Another busy weekend!

After being out of town for a week for some training, I came home to a very busy weekend schedule.

Friday we took the kids to the Deana Rose Children's Farmstead. The kids got to see some animals, catch their first fish, and bottle feed baby goats. Too bad it is so far away, or we would go there all of the time! We did take some pictures, but they are still on the camera.

Saturday Eric was over at my parent's house working on his car, and then Saturday evening we went out for our anniversary dinner at The Raphael. We have been married for 6 years, and yet it seems like it has been much longer. We have known each other since high school (though we were not HS Sweethearts) and were best friends before we started to date.

Sunday we took the kids to the Renaissance Festival. Mom, Billy and Amanda met us there and we all had a good time. Mom bought the girls crowns, so all day they were being greeted and called "Princess" by all of the actors. Megan loved it! One of these years we will have an "Adult only" outing to Ren Fest so that we can take our time in the shops and watch all of the bawdy shows.

So.. That was our very busy weekend. I am ready for a not so busy week! Too bad that it will not happen this week. Tue evening I have a Relay for Life Captains meeting (gotta get a sitter!) Wednesday after work we are all going over to my Grandparent's to help with some projects and celebrate my Bday. Thursday IS my Bday (I might take it off) and Eric is making yummy Chicken Marsala and we will celebrate with the in-laws. This weekend should be quiet atleast!

Happy Birthday Amanda!

Happy Birthday little sister. Boy, that makes me feel old!

The Circus and Starlight

We had a busy Saturday this weekend. We had tickets for the Barnibum Bailey Circus at the Sprint Center for 3:00, we got there in time for the pre-show where you can go down on the floor, but so did everyone else. So we decided to go wait in our seats. We had much better seats this time (for the Disney Princesses on Ice Show we were in the nosebleed section) though I really should have gotten seats on the side instead of on an end. The girls had fun, but poor Lauren was so tired! She had missed her nap and fell asleep after intermission.

After the Circus, we had time to get the kids home, Eric took the dog for a quick walk while we waited for Dwayne and Carla so that we could go to Starlight for Les Miserables. The show was amazing.. and wet. It rained the ENTIRE time. Luckily we stopped by Cabelas on our way to the Circus and bought some ponchos, so we stayed mostly dry. It was the last show of the season and we loved it though.

I am uploading the circus pictures to the August-September album now!

The things kids say (and do)

Megan loves princesses, that is not new. While "Beauty" (Belle) is her favorite, Sleeping Beauty is a close second. At bedtime lately she has started asking to "play Aurora". She will act out the spinning wheel scene. "Touch the spindle, touch it I say" and then fall on the floor in a "deep sleep". Then we have to carry her to bed like a princess. It reminds me when I was little and would sneak into my parent's room at bedtime and pretend to fall asleep so that my Dad had to carry me into my bed. Like a princess. Do all little girls do that?

I need to take a picture of her "asleep" on the floor so that I can scrapbook it!

Did I use qoutes enough in this post?

Weekend

I was pretty busy this weekend.

I decided that since Eric had dressed the girls in jeans and long sleeve shirts Thursday, that meant it was time for me to decorate for fall. I love fall.. the crisp air, warm colors, Harvest Yankee candles (my absolute fav!). Eric wasn't convinced, but he didn't really have much of a say since he was heading off to work!

Saturday night I watched Jason and Kendra's kids so they could go out for her 21st birthday. The kids were pretty good all night and Megan and Lauren were excited to have a sleepover.

Sunday morning Eric made French Toast (yummy!) before he left for work. I took the kids out back to play, and Justin slid in dog poo, so I gave him a quick bath and got him changed. Jason and Kendra showed up around 1230 to get the kids. After that I got busy cleaning and re-arranging. I moved the glider from the girl's room and put it downstairs. Not quite sure where it will go yet, but I don't want to get rid of quite yet. The reason for this change is that I wanted to get the HUGE barbie house out of the living room. So the glider had to move, the bookcase was moved in it's place, and the Barbie house where the bookcase was. I also moved the toy chest in the living room into another corner, and brought a bunch of toys downstairs to the play room.

Then I vacuumed the upstairs, swept and mopped the kitchen and bathroom, gave the girls a bath, shampooed the carpet where Lauren pooped after her bath (poor thing has the runs.. and didn't have a pull-up on yet. She was so upset!) went ahead and shampooed a spot in the living room that needed it as well.

I got the girls in bed, took a shower, did all of the dishes, cleaned out the fridge and took out the trash, folded 3 loads of laundry and then sat down with a glass of Eric's port and watched the Bones season premier that we had on the DVR for almost a week. It was nice to sit there and enjoy my drink, looking around at the clean living room with all my pretty fall decorations up. I just hope that it is all still clean when I went home since Eric stayed home with the girls today (Lauren can't go to daycare with the runs).

And that was my weekend! This week I have a final due (Thursday), dinner with a friend of Eric's and his 2 kids (Friday), and the circus and a starlight show (Saturday). Hopefully I will be able to relax, and maybe play in my scrapbook room on Sunday!

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!

Bible Stories for Kids

Last week Eric brought home a book of bible stories for the girls. He got it at the grocery store of all places. It is called 100 Bible Stories, 100 Bible Songs and includes 2 cds with (you guessed it) 100 bible songs. This book is great. Each story is only 1 page, and the facing page has a picture and a 2 line wrap up of the moral of the story as well as an affirmation. The girls love this book and we have read a couple of stories out of it every night for the past week.

What a wonderful weekend!

The weather could not have been better this weekend. We went swimming at Mom and Dad's Saturday and everyone had a blast. Mom, Amanda and I went to a Starlight show Sat night (The Drowsy Chaperone - hilarious!) and it was a beautiful evening. Sunday was spent cleaning, doing yardwork, watching the girls play in their little pool etc until it was time to head over to Sarah's house for Marin's 1st birthday party. I can not believe that she is 1 already! It was a little sad for me, the fact that Judy was not there to share it with us, but Marin was surrounded by friends and family.

Another successful relay

The Booz Allen Hamilton team raised over $5500 for the Leavenworth County Relay for Life this year. The total for the county is over $64k (the final totals has not yet been released). I wonder how much we will raise next year?

Congrats Mom and Jason!

The Frymire's are on a roll! Mom and Jason were both promoted this week! You both deserve it!

Also, tonight is the Leavenworth County Relay for Life event! It is not too late to donate! http://main.acsevents.org/site/TR/RelayForLife/RelayForLifeHighPlainsDivision?px=4805361&pg=personal&fr_id=5888

 

New Pictures!

Don't you just hate it when you have a full post written out and you lose it?!?! Ok, I will start again! There are new pictures posted in the May-June 08 folder to the right. ome Birthday party pics and other randomness.

Things are going well in the Boettcher household. Eric built a retaining wall with landscape bricks around the front yard and it looks fabulous! Now we are just waiting to get some rock and dirt to backfill and then we can plant. I need to find some low maintenance, hard to kill plants that like mostly shade. Any suggestions?

Lauren has started to chat up a storm, and is our resident copycat. Anything that Megan says Lauren has to repeat. Megan is still into anything princess and insists on wearing a dress (or skirt) every day. She has decided that instead of being a doctor when she grows up she wants to be a dancer and dance like the princesses. She knows every word to almost every princess song (from both the Disney Princesses and Barbie Princess movies) and loves to sing. They are growing up so fast!

We looking forward to our trip to Wisconsin this summer for Eric's family reunion. And Mom and Dad's pool should be ready for use this weekend, Megan has been asking about it for a month now!

Birthdays and business travel don't mix

Lauren is 2! It is hard to believe sometimes, but Lauren is now older than Megan was when Lauren was born. (Did you follow that?) Unfortunately her birthday falls right in the middle if the UQ Capstone Event (the big "game" that I have to travel to Carlisle PA for every year) and I have now missed her 1st and 2nd birthdays. Of course I am the only one who is really bothered by this, she is too young to know the difference after all. Lauren's birthday party will be on Saturday at Mom and Dad's.

This trip is especially hard since it is the longest that I have ever been away from the girls. I am on day 11 of a 15 day trip. The girls are doing great of course... Dwayne stayed the night the first couple of nights (while Eric was at work) and my Mom stayed this weekend. We are so blessed to live near family and owe them so much for their help and support. Word from Mom is that Eric has even been keeping on top of the housework etc so at least I will not have to spend all day Sat cleaning upon my return.

Daddy.. I want to be a doctor when I grow up

That is what Megan told Eric the other night when they were walking around the park. Of course Eric's first thought was 'that is going to be expensive'. Tonight while eating dinner with Papa the conversation went like this:

Eric - "Megan, tell Papa what you want to be when you grow up?"

Megan - " I want to be a doctor when I grow up"

Papa - "Do you want to be an animal doctor or a people doctor?"

Megan - "A people doctor"

Eric - "Who do you want to help?"

Megan - " I do not know, we will have to see when I am all grown up!"

Apparently the first time they had this conversation she said that she: wanted to help her friends and other people when they have a boo boo like Grandma had a boo boo on her heart and went to heaven.

Weekends

Last weekend we cleaned out the garage and storage area at Eric's parent's house. Anyone who knows my in-laws knows that no one has been able to walk into the garage in years (let alone actually park a car in there). And the storage area (that is the size of the living room) was packed as well. We started at 9am and finished sometime after 5. After 5 (or was it 6?) truckloads to the dump and 1 load to the DAV we still had 1/2 of the driveway full of items for the post garage sale at the end of the month. It was funny the number of people who kept stopping by thinking that it was a garage sale. Everything was just piled up (left side of the driveway to sell, right side and grass for keepers)  and there were no garage sale signs but we still made ~$100.
We are so blessed by family and friends. Billy and Amanda came by for a while and were a HUGE help. They stationed themselves in the storage room and handed stuff out. While this does not sound so difficult, you can not stand up in the storage room. The ceiling is at about shoulder height (at least for my short family). There is no way that we would have gotten it all done without them. Mom was there watching the kids, and Dad even stopped by after work to help load boxes and bins back into the storage room (which is now only 1/4 full) and into the garage. Dwayne has reserved a UHaul to bring up the garage full (ok, it is down to 1/2 of the garage now) of stuff to be sold at the post garage sale. Anything that doesn't sell will be delivered to the DAV the next day.
I really should have taken pictures of the HUGE pile of stuff in the driveway, but I was too busy helping Sarah sort through everything.

Yesterday I actually got to play in my scrapbook room for a little while. I even made some cards!

Last night we had a surprise Bday party for April. Her Mom took her and Kelsey to Lonestar for dinner, and we were all there! She was definitely surprised and we all had a good time. My steak was too salty and they made it wrong the first time (Blu Cheese... yuck!) so I did not get my dinner until everyone else was almost done.

Lauren was not feeling well and wanted to be on my lap the entire time. Of course she perked right up when we got home and took a bath. She did not sleep well and kept waking up calling out to me (about every 1/2 hour) so I finally brought her into bed with me at about 1am. She still woke up a couple more times but all I had to do was rub her back and she went back to sleep. I think it is her molars, They have been bothering her for the last month, but still have not broken through.

I am uploading a few new pics of the girls. Last week Eric took them down to the park while it was drizzling and let them splash in the puddles. They had a blast of course. We finally got Lauren some rain boots this weekend but are still looking for a raincoat for her.

I can't believe that it is spring, and yet it snowed here this weekend. It is supposed to be nice all this week... fingers are crossed!

Busy Tuesday

Yesterday was one busy day, but I got a lot done! Before 10 I had cleaned the playroom (which looked like a tornado had hit it, with no exaggeration!) took a load of stuff to the DAV, dropped off some toys at Sarah's, dropped off some dry-cleaning and met Dad for breakfast. Then Dad helped me work on some little projects that needed done in the house. So now I have sheet-rock at the base of the stairs, 2 holes have been patched (from some electrical work done last year), a vent cover installed, a piece of paneling re-hung in the playroom, and some sheet-rock patching around some outlets that needed done. Plus Dad fixed the door going into the garage which has been sticking since we bought the place.

And if that wasn't enough, after less than 24 hours on Craigslist Eric sold the Jetta! So Tuesday was a good day in the Boettcher household.

The first bubbles of spring.. and other pictures

Ok, I have updated pictures! See the March -April 08 folder to the right to view the latest pictures.

Mom got the girls bubbles in their Easter buckets she had at her house. Megan has been bugging me all week to play with them and it was nice enough this evening. (It also worked as great bribery to get her to eat her chicken. I know... bad mommy) They both did pretty good blowing the bubbles this time. Lauren usually blows too soft and Megan too hard. Like Goldilocks, this time they both had it just right.

Overall we had a nice Easter weekend. Saturday I went to a crop (scrapbooking) with April, and Laurie came into town that night on her way out to WVa for her Grandmother's funeral. While I am sad for the reason of the visit, it was nice to spend time with her. She helped Mom and the girls color Easter eggs, and when I got home from the crop helped me stuff eggs for the egg hunt and get the girl's Easter baskets ready.

Sunday while the girls and I attempted going to church with Mom (unfortunately Lauren lasted about 20 min. and we left early so we did not disturb the service for everyone else) Dad his eggs around the house. Since we got back to Mom and Dad's early we had to wait for Jason to bring Emily and Justin over for the egg hunt. It was not easy distracting the girls when they saw the eggs all over the place. Once Emily got there however the hunt was on! They did great, unfortunately they were too fast and poor Justin didn't stand a chance. Next year he will get his turn! They all ate WAY too much candy during the day and barely ate any dinner. Upset tummies and restless nights were had by all that night. And that was our Easter weekend.

Wednesday we celebrated Dad's (2 weeks late) and Justin's (1 week late) birthdays. Kendra and Jason found construction themed party supplies and went all out for Justin's 1st Birthday. As usual I forgot to bring my camera, but I am sure that Kendra took plenty and will share. I still need to get pictures from the Doodlebop show from her!

Have a great weekend everyone!