the traditional gift for a second wedding anniversary is cotton. which means our entire anniversary date on tuesday was cotton-themed. because yes, i get way too excited over tacky traditions such as this one...haha we started off exchanging cottony gifts (a hat for nick and curtains for me), went shopping at cotton-on, drove up through big COTTONwood canyon (that one was really clever and unplanned) and ended up in salt lake for dinner. 

we went to palette, which i've been dying to try since i first heard about it, but we could never quite justify spending that much money on dinner...until our anniversary :) ha, but seriously next time you are in salt lake city, it's a special occasion or you have some extra spending cash, go eat there. you will not regret it. oh, and order the truffle fries. it will make your tastebuds so happy. i promise.

but my favorite part of our the whole night was the car ride home. i feel like it was one of the first times in awhile that we had the time to just hang out by ourselves and talk about all sorts of things and not be busy or distracted or have to talk about grown-up stuff. by the time we got home neither of us wanted the date to end yet, so we found a church parking lot overlooking all the night lights of provo and cuddled up in a million blankets in the back of his truck and talked about anything and everything.

the whole night i felt like the luckiest girl in the world. i'm so happy nicolaus and i found each other and the stars aligned to make it all work out. oh, aaaand yesterday as a continuation of our anniversary celebrations we went and lit off two floating lanterns - one for each year of marriage. last year, nick had the idea to set one off for our first/paper anniversary and we decided we should keep up the tradition but add one lantern for every year. so hopefully by our 50th anniversary we'll have a million kids and in-laws and grandbabies to help us light up the sky :)

p.s. i forgot to add that driving up the canyon we saw a mama moose and baby moose about 8 feet from us! i am petrified of moose but felt semi-safe in the car, but even then when we parked to look at them the mama moose was giving us one terrifying evil eye.

p.p.s. thank you all SO much for your sweet comments on my last post!! i know i'm sometimes the worst at replying to them all. but i'm working on it. and in the meantime i just want you to know how happy it makes me to read your kind words :)