Weekend in Michigan

 

 We went to Michigan last weekend expecting to go to the fair.  We thought we were going to go on Sunday, but Michael called Saturday night to say that they were leaving the fair and Saturday was the last day.  The schedule that my parents had included items on Sunday, but evidently they were tear-down events for the vendors, farmers, etc.

So we had a lovely day on Saturday with Grandma and Grandpa at their house and then we decided to go to the Michigan Renaissance Festival on Sunday.  I have always been hesitant about Renaissance Fairs to be honest, but I am a convert now.  We had a great time.  They had quite a few man-powered rides for the kids that Mackenzie loved.  Isaac was a bit tentative about the rides.

Mackenzie even rode a pony!  We have gone to multiple places with pony rides and Mackenzie has gotten on a lot of ponies, but she usually gets off really quickly.  This time she stayed on her pony for the whole ride! Maybe because Grandpa was with her?

She also got her face painted:

 

Isaac loved the swords.  He was pretty good when Mom told him that he was not bringing a sword home to beat things with, but perhaps this was becuase Dad told him that we have plenty of wood at the house to build a sword with.

 

Last night we went school supply shopping for Mackenzie.  She has an open house tomorrow to go see her classroom, etc.  I think that I am much more excited/traumatized about the whole thing than she is.  I am super excited to get to see her kindergarten classroom.  I can still remember mine exactly!

Bountiful Harvest

Yesterday I spent some time in my garden.  My potato plants had died, I think from a bug and I was not expecting much, but a coworker suggested that I try digging up the potatoes, even if I only got baby potatoes.  Much to my surprise I got some pretty big potatoes.  I also got about 6 baby potatoes.  I put four back in the garden in the hopes that I would get another round of plants and I brought two inside.  I think I remember a science project where you hang a potato over a glass of water and watch it sprout.  I thought that it might be fun for the kids to watch a potato germinate.  Anyway, here is a shot of my potato harvest.  Not bad for my first try and I only spiked one with the shovel!

I have been picking a lot of tomatoes and cherry tomatoes on a daily basis.  Luckily I really like tomatoes since no one else in my house will eat them.  I have also given some to Linda and Shannon.  Here is one day's harvest:

Finally, when I was out in the garden I had to call Mackenzie over to see the hiding zucchini.  It was right on the ground under all of the leaves and it was gigantic!  I didn't think to take a picture of it until I was shredding it up for zucchini bread.  Here is a shot of two loaves that I baked yesterday.  I baked two more loaves tonight and I am guessing I have enough for 5 more loaves.  It has a ton of sugar in it, but we all like zucchini bread so I figure I can freeze a bunch for some treats later in the year.

Finally, we have a fairly good size pumpkin on the pumpkin vine, 2 cucumbers on the cucumber vine and baby green peppers as well.  All in all it has been a great gardening season for me.  My new bean plants (the first round gotten eaten by a bunny) are starting to come up.  Hopefully we will get some beans before the end of the season, but even if we don't I am going to consider this my best gardening year yet.

Congratulations, Mom

This past weekend we celebrated my mom's retirement and her birthday.  She has been retired for over a month and seems to be enjoying it very much.  I think that the party went very well and that everyone got a chance to wish Mom the best and enjoy some food and drinks at The H in Midland. So congratulations, Mom, you deserve a long, relaxing retirement.  Hopefully you enjoy your Kindle.

We have been spending a lot of weekends at the lake with my parents and Lexie.  The weekend of the 23rd we went up to celebrate Lexie's eleventh birthday.  I made her a beanbag (of course) with fabrics that she picked out.  She did an excellent job:

I thought that I had taken a picture of Lexie on her beanbag, but evidently not.  Hopefully my parents have a picture on their camera.  Here is a picture of Lexie that Mackenzie took.

I haven't figured out how to put videos on the blog yet, but here are a couple still pictures of the girls tubing behind the boat:

I also got to go tubing.  I rode with Mackenzie and Lexie rode with my friend Missy.  Missy did a couple of turns around the lake on skis, and even dropped a ski.  Pretty amazing, I am quite confident that my skiing days remain over.

I think that we are going to enjoy a "quiet" weekend at home this weekend.  I am not sure when the last weekend was that we spent in Perrysburg, but it has been a while.  Hopefully we have nice weather and the we can work on the yard and just spend some time at home. Mackenzie is already planning 2 play-dates.

Summer is Flying By

June flew by for us and July is passing just as quickly.  I can't believe that it is the middle of July already.  I will try to sum things up as best I can.  Mackenzie followed up on Safety Town with a week of VBS, which she loved just as much.  Grandma bought her a CD at the end of the week of the music that they used throughout the week.  At the end of the week the kids danced and sang along with the music at a dinner and at church.  Mackenzie really enjoys playing the music in her room and singing and dancing along.  The next week Brian was in Estonia and the kids and I kept ourselves very busy.  I drove the kids up to Grandma and Grandpa's cabin on the third and we hung out with Uncle Mike, Aunt Misty and Lexie for Uncle Mike's birthday.  I came home to work on the 5th and 6th and then picked up Brian at the airport and we headed back up to the cabin for the weekend.  The kids really love it up there, which makes me so happy, since it was such a joyful place for me growing up.  This weekend we went down to Dayton to go to a Pool party at Brian's cousin, Matt's house.  His wife Jean was celebrating graduating from Ketterning College.  The kids had fun swimming at the party and playing with water balloons.  We stayed at a hotel last night and the kids got up and went swimming there this morning before we headed home.  Mackenzie went swimming in her small pool here after quiet time.  So, needless to say, they really like swimming : )

The kids are really growing up fast.  Mackenzie is doing really well at her reading lately.  She is starting to recognize a lot of words and to try and sound words out.  Isaac is continuing to be a typical 3 year old and to defy authority as much as possible.  He is also super sweet and is telling all of us he loves us quite often and giving lots of kisses.  He also enjoys singing songs and playing games.  His name is extremely fitting for him, he loves to laugh.

The painting in the living room is done.  Now we need to find carpeting.  It may take us a while though, first of all because I am cheap and carpet is expensive and secondly because the painters are coming tomorrow to start to paint the outside of the house (also expensive).  However, the room looks so great and getting the carpeting replaced would really be the icing on the cake, so hopefully we can get it done.

Work, Work, Work

Being summer, Brian is on a very relaxed schedule at the University, which leaves him open for home improvement work.  At this point, I am sure that he is anxiously awaiting the fall sememster.  But for now he is stuck working at home.  Right now, along with some smaller projects, we are working on the living room.  We had to have a plasterer come in and fix a number of areas that had been damaged by water in the past, including a big section of a living room wall, which opens up the opportunity for painting.  Our living room is pretty big and has some built in cabinets and quite a bit of molding and window sashing.  So the process of cleaning, sanding, priming and painting has been long and tedious.  We are making great headway though and I am confident we will be done with the painting at the end of this week.  Then we can shop for carpet.  Fun, fun, fun.

Here is a shot of Mackenzie helping prime the built-ins:

We have managed to have some fun in the meantime though.  My parents were here a couple weekends ago.  Mom and I took the kids to the 577 Foundation and the kids loved showing Grandma around.  We went to Cirque de Soleil Quidam on Sunday.  It was very good and I think my parents enjoyed it.  However it was much darker and slower than the other Cirque shows that Brian and I have seen and the kids really lost interest in it.  Here is a shot of Isaac napping, which he did for a pretty good portion of the show.

Mackenzie really did not enjoy most of the show and we ended up leaving a little before the end of the show.  It is unfortunate because I think they really would have loved the earlier Cirque de Soleil show that I saw that was really colorful and fun and exciting.  I will have to do better research before we take the kids to another show.

We took the kids to Madagascar 3 yesterday for Father's Day and it went much better.  They both got a little scared, but Isaac sat for the whole show. 

Prior to going to the movie, Mackenzie had wanted to go shopping. She had $8.57 in change in her purse. I had told her that she could buy herself something to eat at the movie. So she bought a box of Starburst before the show.  She got scared by the "bad lady" in the movie.  She covered up her ears and then asked (very loudly since she couldn't hear) to leave the theatre.  So I took her out (a bit begrudgingly).  While we were sitting on the bench outside the theatre she asked me, "Did you really want to see the movie?"  I told her that I had paid $7 for a ticket to see the movie. She then reached into her purse and took out a penny (all she knows currently is that it is a piece of money, she doesn't know how it all works quite yet) and held it out to me with a sad look on her face. Of course I felt like the meanest Mom on the planet at that point.  I told her that she did not need to give me the money for the ticket and then I suggested that we try to go back in and watch the movie from right inside the door so we could leave easily if she wanted to.  She agreed (a bit begrudgingly) to go back in and watch from the ramp headed into the theatre. When she got scared she would run down the ramp to where she couldn't see the screen and when it sounded better she would head back up. Since the theatre was really empty (we went to a 10 am show), I figured this was okay and it worked for her.

Given the active way Mackenzie watched the movie, she didn't eat a lot of her Starburst. At the end of the show we saw a friend of Brian's and her two little girls. Mackenzie gave each of the girls (and Isaac) each 3 of her Starbursts, which I was very proud of.  Isaac pretty much ran up and down the hallway of the theatre and then found the arcade and the photo booth.  He did say thank you to his sister for the Starburst, which I was also proud of. 

Disconnected

When we returned from vacation we had no phone connection and therefore no DSL connection so my last vacation post is a bit delayed. 

Our last day in North Carolina we took the kids to the Children's Museum in Winston Salem.  The kids had visited the museum the last time we were in North Carolina and Mackenzie remembered the beanstalk that she got to climb.  The kids really enjoyed their time there and I think they got to see pretty much everything.  I love the picture below of Mackenzie reading to a baby doll.  It is really the perfect shot of Mackenzie.  She is going to be a great mom one day.

After the museum we took the kids to McDonald's and we got a huge compliment from a father of four who told us the kids were behaving very well and that we were very brave to take 4 preschoolers to McDonald's.  The kids really did behave very well.  We then took them to the set of the movie Tina was working on and they all got ice cream (sorbet for Isaac).

Saturday morning the Phillips family headed home. The kids did really well during the long drive home, thanks in many ways to the DVD players.  We stopped for a potty and lunch break at Tamarack in West Virginia.  I had stopped there with Tina and the boys when we drove up earlier this year.  They have a small playground outside with cement cheese.  When I was a kid we played on cement cheese, so it was very nostalgic for me.

There were other cement climbing items there as well and Mackenzie thought that this one was pretty cool as well:

The kids have had a blast being home.  They have spent a lot of time in the yard and in the play room. 

On Sunday we had dinner at Linda and Butch's with the Ohio cousins and the kids had their first floats (Isaac's made with Tofutti). 

They also played ball with their cousins.  All of the kids except Isaac were playing a form of tag/dodge ball combo where the goal was to stay away from the ball.  Isaac was playing take away where his goal was to get the ball.  It was quite humorous until Isaac finally stopped playing, crossed his arms and said, "They're not sharing".

Only One Day Left . . .

Yesterday we took the kids to SciWorks in Winston Salem.  It is a science museum geared for younger kids.  The kids had a blast and Mackenzie did not want to leave.  Mackenzie took a tumble outside and got pretty scratched up and we had to ask for some band aids, but other than that it was a great outing.

After quiet-time we pulled out the boys water toy (which we got them a few years ago) and the kids had a blast playing in the water and taking turns playing lifeguarg.  Thomas was super impressed when Brian told him that he used to be a life guard and wanted to know "all about it".

Today we hung out at the house and had some craft time and got ready to have a "party".  Friends of Brian's and Tina's, Dennis and Colleen came over and we grilled and hung out.  I unfortunately didn't think to take a picture of the deck decorated with the kids crafts.  Each one made a bug out of styrofoam balls and pipe cleaners and a wind sock made mainly out of craft foam.  Painting the styrofoam balls for the bugs did not go extremely well, although it did not go extremely poorly either.  I did end up with all of the kids in the bathtub getting cleaned up at the end of it though and a change of clothes for each.  As I was changing Mackenzie she told me that she is "probably going to marry Thomas, because he is so cute."  I informed her that, similar to how she is not allowed to marry her brother, she is also not allowed to marry her cousin.  She took the news pretty well.

Here is a shot of the kids working on the wind socks:

and here is a shot with some of the finished products drying (you have to look pretty hard for the bugs):

While we were getting dinner ready we put up the boys' bounce-house so the kids could blow off some energy and they worked up quite a sweat bouncing around.

We also failed to take any pictures at the dinner itself, but we all had a good time, the kids played together nicely, and the food tasted great, if I do say so myself.