Week in Review: 24 Years, Declan's Nerves, Maggie's Awards and Dinners for Nine

Hello and Happy Friday!

Phil and I celebrated our 24th anniversary on Sunday, and I wish that I had the time to write a beautiful post about marriage and how easy he's made it to be with him longer than I've been without him...but instead I'll just say that I love my best friend/baby daddy/partner for life so much and I'm grateful to God for putting us together!  

We celebrated in bits and pieces over the weekend, because May anniversaries only add to the normal May chaos.  May I suggest y'all get married in a less busy month?  On Saturday, we drove out to Plymouth for lunch and I think Phil's face says it all when we revisited Plymouth Rock.  Plymouth Pebble is more like it.

That night, our friend Fr. Cook was filling in at our parish for the vigil Mass, and we invited him out to dinner (and ice cream, of course) with us and the kids who weren't working.  Phil and Fr. Cook shared the Fajitas for Two as if it was their anniversary:

On Sunday, we started out the day by working out, because the couple that works out together...works out together or something.

We took our annual Cottage photo on Sunday morning.  Season 4 on Anniversary 24:

Then we drove to beautiful Bristol, RI to have lunch at The Beach House.  It was a gorgeous view but very hot in the sun.  Our weather went from winter to summer it seems!

The heat was great for business at The Cottage though!  Lines all weekend long!

Week(s) in Review: A Retreat with My Bestie, Mother's Day Weekend, Mr. Stang and Season 4 of The Cottage

May is certainly May-ing hard this year, and time allotted to blog writing is on the bottom of my priorities lately. I started this post a week ago but I have to remind myself that it's not me, it's May.

I just wrapped up another semester of online teaching at Franciscan University. I had three courses and I was very happy to finish grading and submit, knowing I would not have to think about that role again until the end of August.  I also have been taking the steps to obtain my School Business Administrator license (similar to a public school Principal license, but for school Accounting/Finance) which included education requirements, passing two MTEL exams, 3 years of employment in my role, and 300 hours of an administrative apprenticeship.  I finally received that license last week!

The Ice Cream Cottage opened on May 7th for Season 4 and it was a very busy weekend and we had our busiest day EVER on Mother's Day.  Moms love their ice cream :)

Strawberry Cookie Crumble

Cotton Candy Crunch

Nutella and Strawberry parfait

Biscoff Sundae

Bermuda Cruise: From the Sea to New York and Will We Cruise Again?

We had two full days at sea for the return trip home... technically from 5pm Wednesday to 8am Saturday when we could get off the ship in New York.  Honestly those sea days are kind of a blur in my memory now but they were very relaxing and fun.  

The first sea day heading home was rocky, but the second day was perfectly calm because we were going so slow to not arrive in port too soon.  We tried to take advantage of the many events happening, like a cake decorating show with the chef and other participants (you can see the cakes set up on the deck below):

We drank our weight in frozen drinks:

It was chilly on the pool deck, but the sun felt good so it was a mix between bathing suits and sweatshirts all day!  

The little boys rode the AquaCoaster (rollercoaster waterslide) 13 times in a row on one chilly day because the sane people weren't in line.

You can take the man away from the ice cream shop, but you can't take the ice cream away from the man.  Or something like that.

I miss the salad bar with homemade (cruisemade) blue cheese dressing and mouth watering croutons.  This day had tuna as the salad bar protein - my favorite!

Bermuda Cruise: St. George

We woke up bright and early on our last day in Bermuda to catch the one and only ferry to St. George's at 9am.  We ate breakfast at The Local, then were in line at 8:15 am because so many people had the same idea.  

Bermuda is one hour behind our time, and because our phones were on airplane mode, they didn't adjust automatically.  The phones caught up once we were in Bermuda, but then the time changed again on our way back home.  We spent a lot of the trip confused as to what time it really was!  "Cruise time" we called it.  Also because we were so active and staying up later than usual, we were all sleeping in and eating meals late, and our bodies were totally off schedule.  Some mornings, we weren't waking up until 9am (actual time or one hour off, we never knew) so it was perfectly vacation-y compared to our normally scheduled lives, and setting an alarm to wake up early on the port days felt rough.  But I'm so glad we did on our final day at port so that we could make it to St. George!

The 50 minute ferry ride was very rocky, making the movement on the cruise ship feel like a piece of cake.  Declan, Brendan and I had all taken Bonine and were wearing our motion sickness patches, and we all did just fine.

When we got off the ferry, there was a parade and celebration in the town square that we stopped to watch:

Then we visited St. Peter's Anglican church, the oldest Anglican church still in use outside of Britain.

Future pastor?

The writing intrigued me

Week in Review: It's Gonna Be May

 Happy Friday!  Happy May 1!

I still have one or two Bermuda posts to put together for the blog book's sake, but life marches on and there's plenty of other things happening that I don't want to forget.

At Phil's high school, they had a department dress-alike day, so his theology department suggested dressing as The Cottage Crew:

Cottage Crew for Christ

JP has been very busy out in Pittsburgh, between wrapping up his first year of studies, his med school formal...

Handsome and young future docs

... and all of his volunteering opportunities, like giving eye exams through Eyes on Wheels (a free mobile health clinic) and at the Special Olympics:

He also has spent time helping at Red Door Ministries, which provides meals to the homeless and at the Neighborhood Resilience Project, which is a free primary care clinic.  Plus he got to spend a day volunteering with Envision Blind Sports, which he said was so cool and was thoroughly impressed with the athletes!

JP in light gray shirt

Bermuda Cruise: Bermuda Days!

When we arrived in Bermuda on Monday around lunchtime, we had to wait a little while to get off the boat as we were the first group to start the New York to Bermuda circuit (something about customs and clearing blah blah blah).  We were very eager to get off the ship because rain was due around 2pm and we wanted to explore as much as we could.  Around 1:30, we were able to leave the ship and walk around the wharf area, where there are some shops and restaurants.  We then continued walking for a mile to end up at Glass Beach, where there's tons of sea glass all over the shore.  Bermuda is very strict about not letting anyone remove sea glass or sand from their beaches, but otherwise we would have filled a jar with this stuff.  You can see the storm clouds rolling in, but we had a chance to look around for awhile and walk back to the ship as the showers started.

You can see trash buried under the trees as the shore erodes

All of the males enjoyed skipping rocks: