Putting Family First: 10 Years!

10 years! We have been married for ten years! There is so much I could say on this post but it all feels so very personal, too personal. Thinking of Jaren makes me so grateful it brings me to tears. I found this quote on pinterest and while it's simple I still loved it. Jaren is so good at standing by side, especially through the hard times.

"True love stands by each other sides on good days and stands even closer on bad days."

So I'll skip over the too personal stuff and go straight into this next quote which I am sure will be familiar to a lot of you. If you don't know where this came from, check this out. https://www.lds.org/topics/family-proclamation

"Happiness in family life is most likely to be achieved when founded upon the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ. Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, and wholesome recreational activities."

For our ten year anniversary we went sailing to a new chain of islands with some friends in our ward who were also celebrating their ten year anniversary.

After stopping on an island called Bequia to do some provisioning we sailed to Mustique. This was my favorite of all the islands and this is the fist beach we went to called Lagoon Bay.

This little restaurant that sits over the water is called Basils. We ate here our first night.

On our way to Basils for dinner.

Andy and Kaity walking down one of the main roads on Mustique.

The Pink House and the Purple House, both sold clothes, jewelry, toys, souvenirs, etc... In between them is a wonderful little bakery where we bought some bread and pastries.

So you can rent a mule! Jaren was the only one who knew what kind of mule they were talking about. Andy, Kaity and I all thought it was an animal. Once we realized what it was we all loved the idea. This was so much fun to have. It allowed us to explore the island.

It took us here, Macaroni Bay. This beach is open to the Atlantic and had waves.

Waves like so!

Clearly I haven't had much experience with waves! now this may not look like a big wave but it was a powerful one. I took a pretty good tumble towards the sand

Jaren had the time of his life in these waves.

Andy and Kaity building a sand castle.

Exploring! The mule took us to some beautiful spots.

Dinner that night. We ate well on this island!

Andy loved the sailing part of the trip.

Sometimes the down time on the boat is nice.

This is called the Tobago Cays. This picture was taken from the airplane when we were flying home. This is supposed to be the "jewel" of these islands. And I will say it was beautiful. On our trip however it was SO windy that it was hard to really enjoy all that it had to offer.

This island is called Petit Tabac. It's famous for it's scene in Pirates of The Caribbean where Captain Jack Sparrow and Elizabeth Swan are stranded and stranded and she burns the bottles of rum. We spent a relaxing afternoon here. Jaren swam to his hearts content and I got to relax on the beach and read a book.

This is the plane that the two pictures above were taken from. Here we are getting ready to head back to reality and back to the cold winter weather.

Although the weather above the water was windy the snorkeling was pretty good at the Tobago Cays.

Taken at the turtle sanctuary at the Tobago Cays.

Kaity and Andy

The beach at Petit Tabac, the Pirates of the Caribbean beach.

Just about to sit in the shade and read!

They had the! best! beach! barbecues! ever! This gentleman is getting the lobster ready.

Cleaning the Lobster

Kaity and Andy getting ready for our first ever beach BBQ.

Don't let Andy's face fool you. The food was to die for and there was SO MUCH of it! The cute little English family at the table next to us paid us a compliment by telling us that we were "non-fat Americans." If we ate like this every night we would fall under the fat American category. It was so good!

On the menu: Lobster, delicious rice, garlic potatoes, fruit, and plantains. I feel like I must be missing something. I know there was more food that that.

This was an interesting night! It started out really well with another delicious beach BBQ and then we decided to call it a night. We were a little nervous because the boat next to us had dropped their anchor really close to ours and if the wind swung just right then the back of our boat was way too close to the back of their boat. Jaren and I decided to get up in a few hours and make sure their anchor was holding and our anchor was holding and that we weren't going to hit them. I woke up a little while later and we had moved, back, towards the rocks and coral reef. Let me tell you something, that is a freaky situation to be in! The middle of the night, it's dark and you can see the rocks poking up out of the water and hear the waves crashing over them and you realize your boat has been slowly moving towards them while you were peacefully sleeping. Between the naked men next door, the extremely loud moaning sound of a tight rope and our sliding anchor none of us got much sleep that night.