Daniel's visit - fun adventures!

    We got an exciting phone call from my little brother, Daniel, last week.  He was looking for a place to do a mini-vacation with his family.   Since they are living in Chicago for the summer, due to work, we are a mere 2 hours away.  Or faster, if you drive like Daniel :)  He brought his wonderful family up for 4 days, and we had a great time getting to know his kids.

  One of the places we went was the Madison Children's museum.   Here is Spencer starting early on his rock climbing career, with Daniel coaching him.
 

Spencer was interested in almost everything.  Here he is doing a masterpiece on the painting window.

    The one thing Spencer wasn't into, was the craft area. On the other hand, Sylvia and Addie spent most of their time here.  They glued and tied various things together to make some pretty amazing creations.

It was great to have Daniel park Eil in the craft zone, and just hang out and visit.  I love my little brother.

  Eventually the crafting marathon was finished.  Sylvia wore her homemade crown and flower jewelry for the next couple days, until  all the petals finally fell off.

Addie and Sylvia both enjoyed the spinning hamster wheel.  They would've stayed on it all afternoon.

We found critters for everyone to hold on the top level of the museum.  I was surprised at how calmly everyone let mice crawl all over their arms and hands.

They were not as excited to touch the snake... but though it was fascinating.

Later in the evening, we went to a Madison Mallards baseball game.   Asher's orchestra was preforming the national anthem at the start.   (Asher is the handsome blond, front center below.)

The orchestra sounded really great!  I was surprised at how well their sound carried out of doors.

Mattias got a chance to be babysitter to little Eli for a few minutes in the stands.  I forgot how good he is with babies.                                                       

   We had great seats, and were really enjoying the game.  Here we are smiling and unaware of how crazy the weather would become in 15 min. 

  Dark clouds were on the horizon.  They rushed towards the stadium, bringing buckets of freezing cold, side-ways rain, and high winds.  Yes, there was a tornado watch on.    We were totally unprepared, and huddled over the kids, unable to get into shelter for several minutes.  We were so drenched.  Daniel ran to get the van, and we cranked the heat up all the way home.  The baseball game was cancelled, but we still had an exciting adventure to remember.

   Back in Stoughton, the Addie and Sylvia were having a party with Noel, unaware that we were out fighting for survival in the fierce elements.  They had an art party, ate Blue Moon ice cream and played Wii.   Their evening was far less exciting, but I did envy their dry clothes when we got home.

Grandma's Visit: Week 2

The second week of Liz's visit saw us sticking around closer to home.  On Monday night we went down to our community garden plot and fenced it off.  (These are the wild kind of adventures we treat visitors to around here.)

Sean and Grandma kept the workers in line, and made sure they got the fencing straight. 

     The rest of the week was either really rainy, or really hot, so we did a lot of indoor activities.  Asher really likes playing Scrabble, which is also Liz's game of choice.  Here we have a rare occurrence... Liz getting beat.

    Below is a shot of the official score card...279 to 263.  Beating Grandma at Scrabble is a major accomplishment in ones life. He will probably put it on his job resumes in the future.

    Mattias wanted to challenge Grandma, but found he still has a ways to go before reaching champion Scrabble player status.  They still had fun though.

     Sylvia showed Liz the library down on Main Street (which is conveniently located next to the bakery).  Liz was wonderful and spent lots of time reading library books to Sylvia.

    I had an old faded flower pot in the backyard that could use some sprucing up. One rainy day,  Noel painted the background color, then we traced hands and decorated each persons outline.  It looks great now!

Here is Liz's realistic hand...

Noel went for more of a rainbow hand look..

 Sylvia went for a colorful flower on the back of her hand, and learned how drippy paint can be.

Then, Sylvia did a good job realistically painting our dog Maya's paw on some leftover space.  Our dog was not much interested in decorating her own paw, luckily Sylvia didn't mind.

 We also introduced Liz to "Fancy Nancy".   She read a couple of the Nancy books from the libary to Sylvia, and did a Fancy Nancy sparkle-puzzle with her.  What more could a person hope to gain from a vacation?

 On her last afternoon in town, Liz took us all out to lunch at a tasty Chinese-American buffet.  Noel had all vegtables, and Asher had all meat... they reminded me of the nursery rhyme "Jack Sprat".  Sylvia loaded her plate up with fried cheese balls.   -Very healthy.  We all enjoyed several helpings of really good food.

I took the older kids to their school activities, and left Sylvia in charge of the camera.  She went to Olbrich gardens with Liz and Sean, and took lots of fun pictures.  Here is a shot of Liz and Sean from Sylvia's point of view...

They saw lots of beautiful flowers, and enjoyed meandering along the walkways.

The Thai pavillion is a stunning part of the gardens.

   And when Sylvia got cold, her dad donated his wool sweater to her.  She has a ways to go before it actually fits... but it did the job for the day.

After a final stop at Staples and the Art Museum, Sean and Sylvia delivered grandma to the airport.  It was a fun filled day to finish of a great week.  We really enjoyed having Liz come and stay for an extended period of time.  The kids got to share their interests and activities with her through out the two weeks.  We hope she considers doing such a crazy trip another time. 

Grandma McMullin's visit - Week 1

Sean's mom flew out to visit this week.  We have done a variety of outings, in between rain storms.

Sylvia and her friend appreciate the fact that Grandma is staying in a motel with a pool.  There was much splashing this week.

 Here is Grandma with her two splashing mermaids.

   We also drove to Milwaukee to visit the museums.  Asher really enjoys playing Scrabble, so Grandma showed him some of the tricks of the trade as they drove in the car.  The played on her ipad the whole way. She is the ultimate Scrabble-Master, but Asher aspires someday to win.

  At the Discovery World Science Museum, Sylvia found out her arms are finally long enough to reach into the pools and pet the sturgeons swimming by.  The fish swim in loops, and it is a fun game to see if you can reach in quick enough to stroke their 2 foot long bodies as they cruise by.

Sylvia was also brave enough to try the "bed of nails" experiement.  You lay down on a sheet of plexi-glass, then they raise nails up, so you are totally laying on a bed of nails.  She said it felt "weird".  Sean and I were not brave enough to try it.

Sylvia also enjoyed making lots of silly faces in the hundreds of mirrors at one exhibit.  It was fun to see what she gravitated towards.

   The museum was full  of crazy public school kids on field trips, so lunchtime was looking to be more of the same loud chaos we had been trying to steer clear of all morning.  Liz discovered the top floor of the aquarium, the banquet room.  We asked the museum director for permission to haul our cooler up the elevator and eat there.  It was very posh, and quiet.  We ate our bagels and pudding cups surrounded by unexpected elegance.

The view was very pretty from the banquet room. You could see downtown Milwaukee and out across lake Michigan.   It had a wrap around balcony that you had to be careful not to get blown off.

In the afternoon we stopped at the Milwaukee Public Museum.  The butterfly exhibit is one of Sylvia's all time favorite places.   Liz had a butterfly that stayed on her shoulder most of the time.

Asher was fabulous with helping Sylvia catch and hold some of the butterflies.

Mattias won the prize for attracting the largest butterfly of the afternoon.

Noel has been getting a lot of driving practice in.  She is almost finished with her 50 hours, and will be taking her driving test next month.  She is looks very grown up sitting in a car for some reason.

    
     Finishing out the week, we journeyed a half hour down to Evansville, WI.  The high school there put on the musical "The Wizard of Oz" this weekend.  Since they don't have a strings program, they borrowed some of Stoughton's orchestra students.  Asher has been going with some friends down to practice in the evenings after tennis practice for the last two weeks.   The music was great, the show was amazing.

Not only did he meet other musicians from Evansville, but he made friends with the actors as well.  Here is Asher with the star of the show, Dorothy.   Although, Sylvia thinks the real star of the show was Toto. - Who can argue with that?

Finally, a weekend of spring!

  What do we do when we suddenly get sunshine around here?  Here are a few pictures from our sunny weekend:

   Sean and I got to chaperone a church dance Saturday night.   We drove Noel, Asher and a friend to Madison where we made some new friends.

 Noel has still been experimenting with photography.   Here are a couple of photos from a series of pencil shaving she did this week.  It is always fun to see what she comes up with.

Sylvia's caterpillars are full grown now, and started forming chysalises.  We should have butterflies within another week.

We felt some spring color was desperately need around here, so Sylvia went to work filling up flower pots with a variety of colorful blooms.

Sylvia really got into project.  She loved massging and breaking up the tangle roots, and tucking them in snug to the new soil.  It was a lot of fun.

 We also spent some time watching  Asher play a couple tennis matches.  It is kind of like going of vacation... I sit in a chair, and don't worry about dishes or laundry.   We only had to worry about being blown over backwards by 30 mph wind gusts.  The wind didn't help the tennis players much either.  Asher's team got second overall in this quad-competition.

Finally, Noel spend hours on Saturday outside painting a board to put accross Sylvia's top bunk (to prevent rolling out).  Sylvia picked the color, and Noel came up with the decorations. It is nice to have a couple artists in the family.

Hoping for more sunny days!

Sylvia: Haircuts and Snowmen

    Sylvia has been asking for a couple months now to get her hair cut short.  She keeps pointing out cartoon and TV characters that have the style she wanted. This was obviously not going to just fade away, so we made an appointment at a salon... and now have a new look.

Here is the before picture:

 And here is the after picture:

 She feels beautiful, and smiles anytime somebody comments on her new look.  I guess it was the right choice to go along with a 6 year old's sense of fashion.

This last week, we also had a lot of snow, followed by rain... making it perfect packing snow.

I'm very proud of the snowman Sylvia and I made, but need to remember pregnant people should not be lifting large chunks of snow.  My back was soooo sore afterwards.

After creating the perfect snow lady, I realized Sylvia had never squirted cool-aid from a spray bottle onto snow.  So, off we went to the store to shop for cool-aid and a spray bottle.   Sylvia had a blast giving the snow lady a fancy colored dress.

It was a great day.  Some pregnancy days are really lousy, but I'm having occasional rare ones where I feel almost normal.  I love those days!  They are treasured up in my mind as sparkling days of a perfect life.  The snow man day with Sylv this week is one of those days I'll always treasure as a gift from heaven.