Eric, Zaky and I went up to Bob & Cheryl's house this past Saturday. Eric and Bob spent the afternoon in a futile attempt to drive Eric's "antique" Blazer to a garage for repairs. While Cheryl, Zaky and I spent our time in the pond. Yes, you heard correctly. Zaky finally got in the water. Cheryl's grandma powers were at full force and Zaky was powerless to resist. Here are the pictures to prove it...

I spending a relaxing day floating on a big, pink clam shell (probably looking like Aphrodite although no one actually said it out loud), and after a great dinner Eric and I headed home. Yes, that right I said "Eric and I". Zaky stayed for a three night visit with Grandma & Grandpa and a trip to Santa's Village. Don't feel sorry for Corie though. She has been at Nana & Grandpa Sprague's house for the past week, and that will be followed by a trip to Lake George with her dad. That left Eric and I childless for two days this week. I suppose you are wondering how we spent those lovely 70 hours. A romantic dinner? A movie in the theater? Watching clown porn? Nope! We did a little shopping, and upon returning home Eric went to downstairs to Manland and played video games while I went upstairs and played in my sewing room. Like Tony Shalhoub said in Galaxy Quest, "It's the simple things in life you treasure".

Whitney

Some of my fabric stash.

We finally got the house (almost) clean in time for our company. It was hard to plan a menu without an itinerary, so I did most of the cooking on Sunday morning opting for salads and lunch meat. Although I have hundreds of cookbooks I scoured the Food Network website and found two new salad recipes and one new dip recipe to try. The salad recipes (Greek Grain Salad and Cobb Salad) were great, but the dip recipe was awful. Dad, Pat & Amber arrived Sunday afternoon and stayed until Wednesday. We did some shopping around Burlington and went down to the waterfront on Monday. Tuesday we spent the day at Kill Kare State Park. It's a small park, but it's really beautiful. The weekend went by way to fast, and it was depressing to come home from work Wednesday night to such a quiet house. Corie went home to NY with them. She's going to spend a week there. I can just hear her "Nana, look at me", "Grandpa, watch me climb this tree", "Amber... Amber... Amber, look at me now". Okay, so maybe a quiet house isn't so bad. Next week Zaky is scheduled to go to Santa's Village with Grandma Cheryl and Grandpa Bob. When I die I want to come back as one of my kids!

Nothing makes you realize how uneventful your life is like writing a blog. Oh sure, if I posted once or twice a year I’d have lots of interesting (or at least semi-interesting) things to write about, but try posting every couple of weeks and ho-hum. It’s not that we don’t enjoy most of our day-to-day activities, but they just aren’t the most interesting things to write or read about. You did however come here to read about our daily life, and I will not let you down…

I’ve survived another work week and am looking forward to the weekend. Dad, Pat & Amber are coming up for a visit, so we have been working on getting the house presentable. Actually to be precise Eric and I have been the ones doing the work. Much like Sisyphus and his rock we make little progress, for no matter how fast we clean the kids are somewhere in the house undoing our efforts. Eric did manage to get our new potties installed. I didn’t know that there was anything wrong with our old potties, but apparently they were wholly inadequate. I guess you have to be a plumber to understand, but we are now the proud owners of twin Mansfield potties with matching Church slow-close potty seats... I told you this wasn’t going to be exciting!

It's been a little slow at work, so I've had some time for the internet... Wanna see what I bought? Of course you do.

I have wanted the "Stuffed Toys" for a long time, and almost had it for Christmas but lost the bid last minute. The Japanese craft books are excellent. I've got about 10 in my collection so far, and about half of them are written entirely in Japanese. I also bought some things at Ichiban Kan. It the first of several purchases I plan to make with them :) They have bento items at great prices, but they sell out really fast.

I've recently joined Facebook and can't believe how many friends I've heard from. Now we have another bunch of people that we don't have time to keep in touch with :) I can't end this post without commenting on the photo of Zaky. We took it the day before his 4th birthday, and we sent it into PBS Sprout's Musical Mornings show. I think we sent it in to late though, so it didn't get aired.

We celebrated my sister’s graduation and my Dad’s semi-retirement this weekend in NY. It was great. We enjoyed lots of great food and great family. It was a mini vacation. Here’s a picture of Amber with Corie and Zakary. I think Amber looks more like Aunt Beth every day... except for the ink & hair color (which I love). Corie loved swimming in the pond and would have been content to spend the entire weekend in there. She's a real fish.

Their house and landscaping look amazing, and I took piles of pictures. I plan to use them for ideas when we start landscaping our own house. Here are a few of my favorite shots:

These are the door chickens that I made… one for Pat and one for practice. Zakary has informed me that he needs one for his door also. If he had any money he would be my best customer.

My cousin, Sandy, sent me a link to join facebook, so I could check out her pictures, etc. Since signing up I’ve been getting all these emails from people that I haven’t seen in years. People from high school and college from 20 years ago (ugh, I’m old). It’s pretty cool, but it’s also a little over whelming. That’s a lot of emails to answer. I hadn’t planned on actually using facebook when I signed up, but it seems like it would be fun. Unfortunately work has been so busy lately that I haven’t had time to do my own thing.