Everyone on vacation?

As some of you may have noticed, I have a hit counter on our website. The people over at amazingcounters.com who host the hit counter kindly keep track of daily and weekly stats of visitors. We average a little over 16 visitors a day. I'm very happy with that and it makes the time I spend on this that much more worthwhile. So here's a visitor appreciation post for all of you!!

I did notice that visitorship (is that a word?) dropped quite a bit last week. Was everyone on vacation? Or are you just sick of me not updating the blog as regularly? ;-)

Well here's 3 posts in two days just to get back on track!

And for an added bonus some pictures of our lovely flower bed out front. The flower bed was there when we arrived at the house. And of course because that was the dead of winter it was brown and barren. We are continually amazed by the flowers that just pop up. And thank god it was already there! I don't have a green thumb in my body so here's to hoping that I don't kill anything and they keep coming back year after year!

To Illinois and Back

Every year the second full week of June we travel back to Galesburg, Illinois, home of our alma mater, Knox College. The third Friday of the month is always the Harley Knosher Alumni Golf Outing. We've been attending every year since we graduated and so look forward to visiting with Harley and the golf buddies. And every year, I am continually amazed at what a phenomenal man Harley Knosher is. He has the ability to make anyone feel special and the most important person in the room. He celebrated 40 years of being involved at Knox and had people at the tournament from his first year there through his last year. He is Andrew's mentor and taught him that golf (as well as life) is not an individual sport but a team event.

The obligatory Andrew and Harley picture.

We take one every year. :-)

We drove down to Cedar Rapids on Wednesday and left the girls at my mom's house. On Thursday morning we made the quick trek over to Galesburg. Andrew and Bob Carroll played a practice round in the afternoon while Bob's wife, Amber and I took advantage of a kid-free afternoon and got pedicures. We had dinner at the Landmark Cafe and then hung out with the golf guys, first stopping at a very disappointing Cherry Street (funny how things change, that used to be THE place for alumni to hang out when back in town). We quickly moved on to Seminary Street Pub once the very bad karoke started up at Cherry Street. We sat in the beer garden at Seminary Street and chased all the "townies" away by being loud and telling stories. And stayed out waaay too late!

The gang at Seminary Street Pub

The next morning we all gathered at Soangetaha and had a fine day for golf. Andrew's foursome of Bob, Jeff Ancelet, and recent grad John "Hawk" Hawkinson finished with a 55, the lowest gross score (that's first place for you non-golfers). But lost out by ALOT for the lowest net score.

A team photo (left to right):
Jeff Ancelet '98, Garth Gilster '02, Vince Pavilionis '02, Andrew '99, Chris Endlund '02,
C.J. Rugh '04, Bob Carroll '02, Josh Quinn '01, John Hawkison '07.

I may try to draft a Knox women's team next year. We'll see. :-) I picked up these very cute matching Knox hats and shirts for Ella and Lily at the bookstore. I also got sweatshirts for me and Andrew. I thought he could use another sweatshirt now that we're living in Minnesota. His one Mickey Mouse sweatshirt is getting a little old. Maybe we'll have to take a Knox family picture sometime once the weather gets cooler. :-)



For more photos from the Knosher outing please visit: knoxalumnigolf.shutterfly.com. I have also uploaded pictures from last year's Knosher outing. And I will be updating the Carnival of Golf website (www.knoxcarnivalofgolf.com) very soon. You can also check out Bob and Amber's blog for another account of the event.

We spent Saturday and Sunday morning visiting with my mom and Dave and then drove back in time for Andrew to see some of the U.S. Open. He had a pretty nice Father's day despite it taking us an hour longer than usual to get home. We gave him a movie I made of photos of the girls and him. A gift card to buy some fishing gear, another requirement for living in the Midwest. And Season 7 of E.R. We don't have the previous seasons, so what makes Season 7 so special, you ask? Well, it just so happens that if you are looking really hard in Episode 16: "Witch Hunt" you can catch a glimpse of Andrew as an orderly.

When we first moved to California and before Andrew became Hornet's uber-producer, he worked at Central Casting as an extra to earn a little money and try and get his foot in the door. He was an orderly on E.R., a bus boy on Providence and a gallery member in the courtroom of The Practice. He even had a conversation with Noah Wyle (aka Carter on E.R.) walking back to their cars after the shoot. I was about as jealous of him as I was when he spent the day working with Bon Jovi for Hornet. Aww.....memories. At any rate, for those of you who may want to catch his television debut, look for E.R. Season 7 Disc 5 from Netflix.

Andrew is currently in Los Angeles shooting footage for the upcoming football season. And on Thursday I'm off to Philly for GJWHF 2007 (Girls Just Wanna Have Fun) with Claire, Erin F., Erin J., and Allison. More on that in the future!

The theme this month: Water Fun

It seems the kids are waterbabies this month. We have a Nemo sprinkler, which Ella had fun with. Lily is slightly leary of water. It takes her a good hour and a half to work herself up to actually going in it. And Ella's attention span is nonexistent so with the two of them, Ella plays for 15 minutes and Lily ends up watching. Then we're done and in the house :-)

We had a BBQ for the Engelhart (my dad's) side of the family on June 9th. It was the first time we had them all over and the first time we had a large group. Everything seemed to go over well, we had 19 people and everyone stayed for hours so hopefully they had fun. We learned a few things about the food since it was our first cookout with the gas grill. So things weren't 100% perfect, but at least we didn't set the bar too high the first time. LOL! It was a lot of fun for Ella and Lily. My cousin Kris, from the Seattle area was in town with her kids Alex and Charlie, and Emilee was there. So they all trotted around playing in the whale pool all decked out with the slide, the sand table, and then finally playing dress up in Ella's room.

The kids all had popsicles for dessert. Here's a picture of them responding to the question, "What color do you have?" (Lily, Ella, Alex, Emilee, Charlie)


We also swam at Riley Lake last week for the first time this summer. The beach is open now with three lifeguards on duty. It's great! They have two different swim ropes. And the most shallow one only come up to Ella's chest, if that. She had a blast splashing around the water and playing in the sand. She just ran right in as soon as I told her she could. Lily was freaked out. She just played in the sand about five feet back from the water for about an hour. Then she started to play in the water's edge, barely. Then she let the extremely small waves lap at her feet and finally about 10 minutes before we left, she waded in up to her calves. I brought all these sand toys and she spent the majority of the time playing with a plastic gatorade bottle cap she found. Nice, huh?

The best part about Riley Lake is that it is only a mile from our house! With a park right next to it an some shade on the beach. And it wasn't overcrowded at all. We could walk if we didn't have so much crap to carry. We do walk when we're just going to the park.

And our last water outing, but definitely not least, and probably not last for the month, we visited Nana Mary an Papi Dave this past weekend. We went to the splash pad at the park just down the road from their house. Again, Ella jumped right in, Lily was more hesitant but it only took about a 1/2 hour to warm up to the idea of getting wet. Maybe by the end of summer she won't have to think about it anymore. ;-) You can enjoy many MANY water photos in the June photo album that I added to Shutterfly today.

New Photos

Just a quick photo update. I've added an album from our trip up north and one for my Grandma Mazie's party. There are also some pictures I had taken of the girls at Flash Digital at the mall. I added just a couple pictures to the May album as well. Enjoy!