An Anniversary Surprise

Friday was our 5th wedding anniversary! It is crazy that we have been married 5 years. Time is flying by. I notice that especially when I look at Matthew these days. He is not little anymore and it is weird to me that I have an 'older' aged child. Anyways...our anniversary. When we got married my mom kept telling me that we would hate having our anniversary so close to Christmas-and she would know because hers is the 6th. Turns out she was right. Our first anniversary I was in Virginia celebrating my friend's wedding. Our 2nd anniversary Justin was in Arizona at a Boise State Bowl Game. Our 3rd anniversary we actually went on a nice date: couples massage. Our 4th year we had plans to go up to Boise and stay in the Anniversary Inn. Luckily we went out to dinner on our actual anniversary because we never made it to the hotel because my cousin died. So this year we talked about making big plans since we would be in Boise and have babysitters. Well, Christmas time was crazy like always but we did try to make plans. We went to the temple in the morning and did sealings. Then we went to the mall so I could spend my birthday money buying some new make-up. Then our plan was to walk around downtown Boise for a few hours before heading to our dinner reservation at 5. Afterwards we were going to go to a place whose name has currently slipped my mind. : ) Well, just as we got to downtown Boise and were walking down the street Justin got a phone call. This is where we need to go back a few days...
We have been looking at cars for a while now. Our plan was to buy a new car this summer. Justin's dad told him about a car that was at a bank that he thought we should look at. So Justin checked it out and thought it was a nice car. The next day the bank posted it on craigslist. (It was a reposession, that's why the bank had it). Justin really thought I needed to go look at it so off we went. It was a really nice car. Had all of the things we had been looking for and was in great condition. The high bid at the time was still within our price range so we thought, hey why not put a bid down. We really had no intentions of actually getting the car because we didn't think there was any way the price would stay low enough for us to consider. Well Friday morning Justin got a call that the highest bid was just below our max bid and asked us if we wanted to bid. So we went up to our max bid but still weren't really serious. The guy said they were going to keep it open for a few more days and we knew there were a couple car dealers looking at it. Now forward to 3:30 as we were just starting to walk around downtown. Justin got a phone call from the bank saying the manager decided to close the bidding and make us the high bid. So the car was ours!?! That is so not what I was expecting. Ready or not we were buying a car. So we walked back to our car and headed back to Meridian. But first I made us snap one picture:

We headed to the bank, signed the papers, headed over to the DMV and got it titled and licensed, and an hour later we walked away the proud owners of a 2010 Dodge Journey. As crazy as it all happened, I feel very blessed. It is a much nicer car than we ever would have been able to get in our price range otherwise. It only has 26,000 miles on it and is really in awesome condition. It seats 7, has lots of extra storage cubby spaces, and best of all comes with a clicker to lock the doors. That was the number one thing on my must have list: a clicker button (otherwise known as keyless entry).

We had pushed our dinner reservation back and were still able to go back down to Boise and have a nice dinner together. Then we decided to just come home so we could figure out getting home.

Having two cars meant we had to drive both our cars back to Texas. Matthew got the croup really bad Friday night and we were up until 2:30 with him. It's a good thing we only had to make it to Salt Lake that night because I was so tired. The ride home was a bit longer than the ride here since it was harder to help the kids with what they needed. And we made a few more stops to let the kids out and to switch drivers, but we made it safe and sound.

Both our cars in the garage. We are a two car family now folks!

It is still crazy to me that we have two cars. But it was so nice on Monday morning not to have to load the kids up and take Justin to school. This car has lots of growing room for us and I know it has years of good memories in store.
I suppose you could say it is the best anniversary present we'll ever get!