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This has been a crazy week!  My husband and I spent last weekend in Nashville.  I could write a whole post on how important it is to have couple time when you have kids! We miss our kids like we are missing an appendage, but we have such a good time “adulting” and spending some time child free.  It is SO important for a marriage to make this a priority!  Couple time is probably my top favorite thing ever but I promise not to include that every Friday!  Another one of my favorite things is to EAT!!  We ate at two awesome places in Nashville last weekend.  Sam’s Place is a sports bar in the Bellmeade area.  If you like to watch sports, it’s the place to go!  There were a ton of TV’s that could be seen from any angle and seat in the restaurant.  The food was great too!  I had a hamburger with no bun and broccoli and they were both excellent!  I had already had breakfast and lunch that day and this was just mid-afternoon.  I also ate dinner later.  Yep!  I. LOVE. TO. EAT!!  Later that day we ate at Butcher and Bee in East Nashville.  It was AMAZING!  The atmosphere was so fun-hipster and trendy!  They have a cute back patio with fun lighting and heater and it was the perfect place to catch up with friends!  I had a vegan dish that was abalone mushroom with some kind of extraordinary sauce. I am not vegan but it was not something I had ever heard of so I went with it! And WOW!!  I’ll be talking about it forever!  My husband had a hamburger that he deemed the best he had ever had! My friend Erin had gnocchi that she said was very good. A word of warning about Butcher and Bee….there are a lot of words on the menu that I had never heard of!  I highly recommend both of those restaurants if you are ever in the Nashville area.

I had surgery earlier in the week so the majority of the week after our trip has been fairly low key.  If you saw my Instagram or Facebook stories I talked a little about what was going on and the procedure I had done.  Talking about female issues is not my favorite.  When it comes to that, I am super modest but I wanted to be open about because I know I’m not the only one whose body and hormones like to go crazy on occasion!  Thankfully, besides a rough day on surgery day and just being really tired, the recovery has been pretty good!  We have, however, spent some time doing Easter things and these have been some of my favorite things this week!

We did the obligatory dying of the Easter eggs.  Honestly, this is not always my favorite because I am not a messy craft type person.  My type A kicks in and I get a little anxious.  Never ask me to craft with glitter!  First thing, I had to explain to TJ the difference in d-i-e and d-y-e, I’m really not sure how he made sense of “dying” Easter eggs but I think he understands now .  We used a new kind of egg dying system this year that included using rice. It was called Paas Shake and Color.  It was great!  It made very cool looking eggs with minimal mess!  The dye we did get on our hands washed off with ease!  TJ looks forward to the tradition of dying eggs every year and I’m always going in ensure he gets to make that memory!

My new favorite Easter book is God Gave Us Easter.  This is part of the God Gave us series by Lisa Tawn Bergren.  We read God Gave Us Christmas at Christmas at the recommendation of our local librarian and then checked out God Gave Us Easter last week.  They are just the sweetest books and have a really great way of explaining the holiday’s in a clear way for kids.  The Easter book includes the Easter Bunny and the Christmas book includes Santa Claus but they both point kids to Jesus all through the book.  I also gave God Gave Us You as a baby shower gift and it is so sweet it made me cry!

Today is Good Friday and it is truly one of my favorite days of the year.  Although it is the day Jesus was crucified, I know how the story ends!  I am so amazed and humbled at what Christ did for me and for you.  I want to leave you with this excerpt from Goodnight Warrior: God’s Mighty Warrior Bedtime Bible Stories, Devotions, and Prayers by Sheila Walsh:  Jesus was willing to pay the price for our sin.  We deserve every bad thing that happened to Jesus.  But Jesus took our punishment on himself instead.  He covers us with his perfect record.  When we trust Jesus, God now sees his perfect Son, not our sins.  It was a very painful price to pay, but Jesus paid it because he loves all people.

Happy Easter!