Friday, May 30, 2008

May - Where did it go?

Hey all! All right, so I realize that I tend to blog in spurts. I've kept up reading everyone else's blogs regularly, but not so much on the writing. Let's see...this month we wrapped up soccer and school for Maxwell - both of which he had a lot of fun with this year.

Last weekend we flew to PA for Mike (Andrew's brother) and Caitlin's wedding. Both of the boys were junior groomsmen. The whole trip, they were a little sleep deprived (getting up earlier on eastern time and getting short to no naps), so on the day of the wedding, we wanted to make sure they got an opportunity for a good nap so as to minimize the likelihood of terrorist-like behavior at the wedding. Well, you know what happens to the best-laid plans. On the day of the wedding, the boys bounced off the walls of the hotel room for about 3 hours, getting absolutely zero nap. By the time the wedding rolled around, Ben was just downright surly. When the florist pinned his boutonniere on, he immediately ripped the head off the rose and threw it on the ground. Ahhh well, we did the best we could. Max hung in there fine and was brave enough to walk down the aisle like he was supposed to. Ben and I just hung out at the back of the courtyard. I consider it a victory that he didn't scream or cry during the ceremony. (You'll notice in some of the pictures that we had to put Ben in his more comfy tennies as soon as the ceremony was over.) The wedding was lovely - held at Washington Crossing Historic Inn right along the Delaware River. The weather was as perfect as we've had back there...mid-seventies, sunny, and low humidity. We also had a couple of days to let the kids play together at their cousins' house in their awesome new pool. It was fun to have the whole Shier side of the family together and catch up.

The boys were excellent little travellers - now we are home and I think the boys have been catching up on their sleep all week...they're taking loooooong naps (which is why I'm blogging right now :) ).

Other tidbits:

We got our sod rolled out and are nursing it along with lots of water on our little backyard project.

We're headed to Mt. Rushmore for the 4th of July! We reserved a camp-site at one of the KOAs there that has a water-park and all kinds of fun stuff. We decided it'd be tons of fun to buy a pop-up tent trailer. Some of my most vivid memories ("I'll run the heater just enough to take the chill off;" that awesome thunderstorm in the middle of the night camping in Corpus Christi; being a bonafide Jr. Park Ranger at Custer State Park) are from camping trips and I can't wait to take my own kids! So we've been researching and shopping pop-ups - probably going to buy one this weekend.

And here are some other pics from earlier this month:

Saturday, May 03, 2008

Worker-bees

Look at the dudes working away this afternoon! We had a walkway running from the driveway to the patio that was this awful messy, red rock-dust. It was a walkway you couldn't walk on because it was so dirty and messy or muddy if it rained, snowed, or the sprinklers turned on. The boys certainly loved digging in it, and were frequently covered from head to toe in red muck, but that's about the only positive. So making the red rock disappear was landscaping task numero uno. On Tuesday, we got our new walkway poured! Awww... However, I only had them concrete to the edge of the sod. We all worked to haul the red rock stuff out of the rest of the length of the walkway and we plan to lay sod on that part. We cleared out the rest of the walkway in about two hours this afternoon; we'd thought it would take a lot longer, so we were pleasantly surprised to finish that task today without a ton of effort!

Other things since the last post...

Andrew had a birthday. I baked blueberry pies.

Aspen tore her ACL (again).

My husband surprised me with a fancy shmancy diamond anniversary ring for our upcoming 10th anniversary!

Good book I read: Angry Housewives Eating Bon-bons (ignore the stupid sounding title)

Good movie I saw: Sicko (don't even get me started)

Reason #392 why I love craigslist: Less than 24 hours after listing 2 car seats that Max outgrew, I sold 'em today!

That's all for now...