It's been awhile....

Sorry for the lack of posts lately. Guess I just haven't been in a writing kind of mood. :-) We have been very busy though. We have Ella's speech twice a week, and our playdate with Jody and Arianna. Plus, we spent one morning visiting the Aquarium with my cousin Cindy and her family. It's great that she's on maternity leave now because maybe we'll actually get to see each other more often.

We had Tom and Pat visit a couple weekends ago. Andrew and his dad got our new tv hung on the wall and the sound system hooked up to it. So now, when we watch a movie, we can pretend we're actually there. We tested it out with Gladiator (not when the kids were around) and I told Andrew I wanted to feel like I was at the fight. And boy did I! Tom also moved our thermostat around the corner from where it was located. The sun was beating down on it and so the heat wasn't coming on when it should. Now, everything is much more controlled. Obviously the builders of this house had no brains when it came to deciding on the location of the thermostat. They put it directly across from our large south-facing picture windows. Anyway, much better now!

Last weekend we took a little road trip to visit Nana Mary and Papi Dave in Iowa. We had a very nice stay with them. The girls were excited all the way there. Ella kept asking, "Nana's house?" which was her version of "Are we there yet?". We visited the Science Station which is a children's science museum that was built when I was probably about 10 or so (still has many of the same exhibits). It was a free day and it was raining so we thought we'd try it out. Ella really enjoyed it. Lily mostly thought about taking a nap the whole time. The headquarters for Rockwell Collins is located in Cedar Rapids and they were the ones sponsoring the free day. They had little activities set up for the kids: gumdrop architecture, paper airplane races, egg drop, etc. Ella and Andrew really had fun with that.

Sunday was a gorgeous day, maybe even close to 80 degrees! We decided to have a picnic lunch at a park. I have some friends in California who are interested in letterboxing and I've been wanting to try it with the kids. I think it would be a fun activity to do in nice weather. It's sort of like treasure hunting, but mostly the prize is the satisfaction of actually finding the location of the letterbox. There was a fairly easy clue that lead to a park in Cedar Rapids, so we decided to venture there. We enjoyed a nice lunch, the kids played at the park, but we did not locate the letterbox. Turns out we had the right spot, but we couldn't find the box. Maybe we'll be successful on our next outing.

It was really nice here in MN when we returned on Monday so while the girls took their nap, I got our deck tables and chairs out and they LOVED being out there when they woke up. We also put their sand (aka rock) table on the deck and they played out there on Tuesday even though it was much colder and windy. Then the rains came...

So now, we're just waiting for it to get nice again so we can go out and enjoy the outdoors again! We got a taste of it this weekend and it's been hard to be cooped up with it raining the last few days. I have some new pictures to put up, I might get to it tonight. We'll see.

Hope you all had a great March!