The Boat

Anytime Emily talks about the boat, I'm reminded of Dory on "Finding Nemo". "A boat, I saw a boat, it passed by..." Anyways...here are some pictures of our time on "the boat".
Uncle Von and Isabelle, Emily and Thomas, Sophie, Isabelle, Uncle Tommy, Thomas, and Emily, and Thomas and Jill. The dogs went swimming for a little while.



Here is Emily contemplating whether or not to jump. First she "slid" off the boat while holding my hands. Then she jumped to me. Then she told me she didn't need my help, and she jumped off the boat all by herself. She was so excited and when I asked her if she wanted to do it again, she said no. She loves her Dora swimsuit, thank you Grandma. It has the little ruffle and she loves it.



Here we are Emily, myself, Sophie, and Isabelle on the float. The girls liked it. We pretended it was our spaceship.

Emily and Isabelle just had a blast swimming in the lake. On the second day they realized that they didn't need to wear their floaties and a lifejacket. They swam all over pretending they were Ariel.

Huckleberry Acres

So last week I took the kids to Huckleberry Acres (www.huckleberryacres.com) with my brother Von and his family. My other brother, Thomas, came up on Thursday with his son. We all had a blast. Emily loved playing with her cousins. The kids played outside for hours and hours. We also watched Enchanted (several times) and Evan Almighty. Emily and I got to drive the go-kart. It was so beautiful. We got to go out on their boat (more on that to come), roast marshmallows, and we really had a great time.

Our New Car

So as most of you have heard, the white Infiniti committed car suicide. So here's the story.
Chris and I had talked about using our Stimulus Check to get air conditioning in the white car. It's been broken for almost two years. The summer is just too hot for a baby to be in the car without a/c. But then we got to thinking the car is 12 years old, and do we really want to put anymore money into? We had been talking about getting a new car for a few days. I was on the fence, Chris was definitely for buying a new car. Back to the fateful day...


I started the car up, opened CJ's door and went inside to get the kids (I often did this). The car is a stick shift. When I started it, I took it out of gear and just left the parking brake on. Emily was standing on the patio. CJ was inside in his carrier in the house. Emily yells, "Mommy, the car is going by itself". I run outside, thinking if I can get to it in time I can get in and use the brakes. I did not make it in time. The trees stopped the car for me. Remember CJ's door was open. Two tress caught it and the door did a "Tommy Boy". It won't close but I did manage to bend it back "close" to normal. So my mind was made up for me about a new car. I was glad that no one was in the car and that the crash didn't involve anything other than trees that belong to my folks. Don't worry, the trees are fine.



So the vehicle we decided to purchase...

A Saturn Outlook. In my mind it was between the Outlook and a Chrysler Town and Country. The two selling points for me with the Outlook were: 1. It seats eight. It is nice to have that extra seat. 2. It has all-wheel drive. I don't forsee us needing it very often, but when we will need it, it will be nice to have. Plus we love the On-Star feature. Currently we get turn-by-turn navigation which we've used several times.

Our Garden

Our garden and when I say "our" I mean Chris does 99.5% of the work and I enjoy the harvest. He is such a great worker. I love him for it. My idea of a garden is plant a few seeds (which you already own) in the area you have and see what comes up. This is his idea of a garden.
Precision is what I call it.



The first two photos are of the square foot gardens that my brother researched, bought the materials, and with Chris's help, made. They then filled them up with dirt and viola, Gardens. We ran out of twine to complete ours, but that's okay because Chris and Emily just planted more vegetables in those larger areas.
The bottom two photos are of the garden that Chris reclaimed. He and Emily pulled out a lot of onions. He shoveled, raked, weeded, built a fence using logs (trees) from the property and netting from Lowe's, and measured. Chris chose to get Heirloom seeds from rareseeds.com and I must say I was surprised at how cheap they were. He got corn, okra, beans, snow peas, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, beets, and spinach. They also gave us a free packet of eggplant. We'll see how everything grows. I did help plant the corn. The corn has been planted in the huge garden. The vegetables that we want to go to seed will also be planted there soon. Everything else got planted in the square foot garden. Emily loves helping her daddy in the garden. She loves to water and she helped me for part of the corn planting.

Our Storm

So after reading Maren's storm post and remembering the sirens in Indiana (and the fear that followed since we never got renter's insurance) I thought I'd show everyone what a Virginia storm is like.


Well what started out to be a routine thunderstorm turned out to be "the worst thunderstorm in 30 years". The storm hit Wednesday at roughly 3:00 pm. Winds up to 80 mph. Trees were down all over the place. The power was out all over the place. We lost our power right before the storm even hit. Any guesses on when it came back on?........

Thursday night at 9:00 pm. That's right, 30 hours of no power. Which my dad said is the longest they have ever gone without power in the 30+ years they've lived here.

Okay so here are some things I was not fond of during the power loss:
1. Pink bunny was left out in the rain (we had been outside playing and forgot about it) and the smell by Thursday night...not pretty
2. I had an entire load of laundry in the wash waiting to go in the dryer (again, the smell by Thursday night...not pretty).
3. One little girl who sleeps with a night light on every night.
4. One blow out from a certain little guy at 10:30 pm.
5. Having to search for the diaper pad and wipes in the living room by flashlight while at the same time trying to keep my clothes unsoiled (I was successful).
6. Having well water and an electric pump to pump said water. No electricity=no water.
7. No water=no toilet flushing, no showers, no hand washing, no rinsing blow-out clothes, you get the picture. Emily and Thomas did very well and did not flush the toilet the whole time. I however did flush the toilet after a while (I just couldn't take the smell any longer) and got to fill the tank up with rain water.
8. A new-ish chest freezer completely full we bought it in February and it is FULL.
9. Preschool graduation was postponed because they were without power as well.

I'm sure there were other things that weren't so great, but we survived and here are the things that I'm thankful for:

1. We got to use an oil lantern (actually we used two) from the 1880's. It's been in my dad's family and he said the last time he used it was 1949. It worked really well and we all hung out around the table until bedtime. I'll post a picture later.
2. The grocery store being open. And my parents for stopping/shopping there.
3. Our grill, with a side burner which in 4 years had never been used.
4. Cell phones--with Verizon FiOS I guess the landline only works for a certain time on the battery back-up.
5. My awesome in-laws who came to our rescue and brought us a generator for the freezer! Thank you, thank you, thank you
.
6. My new car with air conditioning.

7. The portable DVD player.
8. The little "candle" lights that people put in their windows at Christmas (they're battery operated and do well as a makeshift night light).
9. Flashlights, Emily and Thomas had a great time wandering around the house with them.
10. Our safety, both in the house and everyone who was coming home from work.
11. Buckets of all sizes to catch the rain water to flush the toilet.
12. 13. ELECTRICITY and flushing toilets.
Plus I remember as a kid when the power would go out and I thought it was cool, so it's neat to see Emily experience it in the same house. This morning she turned her light on in her room and exclaimed "We have power! Yippee!" It was cute.

Golfing

A flurry of activity on the blog. That's what a Sunday afternoon with two napping kids will get you. It also helps that CJ ate at 10:00 pm last night and not again until 6:00 am. Usually on Sundays (or any day) I try and take a nap whenever possible. But I was feeling well rested and had lots to post. The onslaught of videos are for my nieces and nephews who have requested more videos. They live far away and don't get to see Emily. But a bonus is everyone gets to see the videos. Enjoy.


Here is Emily golfing. I know it looks more like hockey.




In this video you'll hear her say "don't go in the water", that's because my ball had just gone for a swim. Golfing is definitely not my sport. Fortunately the camera was not rolling for my shot.



This clip was a better indication of how Chris and I played the holes. Emily commandeered my club (she would have nothing to do with the little plastic ones they give kids) so I went back and got her a smaller club. Then we would go and try to have a good, fast, accurate shot around, under, or through Emily. Having a toddler on the course adds an extra degree of difficulty that Tiger has yet to experience. His baby is still an infant. All in all it was a good time. However, I think next time I'll keep CJ home and let Chris and Emily bond over this sport.

Williamsburg

We went to Williamsburg, VA for the Memorial Day weekend. It was great to get away as a family. Emily loved the fact that our hotel had a pool and she got to swim everyday. She also loved when we ate dinner at Josiah's Tavern in Colonial Williamsburg. The waiter and waitresses were all in costumes. We all had an awesome time. We went to the outlets, played mini golf (I'll post some video from that later), went to Bluebird Gap Farm, we went to a place called Airport Park, and went to the Yankee Candle store. Emily loved all of it. At the Yankee Candle store we saw Santa and his workshop, got snowed on, made our own candles, and tasted homemade fudge. It was a pretty neat store and we will definitely stop again the next time we go.

Emily at the Pool

We signed Emily up for swimming lessons. She loves to go swimming. Last week she learned how to float on her back while wearing floaties. She just loves the pool.

CJ part 2

These pictures are a little more accurate. We love him. His belly is always this big. It doesn't matter if he hasn't eaten. Baby Buddha.

This was his first day at the pool. We didn't put him in, but I couldn't resist the swimsuit.

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