Pictures in her eyes

In the morning, as we are getting ready for school (daycare) Megan tells me what pictures she saw in her eyes the night before. That is how she describes her dreams. A couple of times lately she has told me that she saw " The Grandma that is in heaven" leaning out of a cloud to give her angel kisses. This morning she said that her thumb and her finger were broken and then they were ok. And she also had princesses in her eyes. The first dream I get, but broken fingers?  Not sure where that came from! I want to remember the "pictures in her eyes" so that I could scrapbook it.

Tonight is her "family" Bday party at Mom and Dad's house!

Megan is 4!!!

I can not believe that Megan is 4 years old. Time really does fly. We had her "friends" party at the carousel museum in town on Saturday. Of course the theme was Disney Princesses since she is all about the Princesses lately. She even got a new Aurora dress just for the occasion!

All of her "best friends" were there and everyone had fun. Tomorrow night will be the "family" party at Grandma and Grandpa's house. I made the cake.. yeah, I know it isn't pretty, but the birthday girl wanted a strawberry cake and neither of the grocery stores in town do strawberry cakes. Unfortunately we do not have a real bakery in town anymore so that left Mommy. I tried!

After her friends party she got her big gift from Mommy and Daddy. A new bike!

Playing

I have a great craft room in the basement, right next to a decent sized playroom for the girls.. and yet I never get down there. A couple of weeks ago I saw this:

 

at Walmart and had to get it for the girls. Since I have had it set up.. we all get "craft" time! Lately I have been making gifts with my Papertrey Ink stuff.

I made this set for Eric's cousin Sam and his girlfriend Meghan when they had their new baby.

 

On the right is the lid to a gift box that held some baby washclothes (In the same colors as the papers) and a gift card to BabiesRUs. The metal tin in the front holds chocolates.  

Sorry for the glare!

I also made a gift set for my Aunt RoseMarie's birthday.

The nugget tin:

 

Post-it holder, pen and bookmark/paper clip:

And a set of 6 cards (all different sentiments) for her to give. This one was my favorite.

  

The rest are in the Craft Central folder to the right. I also decorated a gift bag and picture frame to all coordinate. I had so much fun! Now I just need to start scrapbooking again. I am so glad that I bought that table!

Not enough sleep...

Anyone that knows me knows that I am not into sports. Yes, I will watch the occasional game if we have friends over, but sports really isn't my thing. So why is it that I keep getting sucked into the Olympics and end up going to bed way too late? I just HAD to finish watching the Ladies Gymnastics Final (though I did not stay up for the medal ceremonies) and WOW. Even with the mistakes the USA Team was amazing. And China... again WOW.  I did not realize that they are chosen at a very young age (around 3) and literally grow up training for this. They only get to see their families once a year! Those are some talented young ladies.

I also watched the swimming finals. Michael Phelps is amazing. (I know... way too many "amazings" in this post) Makes me wish I had taken swimming lessons as a kid. Not that I would be anywhere close to motivated enough to be that good.

Swimming and gymnastics are really the only events that I am interested in, so maybe I will get to bed at a decent time tonight!

Road Trips, Reunions and Home Maintenance

Road trips, reunions and home maintenance have been happening in the Boettcher household the past 2 weeks.

Every 3 years Eric's family has a reunion. His paternal grandmother's grandfather is the patriarch (Wilhelm Hein) and the reunion is for all of his descendants. The picture at left is all of the surviving grandchildren of Wilhelm Hein. There were 170ish attendees at the reunion, and 3 entire branches in the family were not represented.  While the majority of the family still lives in Wisconsin (Dairy farmers), there were "cousins" from Canada, D.C./Maryland, Nebraska and Kansas as well.

On our way up to the reunion we stopped in the Wisconsin Dells for 3 days. Megan was sick most of the way up there (not sure from what though) so that made the first day of our vacation go by very slow. I was so glad to see the signs for the Dells letting us know that we were almost there! We spent a day at Noah's Ark (America's Largest Waterpark according to the advertising) and Lauren loved it. Megan did ok, but was not as adventurous as Lauren. The girls loved seeing all of the animals and got to feed deer and even a giraffe!

When we got home we took a couple of days off, did some yardwork (ok, Eric did the yardwork) cleaned the garage and got some other home maintenance items checked off the list. Not as much as we would have liked, but oh well! There are more pictures in the July 2008 Album to the right. Typepad is not letting me format my pictures in my blog post the way I want them so I will just let you look at them in the album!