Anniversary Fun!

On December 28, John and I celebrated our Eleventh Wedding Anniversary! It sort of snuck up on us this year, with everything going on around Christmas, but we managed to arrange an evening out all the same. For the first time, we left our girls for a significant portion of time with our house helper, Lou. She was so good to be willing to stay into the evening so that we could go out during the girls' nap and stay out for dinner. Our plan was to return home in time to put the girls to bed ourselves.

We decided to keep up the tradition and go bowling on our anniversary. It seems like every anniversary we've spent in Asia we have gone bowling! So there you go, in the absence of Bed and Breakfasts, we've had to get a bit creative in our choice of entertainment. The bowling alley here (the only one I know of in a city of 6 million people) is almost like bowling in America, since the bowling alley seems to be lock, stock and barrel imported from the States. It's really fun! John and I enjoy the competition, as well. I knew that my I could hold my own during the first game, but that later on, as I got tired, it would be harder. Sure enough, my predictions were correct. Here's the scorecard (all electronic) after our first game:

Fun times, even for a 6 month prego!

After John smoked me all three games, we decided to try our hands at a few other games that were in this bowling alley. We had the most fun playing this street basketball game. The machine had previously had a high record of 250--here we blew it out of the water at 292!
We then discovered that if we scored above a certain point level, it would give us yet another round, so we were able to smash our previous record and set the new high at 337! We had great fun playing this together! It was 11-year teamwork at its best.
We finished by eating at one of the nicer hotels in town that has a great evening buffet. We returned home to find everything in good order except one very notable exception: I had foolishly left on a low, accessible table Chloe's baby book, which I had been working on. It had just needed a few finishing touches and I was in the midst of it when it was time for John and I to go. Chloe found this book, and while Lou was getting supper on the table, Chloe went through and began to systematically tear pictures out and then began tearing pages out, as well as tearing those pages to bits. Lou was so apologetic, but it wasn't her fault. Chloe has had issues with tearing paper before, and though I was very sad that she had found this book, it was partly my fault as well. When we came home and confronted Chloe with the evidence, she looked extremely guilty and refused to meet our eyes. Finally after some time she said "yes" when we asked her if she did it. Her own sin convicted her! John spent about 2 hours that evening piecing things back together and then taping and taping and taping. About 8-10 pages were affected, and 4-5 of those look really tacky, but it will be a memory for her when she is older, right?

All in all, it was a lovely anniversary. We really had fun on our date out, enjoyed our dinner, and it was good to just spend some time with the two of us alone. PTL for 11 years of marriage!