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!

Awake the Lakes

"Awake the Lakes" is apparently the adverstising tagline for Memorial Day Weekend here in Minnesota. This explains the northern movement of three-quarters of the states' population "going up north to the lake" for the long weekend. Andrew and I decided to join the mad dash this year. We left early enough to miss most of the traffic on Friday but still saw our fair share of boats and camper stampers (as my stepdad, Dave would put it).

We made good time and arrived at the Grand View Lodge just north of Brainerd in Nisswa, MN. The lodge is located on Gull Lake which is over 9,000 acres! As we checked in, there was a sign saying the lodge was on the National Register of Historic Places. Upon further reading in the room, it was built in 1919 and added as a historic place in 1979. It's funny though, the trees grew so high around it, the view became more trees than lake. Meaning the view is not as grand as the name indicates. But it really is a wonderful place. Trees, paths, and flowers everywhere. A great beach on the lake with a poolside bar. A ton of different things to do. Very family-friendly. We may bring the girls with us and go back next Memorial Day weekend. Ironically, my People magazine just did a cover story on the 20th Anniversary of the movie Dirty Dancing and this place completely reminded me of the hotel in that movie. Complete with an activities schedule when we arrived! They had pontoon cruises, watercolor classes, campfires with s'mores, etc. We only took the pontoon cruise around the lake. It was pretty cool to see all the beautiful lake homes.

How Andrew spent a lot of his vacation

There are several golf courses associated with the lodge, and Andrew played three of them! Our room looked out on the 9th hole of the Woods course at the Pines. He played all three nines at The Pines and 9-holes with me at The Garden course (which is where all the people who don't know how to play golf go). And then he also played at Deacon's Lodge, which is a signature Arnold Palmer course. Andrew said every hole looked like a signature hole. He didn't play super great anywhere but he enjoyed himself. I got a 47 on the nine we played together, but I pretty much took a mulligan on each hole. I hadn't hit a golf ball in about 2 1/2 years and actually had a few really nice shots and could putt pretty well overall which was NEVER my strong suit. To say the least, we had a lot of fun!

We spent Saturday afternoon and evening up in Bemidji where our friends, Jon and Jess have a cabin. We stopped at the Northern Lights casino on the way there. Andrew had absolutely no luck at the Black Jack table, but did win the jackpot on a penny slot machine. He won 19,030 pennies!! Can you believe that?! We loved visiting with Jon and Jess and their family and seeing the cabin. We hope to get up to visit them again sometime when they are there.

How I spent a lot of my vacation

Other than that, I pretty much laid around and read all weekend while Andrew golfed and we ate and shopped and relaxed. It really was a wonderful vacation, especially when you know that we had nothing planned except the tee times and just decided to wing it the whole time. Everyting just sort of fell into place.

We came home Monday afternoon and found the girls had a great time with Grand Tom and Grand Pat. A giant thanks to them for watching the girls for us!

Grandma Mazie turns 80!

Last weekend our family celebrated my Grandma Mazie's (my dad's mom) 80th birthday with a surprise party! She thought we were all getting together on her actual birthday on Sunday, May 20th up at my aunt's cabin with just the family. She told everyone, "No party! I don't want a party!" But as the Engelhart's are, they didn't listen to her. And the family plus many friends and neighbors from the old neighborhood gathered to wish her well at Doyle's bowling alley (owned by a friend of the family). When she walked in she was floored! She had no idea and she was just shocked. Then she started in on us with a smile on her face, "I told you guys, no party!" :-) A good time was had by all, food, cake, bowling, and more. Plus, as my birthday gift to her, I put together a video of her life. It was so much fun to see the old photos of her and the rest of my family. I am planning on updating our Isaacson movies page very soon (in the next couple weeks) so look for it there!



In other news, we have been furniture shopping the last few months and purchased an entire room of furniture for our livingroom/dining room. The room is currently completely empty. The girls have commandeered it and are using it as a large gym/play area, but that will soon come to an end. By Thursday next week, we will have a dining room set. And by July (darn custom orders!) we'll have the living room stuff. It was a lot fun and somewhat stressful to make the decisions. As many of you who have visited us know, all the furniture in our house is pretty much from the IKEA catalog (Not that there's anything wrong with that:-). So it's a new thing to go to a furniture store and purchase real furniture that you don't have to put together yourself and you actually pay some money for. Hopefully everything we picked out will come together well! I'll of course post pictures when it all gets here.

This post is currently brought to you by me, sitting in a white lounge chair, on a beach with lake water lapping gently in the distance. Andrew and I are vacationing at the Grandview Lodge in Nisswa, MN for Memorial Day Weekend. More on that in a couple days!! :-)

Ella the Flower Fairy

I enjoy photography (if you can't tell from the millions of pictures I always take) and like to try and capture the girls in fun and interesting poses. Ella was out in the yard picking dandelions one night and I just couldn't resist capturing the moment. Enjoy her flitting around!

Happy Mother's Day

Hope all the mothers we know out there had a nice day yesterday! I had a wonderful Mother's Day. We spent the weekend visiting with my mom. We went to the park and had my aunt and Grandma Betty over for dinner on Saturday night. My mom left on Sunday morning and then Andrew took the girls out to Chuck E Cheese and the Arboretum. I enjoyed lounging at home and then did a little shopping for myself. That night we walked around Round Lake and picked up Applebee's for dinner. It was a very nice day and I didn't have to lift a finger all day. Andrew also put together a movie of me with the girls which I will put up on our movies site when I have a chance. And I'm getting a knew stroller called the joovy caboose! Now I won't have to carry Ella back to the car when she gets tired after following me around on our outings.

We had nice visit with Andrew's brother Benjamin last weekend. He and Andrew had a great time playing with the girls outside and catching up on their brother bonding by playing video games. We had fun watching him run in the Budbreak 5K at the Arboretum despite a little rain.

We have a weekend off from visitors next weekend but we are looking forward to Memorial Day weekend when Tom and Pat are visiting again to watch the girls. Andrew and I are taking a little getaway up to Brainerd , MN, also known as the Brainerd Golf Trail. Andrew is planning on playing 3--18-hole rounds and a 9-hole round with me. Mostly, I plan on just relaxing and reading, hanging out by the pool.

There are new pictures up in the May album. Enjoy!

Happy Arbor Day

I'll get to the Arbor Day thing in a few minutes. :-) We had a nice week. We visited Grandma Betty on Wednesday for a little bit. Ella's speech was cancelled on Thursday but Andrew said I should still take her out. So we went out for lunch and visited the library where she picked out her own books. She picked Curious George Takes a Train and How Does a Dinosaur Say Goodnight, among others. It was fun to go out with just Ella. It's funny to think that's how I used to spend my day before Lily came along.

Ella is obsessed (or should I say she's very nurturing) with her Wilbur pig. We take it EVERYWHERE. She has to tuck it in for naps and bedtime. She shushes me when its "sleeping". She feeds it. Worries that the sun is too bright for his eyes. She puts him in the doll stroller and Lily's booster chair at the table. I've never seen her so attached to anything. It's very adorable in some respects. He's filthy as, well, a pig. She's not aware, but the Easter bunny purchased a second pig from Target and its hiding in our closet should we need to "replace" Wilbur due to unfortunate circumstances.

One of her favorite things to do lately is play zoo. She found our play yard baby gate and decided to set it up in the living room. Then she set her pig and various other animals outside the gate. Found a piece of her train track roughly the size of a digital camera and proceeded to tell me she was at the zoo and taking pictures of the "animals." (Okay, maybe I take a few too many pictures). ;-)

I know I tend to post more Ella stories, but really Lily is at the "Monkey See, Monkey Do" stage. So mostly whatever I say about Ella, Lily tries to do the same thing in her own limited manner.

The girls spent last night with Grandpa Gary and Gramma Clare. While they were there, Andrew and I made a trip to Menards. We filled our cart with a hose, a fashionable hose "box" to hide it, various cleaning supplies, and a deck box to hold our chair cushions and the kids folding chairs. We were standing in the check out line and an older couple behind us said, "So, how long have you had your house?" I laughed and said, "Since December" and Andrew said, "Is it that obvious?" They laughed and said they could tell it was our first "season". :-)

Andrew mowed the lawn for the first time today. And we had Grand Tom and Grand Pat come in for a visit. We spent the evening playing with the girls in the backyard. (Okay here's where the Arbor Day greetings come in.) In honor of Arbor Day, Tom and Pat brought us a pine tree seedling to plant in our backyard. So we dug a little hole, planted the tree, and took the girls first picture by it. I have a feeling we'll be taking the girls picture there often to see how they grow along with it. :-)

I've add a new April album to the pictures website, so enjoy!

A treasure hunting we will go....

Do you see anything in there Ella?

At the Arboretum I came prepared to take the girls on a "treasure hunt". I knew there was a letterbox located there, so I printed out the clues and brought our stamps. When we got near the area where I knew the box was located, I asked Ella, "Do you want to go on a treasure hunt with me?" She got very excited. (Lily was sleeping in the stroller at the time so I participated for her.) We followed the clues and had to go off the paved path a bit, but Ella was game and followed right along. And there in a tree, we found our first letterbox! Ella was very excited!

Oh, there it is!

We opened the box and looked through what other people had stamped and written. And then I got out our stamps and ink pad and Ella put a dolphin stamp in for her and a frog stamp for Lily. Then we put the letterbox's palm frond (or maybe it was a fern) stamp in Ella and Lily's books.

Here's our entry into the letterbox's notebook.

Ella had so much fun, she wanted to keep "treasure hunting". She wanted to find "More!". I told her there were a lot more "treasures" we could find, but they were in different places and we would have to find them on a different day. She seemed satisfied with that answer and resigned herself to treasure hunting on a another day. :-)

PS. If you haven't noticed from the pictures....Ella's little pig, Wilbur, travels with us EVERYWHERE! See if you can spot him!

Keeping Busy

Spring has finally sprung!! I can't tell you how excited I am by this. Yes, I appreciate the seasons once again now that we're living in Minnesota. And snow in April (as it did last week) is just NOT fun! And what is even more NOT fun is that there were a couple really nice days before that which led me to believe that the cold yucky weather was behind us. Ha! Well, knock on wood, I hope it really is behind us now. Currently, as I write this, I am sitting on our deck basking in the glow of a nice 70-degree sun while the kiddos take their nap.

It seems we've been crazy busy lately, but it doesn't really seem like I have a lot to report. I'm having deja vu, have I written that before? We pretty much only have to really plan our day on Mondays and Wednesdays now which is nice. We have our Ari/Jody playdate on Tuesdays and Ella's speech appts. on Thursdays and Fridays. The weekends seem to just whip by.

There is a park about a 1/2 mile from our house which is wonderful, we can walk to it! So we've done that a few days. Some of the pictures in this post are from there. I've started getting books from the library for Ella. And she loves it! She has really gotten into having me read to her which is so great. And I have way too much fun picking out books for her. I try to find ones with things that interest her in them: princesses (Disney and generic princesses), dinosaurs, balloons, trains, fairies, etc. And if I can combine any of those into one book, well I've hit the lottery! She has one right now entitled, "Princess Dinosaur". She is on a Curious George kick right now which is fun because they have books that I can incorporate with other things like Curious George goes to the Zoo, or the Aquarium. There is a new firehouse that just opened down the road from us and we pass it pretty much any time we go anywhere. So we got some books for her to learn about what goes on there. The other night she fell asleep in her bed with books all around her! I just can't think of a sweeter picture!

Andrew had to work all weekend because the New York Rangers made the playoffs. They called on Friday and said they wanted all this stuff done by Monday so they could put it up on the electronic billboards in Times Square. All of them, at once! At any rate, it was a looong weekend for everyone. But as a reward we spent some family time together this morning. We visited the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum which is about 7 miles from where we live. We loved it there! So much so that we put today's admission toward a membership so we can go whenever we want. There are fairly easy stroller-friendly walking trails all over. There's one place where there are little houses for kids to play in and a "treehouse". I put that in quotes because there used to be a tree that the treehouse sat in, but the tree was struck by lightning in 2001 and they cut all but part of the trunk down. So now its a trunk with some stairs and a roofed platform. They also have a really nice Visitor Center there and many activities throughout the year. For those familiar with the Huntington Gardens in Pasadena, CA, it reminded us quite a bit of that, but with Midwestern landscapes and trees. And not quite so regulated. You can picnic and hike and go pretty much wherever you like. There's also a three-mile road you can drive around if you like. Anyway, a great family place.



I also like to do little projects with the girls every now and then. Here's a picture of one:I picked out these little snap-on things for their shoes. They wear these on when they play on the deck and sometimes around the yard. I picked ones that I thought sort of "represented" them; Lily got Nemo, a frog, and a turtle while Ella got a princess crown, dinosaur, whale, penguin and monkey (for Curious George). The girls had a lot of fun picking out each thing to put on and telling me where to snap them on their shoes. I found the little snap things at Michael's craft store near the checkout.

Hmm...what else. The girls and I have spent a couple Sundays over at my dad's house so Andrew could have some time to himself or work (as was the case this past weekend). Yesterday was so nice, my dad got the sand box out and the tee ball. The girls had a blast playing in the yard. Ella was really hitting the teeball well! She bats left-handed but throws right-handed! She's just so Ella! :-)

Happy Easter!

We traveled to Racine to visit Andrew's family for Easter weekend. We had a very nice time. The girls were very excited to find eggs with candy in them in the morning. (They've been practicing with empty eggs for the past couple weeks.) And they loved their Easter baskets. Ella got the Charlotte's Web DVD and a little Fur Real Friends pig that oinks and makes little noises. Lily received the Happy Feet DVD and a lamb like Ella's pig. We enjoyed visiting with everyone during Easter dinner and relaxing afterwards.

Hope you all had a nice Easter!

A Banner Day in the Isaacson Household

Okay, some of this may be TMI (too much information) for some of you. But we believe (knock on wood) that Ella is finally potty-trained!!! We just got fed up last week and told Ella when her current pull-ups were gone, we weren't going to buy any more. We have been trying to potty train her for a year and a half. In January I thought maybe we were close. I think I posted that I bought the Little Mermaid vanity as a reward/bribe for her. She earned stickers each time she would go potty on the toilet. When she finished the chart, she could have the vanity. Well, that was not enough incentive for her. I guess she didn't want the vanity THAT much. It sat in her closet for months. Every now and then we would get to add a sticker.

Well, she took the news of no more pull-ups pretty well. And was actually excited about wearing big girl underwear. On our trip to Target this week, she went over to the underwear all by herself and picked some out. She used her Dora seat (yes, I've been carrying it around everywhere we go) at the grocery store, TGIFriday's and a pancake restaurant we went to.

All this time she would only go #1 on the potty, but #2 was another issue. Then, last night after we tucked her into bed, she got up to use the bathroom and then excitedly called for me. She had to show me her "accomplishment." She had gone #2 in the toilet!! Finally, she is offically potty trained! We used the last pull-up yesterday. She's been rationing them, about one a day for a week.

And this morning Ella got to play with her Little Mermaid vanity for the first time!!! We are all extremely thrilled with this particular milestone! Here she is in all her Little Mermaid glory!

Randomness for a Sunday Morning

This morning I logged into Google as part of usual morning routine, and glanced over the news headlines. I read this article on cnn.com about Amelia Earhart which I found to be really fascinating. It suggests that she and her navigator didn't crash into the ocean as once thought, but perhaps landed near an atoll and were castaways for a bit. I've filed this one away in my brain to suggest to Ella or Lily if they ever have to do a school report on an important woman in American history or something like that.

Also on cnn.com, an article about global warming. My regular blog readers will know this is a topic of great interest to me and I am just amazed at the impact that Al Gore has made on the general public. Before his movie, An Inconvenient Truth came out, you barely heard about global warming, and many people didn't even know what it was. Now, I find information about it EVERYWHERE. There are articles almost daily on the internet news headlines. My Time magazine this week devoted a double issue to the topic. Anyway, just thought I would share and further promote this issue.

More of the same

Ella at 13 months playing in the toy box

Ella and Lily in the toy box today

And still making messes!

I uploaded new photos from March today. Click the link in the sidebar. Still no Super Bowl pics. Did I mention those are on Andrew's computer? I might never get them uploaded. However, the best ones were posted on the blog posts. So you're not really missing too much. :-) Enjoy the new pictures!