Nothing but Pictures

I'm in over my head with life right now and I've got nothing left for blogging.  Nothing bad is happening; it's just a lot of different things pulling me in different directions and it's left me with  absolutely nothing extra.   I can't do creative.  I can't do stories.  This post is basically just a picture a day from the last week.       


February 23: One of our favorite youth activities of the year is ice skating and my kids love it.

A noble try for a diet friendly lunch from California Tortilla, but alas, it was way better looking than tasting.

February 24: Rain, rain, rain.

February 25:  Beautiful sunrise on the way home from dropping Emma off at seminary.

February 26:   Despite the fact that we've had these crazy good looking cupcakes sitting around our house for the last few days, I've stayed strong and haven't had a single bite.  And if you knew how much I like frosting, you'd know that that's actually a pretty big deal for me!

February 27:  Glen went to Colorado for the weekend to see Cami play in a lacrosse tournament at CU in Boulder.    His mom and dad also came, which was extra fun for Cami and Glen.

 Glen misses the mountains.

Cami scored two goals.  

February 28:  We had a wonderful New Beginnings program tonight.

I absolutely love these girls!

February 29:  It was  a beautiful spring-like day, which called for reading a book while hanging out of the sunroof (in a parking lot) and going for a quick walk around the block.  

Apparently it's also time for Adam to get his hair cut.  

A Valentine President's Weekend

February 13: 

 Valentine's Day being on a weekend this year made it perfect for taking a romantic Saturday night to celebrate.   A dinner and movie.   Or a nighttime walk on the town.   Or a show downtown.   

Alas, we did none of those things! 

  First off, Glen was out of town on a business trip, which made anything resembling romantic downright impossible.  However, even if he had been home,  we would have had no time to wist ourselves away on any outings, yet alone a romantic one.  Even the evening got sucked up, because it was our ward's turn to host the Valentine's stake youth dance.   So we ran all day and I ended the night with these lovely ladies as chaperons/food preparers!  All night long we kept about 300-youth fed and happy by cooking up frozen snack foods, decorating cookies, and refilling the water and food trays,  etc.  By the end I was completely exhausted and had a newfound appreciation for waitresses, nurses, and others that spend hours on their feet helping others.   

It was all worth it, though,  for these sweethearts and the rest of the 295 or so teenagers there that night. 

February 14: 

We got to celebrate a modified version of  Valentine's Day (on Valentine's Day) by Glen coming home from a week long trip to India!  He brought us these Viennese chocolates which sent us all into peals of laughter.     

February 15: 

We woke up on President's Day to a few inches of snow and a surprise visit from the cousins!  We were all very much still in our pajamas, but loved the spontaneous chance to talk and play together !  

 

We also had to laugh at their "Wiener chocolate" gift to go with our Viennese chocolate!  

 We had an absolutely lovely (and by lovely, I mean lazy) day "snowed in" together and all in all it was a good Valentine President's weekend!   

Hiking to Calvert Cliffs

Oh what do you do on a Saturday

when all the world is soggy?  

Do you stay nice and dry at home

while you play with your doggy?   

No!  

You pack some food, bundle up the kids, pick up a couple of friends along the way, drive for an hour and a half, then go for a hike! 

At least that's what our crazy crew does!  

We drove through driving rain and arrived to Calvert Cliffs State Park right as it started thundering.   We briefly debated not hiking, but quickly decided that we'd come that far, a little thunder wasn't going to stop us.  Especially since the thunder was in the distance and there didn't seem to be even an ounce of lightning.  

 It was a pretty soggy walk, but we still enjoyed seeing a real deal beaver dam along the way, along with its accompanying beaver-made reservoir.     I, of course, had to use our proximity to a dam to throw in a little dam humor.   I commented to the kids on how the trail must now be called the Dam Trail and weren't the dam water lilies lovely and such.   

It  is almost a 2-mile hike to this beach...famous for it's beautiful cliffs and abundant fossils.  Lucky us, it stopped raining right as we arrived, although I think the kids would have had just as much fun even if it had kept raining!    

The kids swam in the warm water of the Chesapeake Bay...

and found some awesome seashells and fossils!  

After a couple of hours of fun... 

we trekked back to the car.

Then we drove to the very cute seaside town of Solomon's Island, got lunch, ate some delicious ice cream, and watched these threatening looking clouds roll by without so much as dropping one drop of rain on us.  

All in all, it was a fun day with the kids and we would gladly go back to Calvert Cliffs again someday, although it won't be anytime too soon!   Now that the soccer season has started, our Saturdays are about to be jam-packed again!  

(we did this hike on 9/12/15)

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