Bike-a-licious!

We had a gorgeous day yesterday so I took Miss C out for a little bike ride:

Why, yes, in the name of frugality, she IS riding the bike her big bro got on his 4th birthday.  But hey-- aren't those pink streamers snazzy?!

She's come a long way in three years!!

Three Looks at CJK

I ended up doing more than 5 hours of work yesterday for one of my part-time gigs so didn't have much time to do much else of note.  Good thing Miss C has been entertaining us over the last week!

She wore that box home and everything!

Girl loves to climb trees now:

Clearly a style icon in the making:

It's a good thing I'm earning some money this week since we just had wood blinds installed in the house on Monday.  It only took 3 years.....!!    ;-)

Filling in the Free Time

You know I'm a huge library fan so it's a pretty significant event that I treated myself to some (gasp!) purchased books a coupla weeks ago.   I'm not holding out much hope that our public library will stock these "southern" stories or Christian reflections anytime soon (although I certainly have found Christian writers "in stock"-- just not a plethora).

ANYWAY- -I'm very excited about some reading:

If we're being honest, however-- I haven't yet cracked a spine.  Several weeks back, we received our monthly cable bill and it had jumped up $25.  As it turns out, promotions do come to an end (Boooo!) but I've always had pretty decent luck with calling and asking about other offers.  I was able to get it knocked back down $15 and I accepted the $10 increase as the cost of doing business over time.  THEN, right before we left for Texas, we were flipping through channels and realized we now unexpectedly have both HBO and Showtime!   Um, yes.  That will do.

All this to say that, in my bits and pieces of free time around the Big Mulch Project (or "Mulch Ado About Nothing" as named by the witty Big Daddy), I've been soaking in some digital entertainment instead of the printed page.   We just finished the final 6 episodes of The Newsroom and I also burned through the most recent season of Girls, which I still claim is a show about horrible people...but I still want to see how horrible they can get.   Speaking of horrible people, Nurse Jackie is currently airing a new season, as is Veep which makes me giggle.   I was watching the most recent Veep episode yesterday and had to text my brother to tell him that I was 95% sure one of the characters was eating Wegmans yogurt!  (Then I saw someone posted the same thing on the local Wegmans FB pan page-- yes, there is such a thing!--and I felt quite affirmed!!)

I really need to get back to reading.....  but man, it's fun to be "current" with the cable shows!!  :-)

It's Almost MAY

Yet it was 42 degrees on Saturday morning and the kids had to be bundled up like this:

Just like last Sunday, the three of us trekked up to school to meet the BG and his players at 7:45 AM before their day o' mulch spreading.  It's possible the kids got in on the early morning donut action. 

The final number was 2624 bags spread.  Prettttty sure the BG would be fine if he didn't see any more mulch for awhile!  I imagine I've locked myself into this Logistics Coordinator job for years to come.  It was hours and hours and hours of work but, I have to admit, I'm kind of in withdrawal now that I'm not sending/receiving emails all the time!

Hope you all had a fabulous weekend!

Unexpected

I just realized I never shared with you the crazy snack experience we had at Grandma's house over Easter weekend!

She bought a few small bags of salty treats to offer for munching, including these cheddar pretzel bites:

When she opened the bag, however, she found an unexpected sight:

Ummmm......

You guys know I like my salty snacks but there was no way I was eating any of that.  I was not convinced that large ball wasn't hiding some sort of.......vermin or something.

(shudder)

HAPPY FRIDAY!   May you find nothing freakishly-oversized in your bags o' snacks this weekend!

Besties

Anne and her chickadees stayed until about 4pm yesterday so we got lots more hanging-out time!  I didn't take any photos, however, so I'll have to feature another pair of best friends today:

May they always like each other this much...!!

Afternoon Awesomeness

Some visitors arrived at our door last night-- and it was this girl's first time here:

Yes, that's baby Norah!!   Her big sis, Ellie, coordinated quite well in stripes with Miss C:

When big brother B got home from school, he was quick to help Ellie put on her shoes:

Just to make things even more fun, we invited these girls to come over, too!

Annie Kate and her fabulously-hatted little chickadee:

After dinner, most of the crew took a walk while AKHG stayed to take care of the baby:

Shoulder-riding-selfie:

Our view when we got back to the house and peered in the basement window...turns out B-man convinced her to play some video games, too!

(That little sliver of blue behind the rocking chair is the boy who has his own controller)!

Free (Gourmet!) Food

Geoff wins Brother of the Year award for sending me a delivery of meals from Blue Apron.  They've been using the service for some time and I was pretty pumped to get to try it, too!

We got our box o' ingredients on Wednesday afternoon:

Check out all the bounty!

I especially enjoyed the bags of "Knick Knacks":

 The two plan options are: three meals of 2-servings each or two meals of 4-servings.  While I was tempted to do the former so we could get three different combos of yumminess (and serve my kids PB&J, ha!), I did instead choose the "family plan"!    The full-color pages you can see in the above pics are the step-by-step instructions for how to turn the ingredients into gourmet meals.  And they were both very tasty!!

Almond-Crusted Cod with Coconut Rice & Ginger Spinach:

And Pan-Seared Steaks & Salsa Verde with Roasted Broccoli & Purple Potatoes:

I got such a kick out of this whole experience.  (THANK YOU, BROTHER!!)  I eventually decided continuing the subscription isn't in our best financial interest since I actually enjoy meal-planning and grocery-shopping, but this is absolutely a fabulous service for people who like to cook but prefer to have all the advance work done for them.

YUM.

PS: It has now come to my attention that Texas is one of the only 8 states to which BA does not deliver.  Booooo.

Mulch Mania

As is pretty common at high schools in this area, the BG's school has a big mulch sale each spring as a fundraiser for music/athletics/journalism, etc, programs.  It's a HUGE deal with thousands and thousands of bags of mulch being sold.  Customers can pay for delivery (done by teams of student/staff/parent volunteers) and then they can also pay $3/bag for the mulch to be spread at their home.  The spreading portion is a fundraiser for the football program specifically and, while seriously labor-intensive, is a really nice way to raise funds.

I volunteered this year to coordinate the logistics for all the spreading.  Turns out this job has heretofore been done by 3 mothers so, um, it's a lot of work.  The BG and I were a great team: we'd plot on maps all the jobs as they came in, and then I had to schedule geographically-efficient routes for each of the 6 teams of football player-spreaders, email back and forth with each customer to confirm the window of time for arrival, etc.   Yesterday was the big spreading day and it was so nerve-wracking to see if our masterful (yet hypothetical) schedule would unfold as we hoped-- would enough players show up to have the teams be big enough to complete each spreading job in the time we guessed?

The 30 or so players (plus 6 adult drivers) spread approximately 1500 bags of mulch at 45 sites...and it all went very smoothly!!  (Cue the angels singing)   Everybody was thrilled.  (Well, the BG and all involved were exhausted!)   The kicker is that there are always two days of spreading so my project for today/tomorrow is to do the whole thing over again with the 1200ish bags we have to get done on Saturday.   So...next Sunday?   Next Sunday is for celebrating!!

The kids and I went to the school at 7:30 yesterday morning to send off the teams, and then we cruised around the neighborhoods a little bit checking on them.  The BG called us when his team got to a job that was of particular interest to the B-man:  his elementary school!!    In a wonderful show of school cluster support, parents and the PTA at our school buy 80+ bags of mulch from the high school sale each year to put in all the flower beds.  So we drove over there to "check on the work"....and to play on the playground!

There may also have been some (wild?!) goose-chasing!

The End

It was sooooooooo wonderful to have the BG with me in Dallas.  Since I'm usually there with the kids by myself, it was such a treat this time to be able to do things like take brisk exercise walks each morning at 6:30 with a partner......that might or might not have ended up each time at the neighborhood Starbucks....and 2 out of 3 days at the neighborhood donut shop!   ;-)    Such a great way to start out each of our days there!

Geoff, Nicki, and Griffin arrived late Wednesday afternoon so we really only had Thursday and Friday together since we left early Saturday.  Although many hours were spent at the aforementioned storage unit, we all managed to fit in lots of fun while we could!

And then it was time to go home.  :-(

HAPPY FRIDAY!

HBD, AKHG!!!

Once we got (back) to Dallas, a large portion of our time went to doing some clean out/organization in a storage unit my parents opened when they moved there in 2000.  Yes, fifteen years ago.  No, not much has been done to/in it since.  You can imagine the fun in store, er, storage!  HA HA!

I'm happy to report that our multi-day efforts resulted in me finding some "tray-zures" that have been heretofore missing from my collection: namely, elementary and middle school yearbooks, along with some awesome mementos from middle and high schools.  Blog fodder for years to come, for sure, but for today-- let's take a brief break to celebrate THE BIRTHDAY GIRL.

In case you don't know of whom I'm speaking, perhaps this wallpaper of us I found in the storage unit can help:

(And I know you can't see it, but I just want you to know that I am wearing a romper in those pics! A. Romper.)

I thought this next gem really summed up the birthday girl.  I didn't have any memory of this note/sign when I found it in the tub o' goodies, but it cracks me up.   I'm pretty sure it must be from 1995 since that was the only year I had a prom date (er, "luv-muffin") who was neither my neighbor nor the Ukranian foreign exchange student.

Ah, playing with fonts on a newfangled word processing program was SO mid-90s!  And since the bottom one is particularly hard to read, let me retype:

"Well,  I hope the Easter Bunny comes hopping your way on Sunday (a certain important person's b-day)"  

Anne doesn't have to share her birthday with a hopping bunny today...but I might still be in "BIG TROUBLE" for not doing some "very important shopping."  :-)

Happy birthday to my high school bestie-- oh, how sad that box of memories would be if we hadn't met in the the band room in 9th grade!

More Middle

We took advantage of the hotel-like accommodations Chez Lindsay because that put us in good geographical position to hit up the Legoland Discovery Center Tuesday morning!   To say the kids were excited is an understatement.  (Even if C doesn't look it in this pic, where they are waiting for the elevator doors to open for our "factory tour"):

She looks happy here!

I didn't do a great job of getting pics of all the activities but, basically, we were very pleased with the LDC!  It isn't cheap but B&C had a fabulous time.  And we only had to stay 1.75 hours for that fabulous time and then walked through the mall to bury our faces in Chili's fries so it was all good!

Even though it's inside a mall, LDC has 3 different "rides."  Here we are in the one that actually goes up and down like a carnival ride:

I didn't get a pic of the first ride which kinda reminded me of the Hershey Chocolate World tour in terms of transportation but each person gets a shooter thing to try to zap the bad guys so that adds interest.    Then the third "ride" was this Forest Police Chase which both kids had fun doing:

Miss C found the karaoke booth.  Of course, since she can't read, the whole karaoke part of it was kinda moot but she used the microphone to sing any number of made-up songs:

Just one angle of the amazing Lego Miniland-- here's the Dallas skyline.  This room is probably now even more cool to kids after The Lego Movie with its Will Ferrell- built basement cityscape:

We left there and headed to Grammie's where we hit up the park at the end of the street for some outdoor exposure:

Then it was on to a Mexican restaurant for dinner-- yum!

The Middle

(Okay, it's not technically the middle, but the B-man told me upon coming home from school yesterday that they had to write about what they did on Spring Break in a Beginning/Middle/End format and the visit with Auntie Lindsay was his "middle."  Who knew I would be so on topic with my post title yesterday?  I was really just being kinda lazy! Ha!)

We came straight to Linds's house after our drive back from East Texas.  She was still out doing a school pick-up so these two settled in to be her greeting committee:

G is 9 months younger than Mr. B and about 9x more interested in sports.  He had no problem talking Miss C into being athletic with him:

She even got a jersey!

 Little B is exactly a year younger than Miss C and is quite into dressing adorably, as you can see:

 Where was the B-man during all of this action?  Oh, you know, putting together a brand-new Lego set that had been given to G but not caught his interest:

After putting together the jet plane, he joined the gang to feed the cows (yes, really!) at the end of the (not at all rural) street:

And he also joined in the post-dinner baseball fun:

With our recent birthdays, we are now officially twice as old as when we met.  (Yes, we obviously met at age 12.  HA HA HA)

Speaking of long friendships, I found this photographic gem in one of L's photo albums from our college years.  Look who came on her Syracuse spring break to visit us in Waco junior year!!  ANNE!

Aren't friends THE BEST?!  :-)

PS:  After I wrote this narrative, I went back and looked at last week's posts to realize I'd posted several of these pics already.  Sorry for the "double vision"-- but hey, you got context this week!