Spring is Here!!

Yippee!!! The snow is finally gone! It's been in the 50's (and maybe 60's soon)! Whoo hoo! And to celebrate, the girls rode their bikes to the Anderson's for a playdate this week!

We had a lot of fun over there. We've been trying to play with Hope (4 years--her birthday is the DAY before Ella's!), Isabelle (almost 7 years), and Claire (15 months) almost every week. And this time, we met some more neighbors with a great play set in their backyard. They have 3 kids as well. The oldest girl will be in Ella's same kindergarten year. The kids all had a great time playing outside and the moms had fun chatting.

The girls and I also met up with Jody and Arie this week at an indoor play area we haven't been before called Playworks. It's a lot like Edinborough's Adventure Peak but BIGGER! And it has more than just the climbing structure! It has an arts and crafts area, a tree house with video games, puzzles, and more. We spent over 3 hours playing and would have been there longer if the girls hadn't tired themselves out so much. :-)



We attend story time almost every Thursday at our local Barnes and Noble. They usually read 2-3 books and then there is a coloring sheet to work on. This week they had a special guest! Madeline from the children's books. Lily took one look at the character and started crying. She stayed all the way on the other side of the room from Madeline. Ella was excited but nervous too. She was going to give her hug, and then didn't. Then she wanted me to be right next to her holding her hand. Finally, Ella did give her a high five and I quickly let go of her hand to snap a picture. Luckily for those leary of her, Madeline only stayed for a few minutes to say hi and left.I don't know if any of you have noticed, but Ella (and sometimes Lily because she does EVERYTHING that Ella does) has her own sense of fashion style. Ella likes to wear a short sleeve t-shirt over a long-sleeved one for a layered look. Then, she likes to wear a skirt (or skort) over a pair of leggings to further the layered look. Seriously, she developed this style all on her own and has become known for it! Her gym teachers look for her to come into class every week so they can see what combination she has come up with. This started I think because we got colder weather and I had a hard time convincing Ella that we no longer wore summer clothes. So she started wearing a long sleeve shirt under her t-shirt as a compromise. And it evolved from there. Here are a couple pictures of the girls that show their style in all its glory (I might have had a hand in coordinating these particular get-ups though). Of course, now that its getting warmer, we don't have to do the long sleeve shirts anymore. ;-)




I have added Feb, March, and April photo albums to the Shutterfly site. There are some pictures of the girls driving the jeep around at Bubba's house in Wisconsin as well as Cedar Rapids pictures. And I edited the Cedar Rapids post to add pictures (scroll down).

Enjoy the nicer weather! FINALLY!!

Grandpa Milt

(Edited to add: Here is Milt's obituary in the Journal Times. There is a guest book you can sign/view if you like as well as a link to the funeral home. If you locate his page on the funeral home site, you can view a photo tribute that played during the visitation. Andrew's brother, Benjamin has actually put all this and more onto a special webpage just for Grandpa Milt.)

We learned last Wednesday that Andrew's Grandpa Milt passed away. He had been sick for about six weeks and we sort of knew the inevitable was coming. Even though you know you'll have to deal with it at some point, it is still difficult when the time comes. He was 91 and a great man who was strong in his faith, full of humor and happiness. And he will be missed dearly.

My favorite story about Grandpa Milt is from when we told him about our engagement. He had a big smile on his face and just sat on the couch pondering our news for a moment. Then he said thoughtfully, "Well that's very good. Marriage...it's a lot of give and take." And that was it. :-) His sage words of advice on marriage.

We spent the weekend in Wisconsin with family. The service on Monday was very nice with Tom giving the eulogy, Andrew doing a reading, and Benjamin leading everyone in song with his guitar. Perhaps the most poignant moment of the day came when the procession made its way toward the cemetery. Milt had been a fireman for many years before retiring. When we passed a fire station, they came out and saluted all of us as we drove by.

Quick Trip to Cedar Rapids

We spent last Thursday and Friday in Cedar Rapids, before we made our way to Wisconsin. We had a very nice visit with Nana Mary and Papi Dave, even if it was a bit short. On Thursday, Nana and I took the girls to the library to do a craft project and play in the kids section. We walked from there to Bruegger's for lunch downtown and then across the street to see Papi's office. On our way back to the car, we stopped at a corner candy store. It was great! The whole back wall was filled with jars of candy for 25 cents (these would have been a penny or a nickel back in the day). The girls picked out a couple pieces each and charmed a couple businessmen into giving them each a package of Smarties.

Friday, we did some shopping, read some books at the local Barnes and Noble, and played at the mall play area. The girls helped Nana make chocolate cupcakes in the afternoon. Then we went to the Greek Place (my fave restaurant!) to meet up with Papi's dad, the Judge for dinner (he's called Judge because he's a retired Federal Judge. That's always what I've called him.) :-) We were celebrating Nana's birthday! After dinner, Nana opened her gifts and we enjoyed the cupcakes and raspberry sorbet. Mmm...mmm.... When we sang "Happy Birthday", Lily freaked out a bit. Hmm...little sister, like big sister? Ella has not let us sing Happy Birthday at her birthday since she full-on freaked out at her 2nd birthday. However, she tolerates it on other people's birthdays. Lily didn't have a problem at her birthday this year. But I wonder if she is going to go through a Happy Birthday song boycott now.

Even though our trip was short, we had a great time! I'll add some pictures to this post as soon as I get them uploaded to the computer.

The weather

Just thought we could all use a comparison:

LAST YEAR on March 27th:



And on APRIL 1st THIS year:



What the heck?! I sure hope SPRING comes soon. This is just craziness. If only this snow was April Fool's. I had to shovel another 4-5 inches this morning! On top of the 4 inches I shoveled yesterday. Conveniently Andrew is out of town on a business trip in nice, warm, snow-free Atlanta, so I get stuck with the grunt work.

An Egg-cellent Easter Egg-travaganza

We had a really nice Easter this year. It was our first one in Minnesota. And well, in true Minnesota fashion, it snowed ALL weekend long! We usually go to Wisconsin for Easter, but a number of things kept us here this year. We had a visit from our friend Phil (a fellow Racine resident). He and Andrew attended the college hockey tournament that found the Gophers in the finals! They lost to Denver. But it was still a very good showing for the UofM. Easter weekend was also the original turn-in date for our Honda so we figured we had better plan on staying here in case we needed to wait until the last minute to turn it in.

At any rate, we decorated eggs on Saturday. The girls had a blast! They each did one of each color and Andrew and I each did one striped one. I tried to teach them that the longer you leave the eggs in the coloring, the brighter the color. But they really were having none of that. They would drop it in and leave it in for about 2 seconds and then proclaim: "It's done!". Since I was in charge for most of the weekend, with Andrew at the hockey games, we spread out the decorating so that it would take up more time. We colored the eggs in the afternoon and then waited until after bath time to decorate them with stickers and whatnot.




And I had the Easter Bunny on my side when it came to bedtime. Hee Hee...They knew that the Easter Bunny came at night while they were sleeping (just like Santa). Knowing that, they both willingly went to bed right away after I reassured Lily multiple times that the bunny would not be coming into her room.

She kept asking me, "The bunny no Lily's room, right?"
Me: No, the bunny won't come in your room.
Lily: Ella's room?
Me: No, the bunny won't come in Ella's room either.
Lily: Mommy's room?
Me: No, not Mommy's either.
Lily: Okay.
Me: The bunny will just stay downstairs. He won't come upstairs at all. And even if he did come upstairs, he is cute and cuddly and not scary at all. But he won't come by your room. Okay?
Lily: The bunny only downstairs. Okay. :-)



It was cute in the morning. Ella woke up first and went right to Lily's door and woke her up and then they both came in our room to wake us up. They searched for all the eggs. Ella was a little too eager and didn't give Lily much of a chance, but they both had fun. They each liked their basket and gift. Ella got a little Princess drawing desk and Lily got a new tea sea (both of which were around $10! Whoo hoo!). Can you believe the bunny also brought Ella tape and Lily floss! :-) They are obsessed with those.

After running around and getting ready, we took the girls to a very nice service at church. However, we got there a little late and ended up sitting in folding chairs set up in the lobby. But we could hear really well. So it ended up being okay. They have a full church band and two choirs (adult and children) so the music was great. We also discovered that Ella's little friend from story time, Gretchen was in the children's choir. She ended up standing right by us as they waited to go up and sing.


Top: The girls in their Easter outfits. Bottom: Playing in Emilee's room.

We headed up to Cindy and Shawn's house right after church for a meal with the Engelhart's. Boy, was it a good meal too! One thing about the Engelhart's, there's always PLENTY of food. And it lasts all day long. So you can just keep eating, and keep eating. Yummy! Traditionally, they have an egg hunt outside. Aunt Linda and Aunt Karin go out and hide the eggs really well. Then, the grandkids (all of us adults now) go out and find them. They have a separate egg hunt for the great-grandkids. The eggs always have money in them. A few cents up to the golden egg with $10. Even with the snow, they still had the egg hunt outside for us "big kids". And Andrew cleaned up! Out of 106 eggs, he got over 50 of them I think! We don't need to divulge how many (or how little) I found. We missed the kids' egg hunt because we were outside. But I was told Ella and Lily had a good time. :-)


Top: Andrew counting his eggs. Bottom: Doing an egg check to see how many we were missing still. We ended up finding all but 8 of them. :-)

In the evening Gramma Clare and B-pa stopped by to give the girls their baskets from them. I swear the girls ate more candy on Easter than they ever have in their life! More than Halloween even!



And here is how the day ended:
Andrew was putting Ella to bed last night and she said to him:
"I like Easter. I want it to be Easter tomorrow."
Andrew: "Well we could hide eggs again."
Ella: "Yeah, me and Daddy hide eggs, Lily and Mommy find then."
Andrew: "Sounds good to me."
Ella: "Wait. No, me and Daddy hide the eggs, Lily finds them, and Mommy takes pictures."

LOL! :-) I guess my picture taking is not so subtle.

Sorry for the delay

I've been wanting to post about Easter. But I've been having issues lately with photo websites. I liked Shutterfly for so long. They always had great customer service and their prints and products were always satisfactory. However, in the last year, I have been disappointed on several occasions. We had to have our Christmas cards reprinted because the first batch was too dark (the second batch was only slightly improved). The calendars I had made at Christmas contained one picture that was extremely dark. You can also tell by their calendars that they have some sort of new printing process. The paper is different. AND I ordered a mug for my grandmother for Christmas and it was shipped to me inappropriately packaged causing the handle to break. Of course, I asked them to send me another one. They packaged it exactly the same way and the handle was broken AGAIN! The third time I finally received an intact mug.

At any rate, what I really don't understand is that the images do not print at all like they look on the computer screen. As a rule, most of the prints are darker and have less contrast than what I can visually see on the computer. Now, it's not just my monitor. This is true of any computer I look at the images on. So, why is it that the prints/printed items I order don't look the same or as nice as the computer images? This is very annoying to me.

So I thought I would finally throw in the towel with Shutterfly and find a new online photo service. I have discovered a few things during this quest. First, Shutterfly definitely has the best features for online web sharing. It's free of charge and you can create a web page to link to or have people access to look at your photos. And this is separate from your actual account where your photos are stored. I have not found any other websites yet that contain the same features and with the same ease of use at no charge.

Secondly, Shutterfly's online tools (cropping, eye fix, etc) are fast, simple, and do not require extra steps. I discovered that ofoto.com (a Kodak website) is somewhat similar and I was excited to try it out. It uploads extremely slowly (even with the special download software). And there are extra steps when cropping and editing the images. So there is added time there. None of the websites I browsed had the same number of borders and backgrounds available when compared to Shutterfly. Another downside to ofoto.com, you have to pay a fee in order to have a webpage to share your photos.

So, I decided I really couldn't make a decision until I saw the prints. I ordered 15 pictures from both websites. The exact same images. And some were better at Shutterfly and some better at Kodak. A total draw!!! UGH!

So now, I'm at a loss. I'm not sure what to do. And my real dilemma is that I haven't ordered any prints to put in albums since Lily was 9 months. Yes, you read that correctly. So I have hundreds of prints to order someday when I finally get around to it. And I want to make sure they are good quality.

So that's the long version of a reason for my lack of posting lately. I am trying to figure out what to do about our photos. If anyone can shed some light on why the images would look great on the computer and crappy on the prints, I would love to be enlightened. I just don't understand that. And I really don't want to pay for calendars and whatnot and then be unhappy with the product.

Sooo....maybe I'll get a real update posted soon....In the meantime....I'm going out to shovel AGAIN! It was 50 degrees yesterday and now we've received at least 4 inches of snow today. AAhhhh!

Last but not Least

Wow! I guess I did need to update the blog! We'll probably have another update of Easter related events after tomorrow. But for now, I wanted to introduce you to our new car!! After two months of indecision, research, test drives, and negotiations we now have a 2008 GMC Acadia in Blue-Gold Metallic (it actually looks steel gray). We dropped the Pilot off at the Honda dealership and have been tooling around in this the last couple days:



And what is THIS all about!:

We had relatively warm weather all week. The kids got outside to play a few times. They even used the sand table and chalk in the driveway one day! Yippee! We saw the grass!! Yay! THEN. It started snowing again on Friday morning. (Nooooo!) And it pretty much has not stopped since. (UGH!) The picture is what our deck currently looks like. Two days earlier there was no moisture on it at all! Where, oh, where is our spring?....


One last sidenote: Last weekend, Lily spilled some Propel on Andrew's work notepad on his desk. Which, if you know him, is practically his lifeline. So he was not too thrilled when he discovered this. Don't worry the notebook survived. But Ella felt compelled to draw the following picture and tape it to our bedroom/office door. Her translation of the sign: "This means, 'No Lily'. She can't go in here." LOL! :-)

Easter is Coming....

...which means our mailbox is full! We received boxes from Nana Mary, Great Aunt Sue, and Bubba and Grand Pat this week! The girls had a lot of fun opening them all and we've been enjoying their contents all week.

From Nana Mary & Papi Dave:



From Great Aunt Sue:


From Bubba & Grand Pat:


Nick Jr. had a Max & Ruby marathon on yesterday. In one of the episodes, Ruby decorates her Easter bonnet. So Ella decided her "art project" for the day would be decorating hats! Here is the finished product. She even helped Lily decorate hers!




The girls decided they wanted to try out their hats and wore them when we went to the grocery store. They received a lot of compliments from many of the other shoppers. Ella & Lily were the belles of Cub Foods!

Happy Feet!

About two months ago, I decided to try and knit myself a pair of socks. I bought some fun yarn and started in on the project. It was somewhat complicated, but also not quite as difficult as I thought it would be. So far, I've finished a pair for me and a pair for Ella. They are actually pretty fun to make. I just thought I would show off my handiwork, or I guess footwork. ;-)

While I was knitting my socks, Ella was very intrigued and asked me if I would make her a pair of socks too. I happened to have some pretty pink (Ella's fave color!) yarn laying around that I hadn't used yet so I set to work and tried a more intricate pattern for hers. She was very excited by them and they are now her socks she wears when she plays in the basement (that's almost everyday!).