Owen noticed it within about a minute of coming home: J-T-O-K. Jen and Tom okay!
Me: Really? Who is O?
Owen: [Brief pause] Ohhhh! Me!
Katie: And K is me!
Category Archives: House & Home
Last day at the pool!
Labor Day is officially the last day our pool is open, so we headed down early—hoping that it wouldn’t be too crazy busy because they were having a BBQ (free food brings out everyone and their brother who NEVER come to the pool any other time) from 1-4. Fortunately, it wasn’t that busy when we got there at 11, though it got steadily busier as the actual BBQ time got closer.
I took a bunch of pics with our waterproof camera which is always fun because it’s so bright out you can’t really tell what you took so you can’t tell if you got any good pics until you get home and check them on the computer!
I like this one because Owen looks like a stingray.
Katie enjoyed pouring water on daddy.
And throwing water at him. This was a lucky shot!
Another ham in the family.
Katie loves it when daddy goes to the bottom of the pool so she can walk on him.
They each had a hot dog and chips…then Katie had a second hot dog! EEK!
A full pool. Quite a difference from the empty pool we normally have when we’re there.
Tom ended up taking Katie home a little early and I stayed with Owen until about 3:30. He would have stayed longer but I was exhausted—we’re rarely at the pool that long and I was done with the sun.
Welcome to my Labor Day!
We haven’t done laundry in awhile. It separated into seven loads. Yay?!
(We ended up only getting six of the seven done because we spent most of the afternoon at the pool!)
Dinner with new friends!
So last night at our dinner, some new friends (that we’ve technically known all school year—their twin girls were in Owen’s class—but we just never actually got together since we were all busy) said we were welcome at their house any time and to just come over. I said we would never just show up unannounced, but if they invited us, we’d be there. So he said “Great! We’re having people over tomorrow. Come to dinner!!” So we agreed immediately!
The kids had a BLAST. They actually have two sets of twins—the girls (in first grade) and boys, who are one. One of the twin girls is in Owen’s class again this year. Katie loved everyone and kept an eye on the babies! We had an amazingly DELICIOUS authentic Indian meal and met some friends of theirs that were really great. They have a huge back yard (probably three times the size of our Jacksonville yard!) so Owen was running all over. They have a playset, too, which Katie loved.
After dinner, this was happening—the kids all having fun taking pictures with someone’s iPhone:
We hadn’t planned on staying longer than maybe two hours (sleep schedules, you know) but we were all having such a good time and the kids were busybusybusy that we ended up staying until ALMOST 11! Holy wah! (We had prepped Katie by making sure she napped beforehand, but she still did really, really well.)
We look forward to many more fun nights with them!!
Saturday Night Dinner—Tom’s Birthday!
Tonight was our fifth Saturday night dinner—and it happened to be Tom’s birthday as well! We had two new families (and one couple who’ve been to a couple dinners) join us—and it was fun (and crazy—with 8 kids!)!
Also as usual, I didn’t even think to take pictures because we were so busy visiting and doing food prep…so the first picture I took was a quick birthday shot of Tom with the dessert he picked (a caramel tres leches cake from Costco…with Owen’s birthday balloon!):
And then a panoramic of the table at dessert time…where it took me more than a few minutes to realize there’s a bunch of panoramic artifacts—like Tom’s hands reappearing on the other side of Katie and a friend’s squished face!
And Katie enjoying the blue frosting on the cupcakes a guest brought for the kids:
As a sidenote, I posted the invite for the next dinner in six weeks (Tom’s work schedule prevented a 4-week plan) and all RSVPs were filled within 24 hours! 🙂
Dinner party prep!
Boneless pork ribs starting their 20-hour bath in the sous vide…
We don’t mess around—we use a cooler for long cooks!
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Pool Shots
Only four days until the pool closes for the season…
…and we are the only three here.
Taking a panorama while Owen walked by captured this:
Our first overnight sous vide!
Trying sous vide boneless pork ribs overnight! Tom retrofitted the top so we don’t lose water from evaporation!
P.S. They were cooking for about 20 hours and turned out amazing!
If you see this, buy it!
We bought it on a lark at Marshall’s…and it’s amazing.
Things that make you go hmmm.
Owen was doing his summer [school] pages tonight when he came across this. We all thought it was funny. (The object was to pick the word from the sentence that should be capitalized—learning that the first word of the sentence is always capitalized.)
It’s just about perfect.
We bought a string of big lights from Costco and Tom hung them from the tree! I love it! I can’t wait to have people over to enjoy it!
I’m drinking my dessert tonight.
We went to a friends’ new house for dinner and brought some of the delicious Not Your Father’s Root Beer that Timmy introduced us to. We also happened to being vanilla ice cream… The float was delicious…but a few sips was enough for me!
All the pics from my day at once.
She always wants to comb my hair but I only let her on days that I wash and condition it.
He said it was costume day so we did this (he can’t get in/out of his costumes by himself).
ABCs while shopping.
This is what she was busy doing while I wasn’t watching. And this is her pout when I tell her she needs to pick them all up.
She tried a ham and cheese (no condiment) sandwich—and actually ate most of it!
I decided to make my all-time favorite garlic toast today because the bread was on sale B1G1 at the store.
“Mama, I want to put the water in please.” Except 98% of it didn’t make it in.
Outdoor lap selfie!
The little stink beat me!!
This time I made a roasted sauce.
Since we’re not eating as much as we used to (plus Tom is gone for work this week), we can’t keep up with all of our tomatoes…so I made roasted tomato sauce today.
I forgot the onions (doh!) so I had to do another tray. And then it all went in the blender with some fresh basil and whole milk.
Yum!
Anniversary dinner…outside the box!
Tom and I were celebrating early since he will be out of town on our anniversary. Fourteen years. Holy wah.
First, my obligatory pre-dinner selfies since I’m dressed up (and wearing a dress I haven’t worn in who knows how many years!). 🙂
Love.
We didn’t take our traditional pre-event selfie because we were running late and then of course the traffic was horrible and it took 45 minutes (instead of 25) to get there so as it was, we were 15 minutes late for our reservation.
So, as you may remember, we have a tradition of eating Chinese on our anniversary. And I’m sure there are many über delicious Chinese places in the area, but we decided to go outside our box and have a Greek dinner at Mike Isabella’s (from Top Chef) Kapnos Taverna (recommended by a friend). Delish. Three “small plates” was too much food and we each left a few bites (we did technically eat too much but it was seriously a quarter of what we’d normally have eaten!). We splurged and shared a chocolate dessert, too. 🙂
Then we got back to the parking garage and saw this:
How funny is that? You know they saw this car and parked next to it on purpose!
And then we finally took our anniversary selfie! 🙂
Guess what Tom got?
A 2015 Subaru CrossTrek in Tangerine Orange Pearl!
He has been researching for awhile now so this wasn’t totally out of the blue…but it was a quick decision (the dealer only had this one on the lot and wasn’t getting anymore and it was a decent deal—and someone else was coming to look at it that night). We hated to spend the money, but really wanted to trade his 2008 Prius in before it lost too much more value or required major work like hybrid battery replacement.
The car is quite cool, though I’ve only had a quick ride around the block thus far (he got home about 8:15). Tom loves it—it’s a HUGE upgrade with extras like Bluetooth and leather seats that he’s thrilled about. I kinda hate him because it’s orange and I’m the one who really loves neat colors…but I’m excited because I’ll actually drive it (I never really liked the Prius).
The only minor snag in the process is that I can’t find the title to his Prius. Normally my recordkeeping is SPOT ON but it’s nowhere—it’s not in the safe and it’s not in the file cabinet…and there’s not even a scan of it anywhere! I have an old title (with the first lienholder still on it) scanned into Evernote but that’s it. And oh yeah, of course I can’t find the lien payoff letter, either. WTF??
I know it can be resolved, but now it’s going to be a PITA. What gets me is that I scan everything like that into Evernote—or at the very least, my computer. And there’s nothing. NOTHING. I know we got the lein release letter but can’t recall receiving the title. To be missing one of them maybe…but both?!
The kids were SUPER excited! We went for a short ride around the block and they were practically giddy!
Owen’s half birthday pool party!
The wait was finally over—the day for Owen’s postponed birthday pool party! And the weather was perfect!! We had 19 kids and 14 adults!
The timing was perfect: at the end of every hour, the lifeguards take a 15-minute break and all kids must exit the pool. So we used this time to have our pizza lunch!
The second break was time for cake! Of course, I had completely forgot to put the balloon in the cake…
So it went in the leftovers so I could take a picture. 🙂
Two of the kids from his Kindergarten class (who are about his size so he looks normal!).
Everyone had a great time! The kids LOVED the water shooters and, while a few got broken, each kid was able to take one home. We guessed pretty good on the pizza—we ordered five and ate about four. There was enough cake to leave out a few pieces and freeze a nice chunk for a later date. The best part was after 10 minutes of cleaning up and packing the car, we were DONE. 🙂
Appropriate road trip music.
About two hours into our trip home, this came on XM.
If it doesn’t ring a bell…it’s the theme song from National Lampoon’s Vacation:
Sorting Stones
I finally got around to sorting the bucket of stones from our beach trip…
Unfortunately…not all the stones were legit. I blame Tom, who was grabbing lots of random fossils, LOL. (They’re neat and all, but they’re no Petoskey stones!)
Only the bottommost piles were actual Petoskey stones (broken up into partial Petoskeys, good Petoskeys, and excellent Petoskeys). 🙂
Local Petoskey stones!
Why did we go all the way to Petoskey when we found all these in the front yard landscaping in the last 30 minutes?! 🙂 I swear we found them all last year.
The kids even found some rocks for their new collections (yes, they’re apparently starting rock collections now).
Kaliseum Daredevils
We took the kids to Kalkaska today for open swim…and boy did they have a blast! Owen was excited to go down the slide again (mom fail: I may have forgotten to mention he did it for the very first time when he was there earlier this vacation). I LOVE the faces he makes. 🙂
My favorite:
You see his harem standing by watching him, right? 🙂
Katie really wanted to go down the slide but she was too little…or so we thought. The lifeguard came up and told Tom she could go down as long as he was at the bottom to catch her. So Owen took her up:
There were other kids going up and they were getting too close to them on the stairs so Owen put his hand out to stop/block them and protect Katie. And then he guided her into the slide while he made sure to keep everyone back. Awwww, I know. 🙂
Here she comes!
Caught her!
Her reaction? She LOVED it and wanted to go again! (But she was done after the second time!)
I still can’t believe it—Owen was 6.5 when he finally went down the slide…and Katie was 3! You can tell who the family daredevil is!
Campfire and fireworks!
Thanks to the magic of a little packet from the fireworks shop, this is how we do campfires on vacation… 🙂
Katie’s first sparkler. She was…intrigued. She didn’t love it and she didn’t hate it.
And then the fireworks! It was a wild crapshoot because we didn’t know what 90% of them were supposed to do…we just stood back and watched…and we had a few close calls with things whizzing by us and up and into the neighbors yard. EEK! But the kids loved it!
Well, they thought some of them were a little loud. 🙂
Of course we did the pooping dog again!
And we still have a bunch left that we hope to get to before we go home!
This is why Gramma can’t have clean windows.
Post-Christmas Bratfest
The family came back for lunch today, and Timmy graced us with about 15 different varieties of brats from his store, Beson’s Market (Bay City). Talk about yum. 🙂
The leftovers after 15 people were in a meat coma:
Maggie getting some love from the cousins.
Gramma Jean got out the water balloons and BOY did the kids have fun!
Nick is 11 and Owen is 6—and Nick has maybe a half inch on Owen. This is what they did when we told them to stand next to each other. 🙂
35 years later…
See the tree right next to the stump? I planted it in elementary school with one of the tiny saplings they send home on Arbor Day!
Swimming with the grandparents
Finally jumping into a pool that has a deep end! All the pools we frequent are a max of 5′ deep so he always hits bottom! This was a new experience for him and he loved it!
Showing Grannie Lin that he can really float now!
And this little stinker! Here she is jumping into the shallow end…BUT!…Earlier, she walked down to the deep end where Papa and Owen were, walked right to the edge, and jumped right in! Went completely under and everything—and came up smiling! SHE HAS NEVER DONE THIS BEFORE, even with prompting! It was so unexpected that I didn’t even have time to get a pic of it! She swam over to the ladder, got out, and DID IT AGAIN! I missed it again, too, because I had a brain fart on how to take a video with my real camera. ARGH! Of course, she refused to do it a third time!
She loves her brother!
Strangely enough, her in the pool doesn’t bother me…but her climbing up this ladder scares the crap out of me.
This is a horrible picture but I need to use it as an illustration. You can see I was a bit away from her and she had climbed up there. No biggie. Then she reached up and grabbed the first bar. Still no biggie. Then she leaned out and grabbed the second bar (as seen here) and right as I snapped the picture, she swung her legs off the bar so she was hanging there. I practically dropped the camera and rushed over there—knowing she couldn’t hang there very long on her own and not wanting her to come crashing down. EGADS. I grabbed her and she proceeded to work her way across the bars like no big deal. NO FEAR!
Sleep happens on road trips!
The kids had a long, busy, fun-filled weekend with our friend’s kids and the babysitter (while we were at our TiVo events) and didn’t get their normal amounts of sleep…so this happened pretty early into our trip.
Tomatoes aplenty!
I picked tomatoes today.
Then added them to what we had left from previous days (on the right). Holy wah.
I had to do something with them before vacation…so I did my first crock pot tomato sauce! With our basil, too!
Then blended the crap out of it with the stick blender because I didn’t skin the tomatoes…and it’s really tasty!
I think that’s Owen’s.
Tom grabbed the first apron he saw. 🙂
