues resolved.

The baptism itself was a full immersion. They had a big tub for us and in total, 21 people were baptized that night. It was really something special. I felt giddy as soon as I came up out of the water. I'm sure my pictures are ridiculous because I really couldn't focus and was just standing there with a stupid grin on my face. Oh well-I am sure they are used to that kind of reaction. :) I do wish my dad could have been there, though. Michael tried to take a video but the camera memory failed. Grrrr. My good friend Elizabeth and her husband were baptized right after me, which was so awesome. She said that my decision to do it helped HER make the decision to do it. How cool is that? You never know how your actions will influence someone else. Getting baptized was something I had wanted to do for a long, long, time...just never had the opportunity to figure out how to do it. I was never baptized as a child so this meant a lot to me, to make this public declaration at 25.

Saturday I walked 1.75 miles around Mary's Lake in Lawrence with my growth group. This group is exposing me to some amazing parts of Lawrence I never would have discovered on my own. It was so beautiful. The weather was perfect...chilly enough that we didn't overheat when we walked but not frigid. According to my heart rate monitor I burned 308 calories...which I took advantage of later that day. After the walk, Elizabeth and I got pedicures. Talk about heaven! I hope I can continue getting to know the amazing women in our group and have these mornings be a casual, fun place for us to get together.

Saturday afternoon, Michael and I went to see Paranormal Activity 2. It was definitely creepy, and had a few 'jumping in my seat' moments. Was it so scary that I had trouble sleeping? No. But definitely more eerie than a slasher horror flick. I used to dismiss these types of movies by simply not believing in supernatural activity. But I started thinking...if I believe in God, and in angels (which I do), and if I believe that angels can be on Earth...then wouldn't it stand to reason that the other side could be here as well? So that put a new spin on the movie, if you do believe that something paranormal like a demon could exist. I won't give away the plot of the movie, but after coming out of the theater, we are SO glad we don't have a basement. And that's all I'll say. ;)



This is why I needed to burn calories yesterday. Well, that, and the chicken tenders I had at the movie. It's a candy corn themed cupcake. Just white cake mix dyed orange and yellow, with homemade frosting and candy corns. I will be honest and say I wasn't too thrilled with the taste of the cake itself. I like a dense cupcake and these were really soft, the one I ate kind of crumbled. I hope that after they cooled overnight that they firmed up. I made these for the food table at church today. I mean, it is Halloween, after all. Gotta get in the spirit. ;)



So you can see the layers. Betty Crocker, I am not...but it was fun nonetheless.

Speaking of Halloween...that happens to be Michael's birthday! I think he had a pretty good, relaxing day. I let him open his presents early this morning...cards from me, my dad, his dad, his sister, my aunt, my sister, and my grandparents. His main birthday present from 'me' was a bunch of computer upgrades he did about a month ago, but I got him a little surprise: the Ocean's 11 trilogy. We love those movies and now that we've been to Vegas and the Bellagio, the first movie in particular is really fun. My dad went wild and got 15 dvd/blu rays from Michael's Amazon wishlist. I loooved his reaction when he opened the big box: "holy crap!" Love him. After I got home from church he sat with me in Panera while I had soup and we clipped coupons from the newspaper. We went to Target and get this: DIDN'T SPEND ANY MONEY. That is a major feat, friends. We wanted to look at their silver ware because I've got an itch to replace ours soon. We walked over to the Halloween section, which was being replaced with Christmas decor. Before you know it, they'll have that stuff out in the summer. We got some groceries for the week and have spent the rest of the day watching Apollo 13, Ocean's 11, a Robin Williams stand up comedy dvd, the Ghost Hunters Halloween special, and stopped only for dinner at La Parilla, a Latin/South American restaurant. I had a great time on his birthday, and I'm pretty sure he did, too.

SO, onward to a new week!