Photos of Grace with her cousin

Here are some great photos of Gracie with her cousin having a tea party. He is just a month younger than Grace, and they are great friends!

Photos from DD2's Intermediate School Musical Production of "Alice In Wonderland"

In April, DD2 was also in the school musical "Alice in Wonderland". I didn't get to take too many photos of the play, but did get a couple of her. She played the part the sassy daisy in the garden. She did a grat job. I was very proud of her!

Some Photos from Easter

I know I didn't post any photos from Easter at the time, and I've finally had time to download photos off of our camera. So here they are.

Okay. I know I'm deliquent in posting

Yes, it's been awhile since I've posted anything on my blog. Sorry, but with 3 kids, a husband, a job, a house, and all the things that goes along with my life, I just haven't had time.

Work is stressful. I don't dare to think that it was ever calm down anymore. I think that's just the wa it's going to be. I've accepted that, but along with that, have decided that instead of focusing all my energy on work there are other things that are more important in life. So I'm pulling back on the overtime I had been putting in since January. Now I'm trying to stick to about 40 hours a week (which actually is 8 hours of unpaid overtime for me, since I only get paid for 32 hours a week!).

Lots of things have been going on. I don't have time to post about them now. If you want to see little snippets of my life, and I know you, you can consider requesting me as a friend on Facebook. I'm much more adept at taking 5 minutes to keep up with sharing what's going on instead of writing on the blog. I'm not abandoning the blog (at least not yet), but you probably won't see me posting as much as I used to.

Playdoh and Strawberries

Okay. I know that those two things don't normally go together. And they really don't in this case either except that that's what I have photos of. Grace playing with Playdoh, and Grace eating strawberries. I took the Playdoh photos, DD2 took the strawberry eating photos.

Not too much to say about it, other than Grace enjoyed both!

Putting up our Easter Tree

The other day my niece, who has 3 daughters, sent a Smilebox of 2 of her girls (the smallest one is a tiny baby) putting strings on plastic eggs and hanging them on a tree in their front yard. Her daughters are young, 3 and 1. It was so darn cute, that I decided that I should see about getting our Easter tree up.

Several years ago my mother gave us a small Easter tree with little wooden ornaments that you hang on the tree limbs. It's a table top tree. We used to put it up every year, but then as the two older girls got older, it didn't seem to be a high priority. Last year, you may recall, I wasn't even home for Easter as I was with my father because he was very ill.

So this year, I decided to ressurect the tradition of putting up the tree. Grace thought it was pretty cool, although she did the same thing that the other two girls used to do when they hung the ornaments on the tree - hung them all on the same branch! I took a few photos to mark the occasiion. You can see that Grace got a little tired of me asking her to smile, because she gave me this cheesy goofy smile in some of the photos!

But she's still adorable, if I do say so myself. DD1, DD2 and DH weren't home, so they missed out on the activities.

Happy Birthday to Me, a little belated

My birthday was on March 1, but because we were on our way to El Salvador that day it was decided that the celebration wouuld be postponed until sometime later. That amount of time was ambiguous, and truthfully I figured that it would just be forgotten. However, leave it to my sweet DH to not forget how important birthdays are to me! Last night he declared that we were going to celebrate my birthday, and asked me where I wanted to go. Well, a few years ago just after some friends of ours' daughter died, I had wanted to take them out to help celebrate my birthday as sort of diversion. We all went to Benihana's, and although I'm not sure if it was really a diversion for the family we were with (what really could be in such a sad situation?!), we had a good time watching our food being cooked at our table, trying to eat with chopsticks, and experiencing something different.

So I decided that we should go to Benihana's again, this time as a family of 5 instead of 4. So off we went. DH was thoughtful and called ahead for a reservation, so we didn't have to wait at all when we got there. We were seated with another family of 4, that appeared to be mom, dad, 1 teenage daughter, and one 8 or 9 year old daughter. They were not very talkative, and actually I thought they didn't seem very happy. At any rate, we didn't interact too much. I was more interested in Grace's reaction to the whole grilling at the table thing. She surprisingly liked the soup, and ate the entire bowl! That was good, because that's about all she ate, with the exeception of my complimentary birthday bowl of chocolate ice cream that she ate at the end of the meal.

So how did she react? Well, really not too much at all. She was interested in watching our chef (I guess that's what you'd call him?), but not overly intersted. I thought she would get excited watching him cook, flipping the spices and trying to entertain the table guests. She wasn't too impressed. Mostly she just ate her soup. The other girls liked it though, and all of us tried sushi. My first time, along with DD1 and DD2's first. DH had had it before. I can't say that I hated it. It was more of a feeling of "why would I order this as it's nothing special" feeling. I think DD1 felt the same way I did. DD2 didn't like it, and even took the salmon off to finish up the one roll she had.

DD1 and DH ended up eating most of the shrimp and steak, and both said they were stuffed. I ate a little shrimp and steak, but mostly chicken. I really liked the fried rice, and the salad. I think although it wasn't the best birthday I've ever had, it was a nice time. We bought an about to be expired mini birthday cake at Miejer to top off the evening, but alas, we didn't even slice it. Everyone was too full, and it was too late by the time got home. So another birthday celebration behind me. The good thing about birthdays is that there'll be another one next year!