The Day Our Friends Were A No-Show - Part 1

Earlier this month, we headed over to Young's Dairy to meet our good friends, the Murphy's. (Jim and Dan were college buddies). We have had fun over the years meeting up with them and Young's is usually our meeting point. They moved overseas last year and Jim teaches at an international school, so we were looking forward to catching up and getting an update on how their year went. Dan and Jim passed e-mails along and a time and place was set...or so we thought.

We were to meet them at noon and have lunch together. We pulled in right about noon and waited....and waited...and waited. We each passed the time in different ways as our hungry stomach's growled away. Lydia was glad she had a book in the van!
Jake had to resort to a little of this...

And Claire found some pretty flowers to smell. I thought the flowers were a decent background for a picture so I asked Claire to smile. The ornery little girl gave me these instead...

So, Lydia posed for me!

And guess who came around after watching her big sis!

Shortly after I took these pictures, I sat back down at the table and said,"You guys did say "noon,"right? Dan shook his head yes. "And it was supposed to be today, right?" Again, Dan shook his head yes. Then he got out his phone and re-read those e-mails. We were at Young's 2 days ahead of schedule! Ha! When we realized this, we quickly headed in the lunch line and filled our bellies. Then it was off to the putt-putt course, visiting the animals, and ice cream. Will post those pictures next time. Just had to share that little funny story.

Fun at Jungle Jim's

I was mean tired driving home from the Louisville zoo last month. We were about 50 miles away to Cincy when I was so wishing that we were 5 miles to HOME. Then I had an idea. The kids were oblivious while I was on the phone with Dan. We crossed the bridge into Ohio and drove past the city. I got off at the West Chester exit and pulled into a hotel parking lot. "What are we doing here, mommy?" "We are going to stay here overnight." "No, really... what are we doing?" "Really, we ARE going to sleep here tonight." I might have well said we were on our way to Disney - that was the hollering and celebrating going on in the back of the van. Who knew a sleepover in a hotel was so exciting!? Score, Mom (and Dad, the hero, who had found us a decent place on Priceline). The kids were happy to not cut our trip short and I was happy to have a bed sooner than later. We checked in, went across the street to get some snacks, Jake watched some basketball, and then we were all out. The next day we swam in the pool before checking out. Since we were close, I took the kids to Jungle Jim's. I don't know what they were imagining in their heads after my description, but I did remind them it was a glorified grocery store. That didn't matter. We spend 3 + hours there...THREE HOURS. They wanted to check out every single isle with all the different ethnic food options. We bought some fun, different food, sampled several things, and of course, had fun with the camera!

A Trip To Elizabethtown

I got some catching up to do seeing as the summer is more than half way over. Figured I would show a few pics from the beginning of summer when we went to go visit the Rebilas family in KY. Not too many represented...I wish I could say it was because I just forgot to take pictures. It was more like I was too miserable to take pictures. If you remember from an earlier post, the pink eye bug had hit our household (at least the women folk) HARD! I would have post phoned our trip but I thought my pink eye was starting to go away with the left over drops I had from Claire...or Lydia...one of the two. Sadly, it got much, much worse. I even ended up going to Becky's doctor and got a stronger prescription of drops.

We were planning on staying through Wed. but ended up leaving Tuesday when Claire started getting her 3rd round of pink eye. It was enough for me to be crazy about handwashing & disinfecting everything I touched. There was no way I could do that with Claire. But before we headed home, we went to the Louisville zoo. I think it was a record for heat that day, of course. But the kids and the moms still had fun! Here we are at Wendy's for dinner before we drove home to Ohio. (**with the fun memory of me throwing my keys in the trash and an employee fishing them out for me. I was going to do the dirty work, but he insisted. I thought, "how nice of him." Then thought how amusing it was that he then asked me to mention the whole incident to his boss right then and there. I waited while he retrieved her and told her "this man needs a raise" and explained what had happened - although I did leave out the part about him asking me to praise him in front of her). =) We discovered this little message...although Drew was not the author of it...
Ethan was! What a sweet boy!

Claire and Sammy had quite a little connection going on. It was cute to watch. Sammy just looked at me funny when I told her to "have her home by 8:30."