Tag: family time

A Movie in the Park

Lauren5 Comments

It’s my mom’s birthday on Saturday, making this “Birthday Week!”  As in, I fully support and encourage all family and friends to celebrate their birthdays all.week.long.  I mean, it only seems natural that we do so as adults, since birthdays don’t get as much attention as they did when we were kids.  Seems like a fair trade off to me.

I’m always excited for my mom’s birthday as I’m partial to July celebrations (wonder why!…) and especially excited this year because the festivities are right up my alley and because I have some really good birthday surprises up my sleeve (Mom, are you reading this?).  And guess what?  We kicked the celebration off last night with a movie in the park.

IMG_4207I should have known it was going to be a good night when I met my family in Louisville and everyone was on time.  That never happens.  Seriously.  It gave me hope that I can put my dad and my sister back on the guest list for my future wedding (cough they are the family’s biggest punctuality offenders cough).  Also…a line of food trucks!  Be still my heart!

IMG_4205I was kind of taken aback by the amount of trucks that were there — nine I think?? — but finally settled on the street taco truck, Comida.  I have a serious taco weakness.  I kind of underestimated how small these tacos were, hence me only ordering one (chorizo!) plus a side of rice and beans, but that just means more room for sangria and ice cream, right?

IMG_4203My mom and my sister grabbed brisket sandwiches and some amazingly delicious French fries — thick cut and salty, just how I like em — at the BBQ truck and then we all camped out on our picnic blanket with some homemade sangria my mom brought with her.  P.S. Can you see my mom’s new diamond earrings?  She had one fall out of her ear earlier this year, so my dad took her for a replacement and white gold upgrade.  Way to go, Dad!  I swear he was also at the movie, despite the lack of evidence.

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IMG_4209Wine-soaked cherries and peaches, yes please!  Oh look, there’s my dad (kind of…).  Told you he was there too.  We hung out with our sangria while we waited for the sun to set and the movie to start.  They were showing Jurassic Park, which yes, I did just see in the theater, but Jeff Goldblum is so worth re-watching it.  My dad concurred that he is the best part of that movie.

IMG_4206How cool is the inflatable screen?  I had just enough to time grab a double scoop of chocolate chip cookie dough from the Sweet Cow truck to share with the girls just before the movie started…perfection.  About halfway through the movie, we started to feel a few raindrops and the wind picked up and that park cleared out so fast.  We stuck it out though.  We had to see who was going to save them all from the Velociraptors, obviously.

Seriously, a perfect night (albeit kind of chilly, especially for the end of July) with my family.  All that was missing was Joey (he was at his softball game) and maybe a second street taco 😛  The best part?  We get to do it all again on Saturday when we celebrate my mom’s actual birthday with tapas and dinner at the Med (always the Med!) and another movie in another park.

Is it Saturday yet?

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Do your birthday celebrations last longer now than they did when you were a kid?

Have you ever been to a movie in the park?

The food truck craze: yay or nay?

Weekend Things

Lauren6 Comments

Ahoy!

Oh, sorry.  Confession: every Sunday at 9 AM I sit down and watch Sandwich King on Food Network.  I watched Jeff Mauro win Next Food Network Star and I find him to be so much fun.  Plus his 4-year-old son Lorenzo (seriously, that’s his name)?  Adorable!  Anyways, I’m watching as I [start to] write this post and it’s all about seafood sandwiches (crab cake sliders, yes please!), hence the “ahoy.”

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Other highlights of the weekend included my second trip to the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.  This time with my mom and my sister.  We planned on picnic-ing in the grass before the play started, but it started raining right as we parked, so a car picnic it was!  We all picked out our own dinners at the Boulder Whole Foods beforehand — oh hey, sister’s employee discount — and it was CA-RAZY in there!  I can’t believe how many people go grocery shopping on a Friday night.  Or maybe that’s just health-food-loving Boulderites.

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My mom forced me to get this soda and it was horrible!  It seriously tasted like carbonated cough medicine.

As luck would have it, the rain stopped right as we finished our picnic.  Sidenote: it rains every.single.time. I go to the Shakespeare Festival.  It’s usually just a sprinkle, but still, what are the odds of that?  We saw Macbeth and I was pretty excited as I’ve only ever seen comedies in the past.  I was ready to see how the CSF handled something darker.

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Look at the Koi and the cute little turtle swimming at University Pond.

My two cents: I really did not enjoy the new direction the CSF took this year by modernizing the plays.  All the lines stayed the same but Macbeth, for instance, was set in a more-modern-day Afghanistan.  I think they were trying to make the plays more relevant.  Well call me old-fashioned but I liked going to the CSF in the past so I could be transported back to Shakespeare’s time.

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About three-quarters of the way through the play, the wind really picked up and there was some crazy lightening.  I thought it was really adding to the play, but the CSF crew seemed to think it was a little unsafe so they sent us inside.  About 15 minutes later, they called it and we headed home 😦

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We had almost nothing planned on Saturday and I can honestly tell you, I couldn’t have been happier about it.  Instead, I got to lounge around and watch TV, enjoy a relaxing facial, go shopping and cook up a delicious homemade pizza.  We also happened upon a tiny (and pretty disappointing) Farmers’ Market right by our place.  I was hoping to find some good cherries, but instead I had to go to Whole Foods and spend much more than was probably necessary to get some Rainier cherries.  In my humble opinion, they are the best.

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Saturday ended with S’mores!  We had graham crackers, Hershey’s chocolate and marshmallows, we just didn’t have a campfire.  But you know, sometimes you just have to make do, so we may or may not have taken apart our grill to be able to toast the marshmallows.  Can we all agree that the charred marshmallow is the best part and the overwhelmingly chocolatey Hershey’s square is the worst?  I have a feeling any chocoholic readers out there are now questioning my sanity.

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This picture pretty much sums up Sunday — aside from me watching Sandwich King, of course.  When you purchase the warning track suite, they automatically give you 8 tickets for another game in one of the suites, so this was our view for the game.  Not too shabby, eh?  Unfortunately we lost — although our catcher didn’t seem to notice, as Joey just read a tweet he wrote about winning the game — but it was still a nice place to spend the day.  

One last thing: Happy July!  Can you believe it’s here already?

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What did you do this weekend?

What’s your favorite part of a S’more?

Do you have any 4th of July plans?