Kidnapping Bastiaan…. And Vanilla Bean Ice Cream…

Yep, I admit it!
I kidnapped my husband!
And I LIKED IT!

We don’t go out much. Our life pretty much evolves in and around the dairy. We don’t feel the need to go too far and away places, because when we were “young” (yes, this means in our teens and twenties) Bastiaan and I traveled the world. So now we are just happy to sit on our own couch in our own house enjoying each other’s company.

But sometimes you (well, I anyway) get this feeling and you just need to chance paces a bit to keep yourself and your relationship happy…

Soooo, I kidnapped my hubby!

Last year my sweetie turned 30 (such a young pup...)! And we needed to celebrate, but I am not very good at giving gifts and I am also ALWAYS forgetting his birthday day (yes I know, it is usually on the same date every year…) but somehow it always sneaks up on me! So to make up for all the years that I almost (or fully) forgot I planned a little get away trip.

He did not know ANYTHING! I just told him he needed to make sure to shower and shave and be ready at 11 am Thursday morning.

The night before I packed his favorite shirts and yeans, tossed some cologne and gel in a bag and put that with my girly girl stuff in the trunk of my car. At 11 am he was ready and was anxious to know where going…. Bastiaan is not very good with surprises or gifts; he just has this need to know what it is or what the surprise is…. But I was NOT going to tell him!

I had to be pretty crafty because after his shower and getting dressed, with me telling him “Sorry honey, that shirt of yours is still in the laundry basket…”, “Yeah I know it is been in there for over a week….”, “I’ll do it when we get back tonight…”. And sneaking back into the house, while he waited in the car, with a lousy excuse of having forgotten something, to get his toothbrush and shaving stuff, in two Walmart bags, so he couldn’t see what was in it... We finally got going.

No I didn’t need no handcuffs, and also I didn’t need a blindfold, but I had him in my car and I wasn’t gonna let him go!

After we drove for 4 hours he REALLY wanted to know where we were going. I told him, “surprise!” and kept driving. But of course I got a little hungry and he got a little grumpy after all this driving, so we pulled over at an exit close to Cincinnati. Bastiaan was all ready to hop out of the car and do some driving with race cars (that was what he thought we were going to do) but when we pulled into the parking lot of a Steak and Shake, he figured it out pretty quick! No racing cars, not today!

After we had a fabulous burger and a shake, YES some VANILLA BEAN (hehe), we hit the road again. And finally after driving a little over seven and a half hours we were there! By that time Bastiaan knew we weren’t going home that night, but he still did not know I booked us a Bed & Breakfast close to the Smokey Mountains and we were going to stay there for two nights. We ended up staying there for THREE nights, just us, our lovely hosts and some wonderful house guests. No phones, no TV, no computers and NO COWS! We did have long walks, amazing breakfasts and even more amazing desserts, some incredible views of the mountains and our own porch and Jacuzzi! It was fantastic!

And..., because of all of you, we made it into the final round of the Progressive Dairyman Ice Cream Face Off!!! AND because Bastiaan is going to be 31 this weekend and yes I am kidnapping him again today! But this time with his knowledge, I am gonna ask you ONE MORE TIME to please vote for Vanilla Bean! And I promise you, I will do my best to find the best ice cream place in DollyWood and eat some Vanilla Bean Ice Cream and let you know about it…. Well…. And if we won the contest of course!

A big THANK YOU SOOO MUCH to everybody who voted AND a big THANK YOU AND A BIG HUG for everybody who where brave enough to try my Ice Cream and multi colored Peppercorns recipe, and actually did LIKE it!

You guys are the best!!!



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Three times is the Charm... Getting Married # 1

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Some people get married once
Some people get married twice
Some people get married three times to THE SAME guy… and yes this would be me…

How do you get married three times, well, it isn’t because I really wanted too but sometimes life throws you a little curve ball and you just have to go with it…

Bastiaan proposed to me in November of 2007. In a really nice restaurant in Fort Wayne, we had been together for over 6 years and he figured it was time, and so did I, so I said “YES!” (And we got a free dessert from the people sitting next to us in the restaurant which made it extra nice).

We set our date to be on July 5th 2008 so our family and friends would have enough time to come over and book a flight from the Netherlands, Canada or Australia. At that date we would have the party and our church wedding. Of course we just started milking on the 20th of November and everything was still very hectic, exciting and stressful but also an immense adventure and we were loving every moment of it!

Because Bastiaan’s visa was going to expire in February we needed too make sure he would be "safe" and we decided to get married in the Courthouse in Bluffton, just to get the paperwork done. Go to Holland make sure the visa’s were in order and then get “really” married in July. For us this “wedding” was a necessity. We would of preferred to have done it on the same day as our church wedding but if you have so many people coming from abroad you need to give them proper time to make arrangements and plan flights. Telling them in November you are going to get married in February is not enough time, we figured.

I do, # 1...
We were already flabbergasted when we went to the courthouse to get a marriage license. Question one; ‘Have you been married before?’, ‘ No…’. Question two; ‘Do you have any children?’, ‘No…’ Question three; ‘Do you have mental problems?' ‘HU? NO!!!’. Those questions plus the actual license cost us $9.00 which was shocking (Yes, the price as well as the questions)! They told us now that we had the license we should get our witnesses and we would be ready to go…

On January 18th it was COLD!!! As in we (Dutchies) are not used to this kinda weather! But because I wanted to make sure this was at least a little special, it was our wedding after all, I wore a skirt (never mind the fact that an hour before I was still running around in coveralls on the farm trying to get things in order and Bastiaan was working on fixing a tractor!) and Bastiaan got a nice new shirt and my mom & dad and brother were coming, all dressed up too after running around on the farm all morning. Because of the dairy start up we hadn’t really had the opportunity to meet a lot of new people who could stand in as our witnesses and so my parents were going to be our witnesses.

We agreed with Bastiaan’s parents and my little sister that we would put them on speaker phone when it was time to do the ceremony so they would listen to us say our 'I do’s'. We did not want them to feel left out, but we also didn’t want them to travel two times, after all the June wedding was going to be our “official” wedding, and we rater had them there at that time!

So on this cold day we went to the Bluffton Courthouse and which was another SHOCKER where out of the courthouse and married for the very first time WITHIN 15 (if it lasted that long) MINUTES!

Before Bastiaan and I knew what was going on we were officially married! The only thing I really remember was the major saying those things that we only hear on TV or in the movies, now for real right in front of us which was pretty amazing! And naturally my new husband being very sweet and handsome!

After we got out off the courthouse we went to the Mexican restaurant to celebrate and got a great lunch, after that it was pretty much back to business as usual…

Soon after our “Court Wedding” Bastiaan and I picked the venue and the church and met with the priest, picked what we wanted to eat and who we would love to have at our special day and THAT was pretty much the extend of what he wanted and needed to do… (Being a boy and planning weddings apparently doesn’t go together…).

Me and a friend on the other hand decided on getting organized and we got a Marta Steward planning guide (haha, yep) and the next months we were extremely busy getting everything done and ready. In the beginning of April 2008 the first wedding invitations went to our 200 guests all over the world…

On April 15th I got a phone call.
‘Sorry, but you got cancer…’.
Within 5 minutes our whole world as we knew it changed.

Four weeks after getting “the news”, being true several surgeries and debating different types off chemo, we canceled the wedding...

Together we decided to fight this beast first, make sure we were healthy and yes then we would get married, for Real. But at that time we really did not know or realize how bad it was going to be...

Next Thursday I’ll tell you about us getting married for the second time, without us really realizing what exactly was happening!


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How to end up with my perfect guy...

There is no such thing as the perfect guy, right??? WRONG!

This past Monday I told you about our Bar in School (Bar 6-) and this cute guy that walked in while I was doing my weekly shift of bartending…. Yes, on a weeknight...

Bastiaan, was his name.

I figured this was a good, solid name and I quickly checked his hands (pretty important for a farmer) and checked his teeth (pretty important for a farm girl). They were both fine so we started chatting.

He just came back from Australia where he spent 8 months working at a cotton farm a sheep farm and doing some backpacking. That sounded like music to my ears because I already had traveled 3 times to The States, once to Canada, several times to Sicily (all by myself!) so I was pretty content with the fact that I found somebody who traveled (by himself) too and wasn't afraid to see the world.

We talked a hole in the night. Of course I was too busy talking to notice the time and D finally told me, “Hey Leo, shouldn’t you close the bar?” Oh yeah, close the bar... Bastiaan helped us close the bar (which included cleaning the whole place, clean the toilets and the outside so the next morning “normal” students could go to school) without finding left overs from the previous night and we did this same thing the next night and the next…

Although I told him the second night, “You have to know, when I grow up, I’m gonna live in The States!”, that didn’t scare him off. He just laughed and asked if maybe I wanted to come to Australia instead.

“NO WAY!” … Yes, yes determined stubborn is something that some people would label me with…

On our 4th night he walked me back to my car. We also had dorms on the school property and the first year they recommend you staying in the dorms (to get adjusted to the life, as in, don’t drink and drive but just crawl home...) but because I was already in my third year I “upgraded” my bottom into a real student house (in the suburbs of the town). Bastiaan had his room in the dorm (after all he was brand spanking new), but I had to drive to my house every evening. 

While walking "home"/to my car from the Bar listening to a Belgium band, Lasgo with their hit song Something, Bastiaan kissed me! And yes this was one of our OPENING SONGS at our wedding (our THIRD wedding, but I’ll tell you all about that later) and yes he is about 1.5 years younger but he also knew how to take charge... hehe…

The music was great, the weather was great, the evening went really well and I was in the best company a girl could wish for. When I got home I woke up all my roommates and told them we had kissed! Of course they were very happy for me and asked me what my plan was next. I hadn’t been in a serious relationship for a while and I told them, "we would see where it would lead us". To D I said, “I don’t know, he is awfully young, maybe it will last 3 months and then something else will come along for him”…

This year we are together 10 years with LOTS of ups and downs; as in: break up’s, get together’s, emigration to a different part of the world, battling cancer, starting a large dairy together with MY mom, dad and brother, leaving his family for me, leaving his friends for me and try to find new friends, putting his dreams away on a shelf so i can chase my crazy American Dream, going true a truly awful time financially and mentally with our dairy so soon after we started up, learning to love cows while actually he is a crop farmer and no, crop farmers are not dairy farmers..., hoping that one day he can become a daddy, that is if my body and mind  is ready to have little ones... and oh, did I mention BATTLING cancer with me…?

I really KNOW i found my perfect match. He’s quiet, I’m blabbing all the time, he’s understanding, I’m wondering AND worrying about everything everywhere, he thinks things true, I’m a spur of the moment kindda girl, he’s perfect , I’m far from….


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