Remembering Memorial Day

Remember Memorial Day? {Does it seem to anyone else that this day was about 4 million years ago now?}

I am actually glad I am behind on telling you about our day because I wanted to update from the post you were so kind to read last week, where I chatted about my struggle with discontentment over that non-lake-saturated weekend. Paula, I saw your comment to me yesterday about the long weekends you spent NOT doing fun things while your husband battled health issues, and it was another great reminder to me that there are so many reasons why we don't all get the picture-perfect holidays we hope to have. Whether its work or health or life chaos, it's not always Pinteresty in this life, is it?

Good reminders to be thankful for what's in front of us and good reminders that we are absolutely not alone in the struggle, even if we have varying details before us. Thanks for being a great community of listeners and boat-sharers with me on this one. I appreciate all of you who pitched in with similar stories and words of encouragement!

Ryan did work all day on Memorial Day, but we reserved Monday evening after he got home for our very first fire pit extravaganza in our new home. Of course it was the first truly hot day we'd had in a while, so we were unsure of the wisdom of adding a fire to the mix, but we did it anyway.

{Oh...do you not start fires with your shredding? Keepin' it classy with the Shaffers!}

We have each had some real doozies of fire-starting-disasters in the past, so we were pleasantly surprised when this one took right off and burned beautifully for the evening. Perhaps the key was to use the shredding!

While hot dogs are nowhere in the same COUNTRY as anything on clean eating list, I wanted hot dogs, because it seemed holiday-appropriate. So we found some turkey dogs, which we hoped were at least on the higher end of the worst-food-for you spectrum. Maybe my tastes have just changed over these last six months...I don't know...but I have to say they tasted just the same as regular ones to me. Delicious!

{Recycling last year's 4th of July shirt. Save money, right?}

With our turkey dogs {and wheat buns, thankyouverymuch}, we had some baked sweet potato fries that were DELICIOUS. One of our new favorite side dishes.

And for dessert, we had campfire cones. If you spend much time on Pinterest, you've probably seen them. Waffle cones filled with s'more ingredients {or whatever ingredients you want.} We had marshmallows, strawberries, chocolate chips, and some peanut butter M&M's in ours. I did a trial run on these in the oven before Memorial Day and they were perfectly melty, gooey, and Pinteresty. The posts on Pinterest said, "Oh just throw them in the campfire coals to cook." Well no one mentioned they would come out CHARRED! So I think we're going back to the oven method.

After dinner, we did hang out in the hammock for a bit!

And because I'm dorky like this, I wanted sparklers for after dark. Ryan is really more of a HUGE fireworks fan, and not really into measly little sparklers, but he was a good sport and humored me.

So all in all, it was a lovely evening, and I'm glad we had a bit of time together!!