Lake Tahoe

It's been such a fun week at Lake Tahoe. I'm sad that we only have one day left. Here are a few more pictures from our trip.

The water level of the lake is incredibly high this year so they are releasing as much water from it as they can, which translates to no rafting down the Truckee River for us this year. The river is so high it reaches the bridges and flooded the bike path. So instead of a picture of us rafting, you get a picture of our fannies on the aptly named Fanny Bridge watching the water be released.

We spent Monday letterboxing our way around the Lake and discovered some new sites and also visted some old favorites. here we are looking down at Emerald Bay. There's a tea house down on that little island.

We made it to Ben's wedding reception in Sacramento on Tuesday (Larry's best friend from Medical school, who we like to refer to as Basment Benji since he spent a few months living in our basement).

After spending the night at my grandparents' we headed back to Tahoe and visited the Donner Party Memorial. Appropriately it was the only day up here that was cold. They built the rock part of the memorial to show how high the snow was that year, 22 ft.

We spent yesterday kyaking, but I don't have any photos of that for you. Now I have to go so more later!

Tahoe Sunday

I've only downloaded my pictures from Sunday so here's what we did after church on Sunday.

We headed to Squaw Valley with my parents and browsed through an art festival.

Then we took my parents on their very first letterboxing trip.

The beginning

Oh, where to begin? I think I'm going to post about the Surviving the Applewhites reading on the book club blog, but let me tell you about the rest of my Friday night.

First the backstory:
One of my very best friends, Alicia, had a pet peeve when she lived in Ohio; all over Ohio there are people with cement geese sculptures on their porches and they dress the geese up for different occasions and holidays. One day we met up with Alicia for dinner only to find her particularly peeved because she saw a cement goose in a cardinal costume and she said that you should not dress up geese, but you cannot dress them up as other birds, it's just stupid.

Once Alicia moved to Texas she started to miss things she thought she would never miss about Ohio, and she finally admitted to me that she might even miss the dressed up geese a little bit. In honor of her admission, Larry and I drove around town taking pictures of so of the best dressed geese and mailed her and album of dressed up geese pictures. Then last fall when we were visiting Mammoth Caves, we came across cement geese for sale. We couldn't afford a full-size gooose, nor could we lift it but they had little cement ducks for sale and I couldn't resist buying one for Alicia, who would grown when she saw it. It was still too heavy to mail so my layover in Denver was the perfect opportunity to make the delivery.

Of course I couldn't deliver a naked cement duck do after the script reading my friend Cat and her daughter help me throw together some wonderful outfits. They were so funny Cat made me take pictures so here are a few of my favorites.

And here are my lovely helpers hard at work on a native american outfit

After two hours of sleep for me and no sleep for Larry, we left for the airport and 4:30 in the morning. I spent the day with Alicia and her boyfriend in Denver. We checked out her new apartment and then spent the day couch shopping. Of course she loved the duck. For those of you that know Lish and want to check out her new boyfriend, here they are on the balcony at her new apartment.

Larry and my parent met me at the Reno airport and the first place we headed was In-N-Out (Larry's choice in celebration of completing his intern year).

A glimmer and a twinkle in my day

Things That I would be doing this weekend if I wasn’t leaving town:

• Watching Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion at the Ohio Theater tonight or the matinee of Mary Poppins tomorrow and taking the theater tour afterwards (I bet that it a cool tour)
• Checking out the Frog Jump Festival in Dublin (I think it’s at Coffman Park)
• Watching The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) at Shakespeare in the Park in German Village
• Working on Card Kits with Candice (Let's be honest, this would be most of my weekend)
• Maybe checking out my friend’s booth at the street fair at ComFest (Where else are you going to see tons of hippies gathered together in Columbus this weekend?)
• Or maybe I would end up checking out the Art Affair at Easton
• Meeting pop-up artist David Carter at the Museum of Art on Sunday or the Southeast branch of the library on Monday
• Watching Otterbein’s production of Harvey (It’s a little pricey, but their plays are always worth it)

It’s a good thing I’m leaving so I don’t have to choose!

Things that made me smile during my lunch break:

• The three-year-old boy at Wal-mart who ran up to the door, raised his arms high in the air, and yelled in a huge voice, “OPEN SESAME!”
• The little old lady with beautiful white curls and perfectly applied hot-pink lipstick who was buying poise pads and smiled at me and insisted I go before her in line because I was only buying a few things (for Alicia’s gift) and she was in absolutely no hurry at all.
• This paper I designed to use in part of one of my card kits

• This post of my friend Melinda’s husband experiencing his first J-Dawg
• An email from Lish to discuss meeting tomorrow
• 263 freshly printed pictures
• Working on three things from my to do list. Maybe I’ll finish more of them than I thought! It's amazing how much you can accomplish in an hour when little old ladies let you cut in line.

I'm off

I’m off (or rather, I will be soon!)

Will I miss staring at this five days a week?

Not even a tiny bit!

I have a feeling I will be beginning my vacation as a sleep deprived zombie because before I leave I still have to:

• Print the pictures on my digital camera so I can clear my memory card in order to make room for vacation pictures
• Attend a reading of the script for Columbus Children’s Theater’s production of Surviving the Applewhites (and hopefully get a glimpse of Stephanie Tolan and Katherine Paterson while I am there)
• Work on a gift for Alicia (I’ll try to post pictures if I get it done)
• Pack
• Buy a wedding present for Ben
• Pay some bills
• Print, assemble, and take a picture of one of the digital card kits that I’m putting together (they told me that I can give you a preview on my blog so look for that later)
• Finish as much as I can of the digital card kits so I don’t have to work on them on vacation
• Make it to the airport by 5 a.m. for my 6 a.m. flight

Do you think I will finish all of that? Not likely, huh?

I’ll try to post while I’m on vacation, but my internet access will be spotty at best. Have fun while I am gone!

Twilight Phenomenon

HAVE YOU READ THIS BOOK YET?

I know, I'm supposed to be posting about books on my book club blog, but this is not a review of a book that I've read recently, this is a book that I read in December, and I cannot stop thinking about it! I'm entrapped in the Twilight Phenomenon!

OK, so let's get the worst part over with, yes, this is a vampire romance novel written for young adults. I don't like vampire novels, and I'm not a fan of romance novels either so why did I even pick up this book you ask. I picked up Twilight earlier in a bookstore and read the blurb because the cover drew me in. Uh, a vampire romance novel? No thank you! I quickly put the book down and looked around to make sure no one saw me pick it up. Soon rave reviews were posted everywhere, but that still wasn't enough to entice me to pick up the book. It wasn't until I came across and article that mentioned that the author, Stephenie Meyer, is Mormon. That month I was hosting my children's literature book club, and we happened to be focusing on young adult and children's novels written by Mormons. I was trying to provide everyone with an overview of what's out there so I suddenly felt like I better pick up this dreaded book.

I would have missed out on so much of I never picked Twilight up. I was immediately sucked in. There were a few moments that I was worried it would become a little "unchaste" and I probably wouldn't have continued to read if I hadn't known it was by a Mormon author and thankfully it did stay relatively clean. Meyer calls it the vampire book for people who don't like vampire books and I agree. I never knew I could care so much about a vampire. After I talked it up at book club (even though part of me was still a little embarrassed to recommend it) a few members read Twilight and they have fallen prey to the Twilight Phenomenon too. Now they are running around like mad, trying to convince people to read this book and gushing about how good it is.

Luckily, Stephenie Meyer just posted on her site that the next book in the series is due out in late August. Once you've read the book and joined the phenomenon you can go to her site to read a chapter of Twilight from Edward's perspective or order an "I love Edward Cullen" t-shirt with an apple on the front that says "Bite Me" underneath it, and you can see who Meyer imagines would play each character in a movie.

Leaving on a jet plane

All of his bags are packed. In a few hours my little brother leaves Utah on a plane headed to his mission in Florianopolis, Brazil. I know it will be a great experience for him, but part of me is so sad. I haven't seen him since Christmas and now it will be two more years before I have the chance. He spoke in church on the 11th and my little sister Marissa reported that even though I wasn't there, he thanks me for being so smart and always knowing how to get him out of trouble. Uh, gee, thanks! (Marissa has a blog now, but she says until Mike finishes his thesis she won't get much internet time to post)

Eli is almost 7 years younger than me, and what he remembers about me from his youth surprised me. I used to read to him every night, but I thought it was long forgotten until he asked me what the title of one of the books that we read was (The Farthest Away Mountain by Lynn Reid Banks). He also remembers me leaving trails of pennies through our house on Saint Patrick's Day with a treat at the end of the trail from the leprechauns.

Even though I was quite a bit older than him, we always had a lot of fun together. Of course he went through the teenage years, when he didn't want to hang out with me, but he's reached an age where it's cool to hang out with his older siblings again, and I guess that's partially why it's especially sad to see him go.

Eli's always been a super-confident cool kid. He was chubby during his middle school era and one day his soccer coach overheard some of the kids calling him Twinkie. He told the kids to cut it out, but Eli interrupted and said, "Coach, it's cause I've got a creamy filling in the middle." And he flashed his bright smile. He honestly was proud of that nickname. He had it embroidered on one of his football hoodies in high school. His band, Festively Plump (later known as Dishwasher Safe and then Adrenaline) had a song that basically went, "Eli's not fat, he's festively plump, festively plump, festively plump." He just thought it was hilarious. Later he thinned out, grew taller, and became the popular kid who was the starting center of his football team, which took state. My mom overheard some awkward girls talking about who their dream date would be to one of the dances and they all came to an agreement that it would be Eli because, "He's so nice to everyone."

He's the kind of guy that I have always been proud to be related to and that it why I know he will do well over the next two years.

In the summer time

OK, to be fair there are several things that I love about summers in Columbus. Here are a few:

1. Fireflies - they've just started to come out and there's something about them that seems so magical.
2. Rita's Italian Ice
3. The CAPA summer movie series. They play old movies Downtown in the Ohio Theater. Tickets are only $3.50 and it's worth that price just to see such an amazing theater. I'm hoping to catch Hitchcock's Suspicion there next week.
4. Ohio Festivals. They have them for just about everything you can think of. This weekend in the Duct Tape Festival in Avon and the Festival on the Fish in Vermilion. I have never been to either of those festivals, but we have been to the Washboard Festival, Columbus Arts Festival, and the Pumpkin Festival. The one thing that you can always expect is a lot of unusual deep fried food.
5. Free Shakespeare in the Park. We went tonight to see A Midsummer's Night Dream and the weather was perfect. Here's a picture that I took before it got dark.
6. The Ohio State Fair. I don't consider myself much of a State Fair kind of girl, but you have never been to a state with more pride in their state fair. Where else can you find a lifesize sculpture of a cow made out of butter?
7. Farmers Markets. Ok, techinically we only go to the farmers market in Athens or at the North Market, but they have farmers markets all over town. When we go, we always try to pick up something unusual that we've never tried before. That's how I fell in love with yellow water melon.
8. Cedar Point - also not in Columbus, but one of my favorite parts of Ohio summers. If you want to avoid the heat, it's a good place to visit in the fall too. I've been on a lot of roller coasters, but none of them have been nearly as terrifying as the best at Cedar Point.

Utah

Things I'm looking forward to in Utah:

1. Of course seeing friends and family.
2. Cafe Rio Salad (Sorry Cassie, I know you prefer Chipotle, but it just isn't the same)
3. Cool nights with a breeze coming from the canyon.
4. Church that starts before 1:00 and seeing my dad in action as the bishop.
5. No humidity; my hair won't become a giant wavy puff-ball the second that I step outside.
6. Our annual space at the Fourth of July parade in Provo. My Uncle Cory and his kids always camp out on the curb starting at about 3 a.m. to save our special spot.
7. My Uncle Cory harrassing every group in the parade getting the crowd to chant so every band, cheer leader, and singer performs infront of us.
8. J-Dogs. Thanks for introducing me dad!
9. Startups suckers
10. Actually running into people I know around town. This is just starting to happen to us after five years in Columbus, and is still a rare occurance in a big city.

Vacation

I think I already told you that Larry and I have the last week of June off, but we couldn't decide where to go on vacation. Plane tickets to most of the places that we want to go are so expensive right now, but we've visited most places within driving distance of Columbus over the past few years. Last night we decided to to splurge and bought our tickets to Lake Tahoe. My grandparents own a cabin there and Larry has never been (which also means I haven't been in ages).

I can't believe how many people we've arranged to see on this trip. First, I have an eight hour layover in Denver. I know, you're thinking an eight hour layover is terrible, but it's not; it's wonderful. One of my best friends in the whole world, Alicia Hall, is moving to Denver and she will be flying in the same morning to we will be able to spend the day together.

Then I head on to meet up with Larry and my parents in Reno. In the middle of the week Larry and I will drive to Sacramento for Ben Shadle's wedding (Can you believe our little Benji is getting married? It seems like only yesterday he was living in our basement). After the wedding we'll probably spend the night at my Grandparents' house in Granite Bay (another place that I loved growing up and haven't visited in ages). Then it's back to Tahoe. Larry will fly back home on July 1st, but I will be driving back to Utah with my parents. I know it's a crazy long drive, but it will be worth it to see all of my friends and family in Utah (You know who you are, and if you're reading this blog, you better set up a time to get together with me while I'm in town).

Independence Day is a huge holiday in family so I'm really excited to spend the holiday in Utah. A lot of my extended family has moved to Utah since I've moved to Ohio, and I'm always so jealous when they all get together and I miss it. This time I will actually be there.

So much to look forward to!

Going to the Zoo!

I woke up this morning and went through the usual morning rush of trying to get ready and make it to work on time. I made it downstairs a few minutes early, only to discover Grant sitting alone in the family room playing Sorry by himself. He begged me to play with him, and I felt so sorry telling him I had to go to work. That combined with the great weather was probably why when Candice emailed me and asked me to leave work early to go to the zoo with them, I couldn't say no. Besides, we were going in honor of Cole's birthday, and how can you resist a face like this?

Jello Celebrations

Candice and her kids came to visit us for the weekend so we decided to celebrate with a picnic at Homesteadn Park. The boys loved the unique playgrounds. Of course their favorite was the one with all of the waterguns.

Grant got just a little wet!Larry made some jello for the boys. Can you guess what his secret ingredient is?This is how Candice and I spent most of our Saturday. We got a lot done, but we still have a long way to go. I'll see if I can share some previews of the card kits with you when we're done.

Larry spent all day entertaining the boys. He took them to a mall playground (it was raining so they couldn't stay outdoors), then he let them pick anything they wanted at the Dollar Store. I think the highlight of Grant's day was making three kinds of Jello with Larry (I swear we don't live on Jello; Grant just liked Larry Jello ala spoon so much he wanted to make more). He made sure we each tried all three flavors.I think the boys wore Larry out. He fell asleep before 10 p.m. and I had to wake him up three times to get him to go upstairs. The third time I woke him up I asked him if he just wanted me to let him sleep on the floor and she said, "What kind of antibiotics was she taking?"

Tradition Additions

Here are a few more fun family traditions. The first one is from a random site I can't remember. Sorry!

1. Brighten Someone's Day Day: In today's busy world it's hard to keep in touch with loved ones. Maybe you live near aunts, uncles, cousins or friends that you don't see very much. Get your family together and make or buy a thoughtful inexpensive gift. Bake cookies, pick something from the garden or make a home-made card. It doesn't matter what the gift is. Just make sure that the whole family has a part in helping to make or think about who to see and what to give.
   If your family wants to send small gifts and tokens of love to distant relatives you can make this a home project and it will be great! But, it is really touching to visit with your loved ones when you "brighten" their day. Especially for younger children.
   Pick a day and time when you know that most of your loved ones will be home. You might want to call first and explain that you will be stopping by for a very quick visit. Just give it to them on the doorstep if you want. The key is to visit as many as possible. If you have someone to visit for longer than a few minutes, you put them on the end of the list.
2. On Easter, after my friend Anna's family find all of the hard-boiled eggs, they have an egg breaking contest. Two people at a time tap their eggs against each other until one breaks. The person without a cracked egg moves on in competition. Then the person with the last whole egg left is the ultimate champion and there are deviled eggs and egg salad sandwiches to be had by all.
3. I vaguely remembered my friend Dayna telling me about one of her family traditions that's pretty original so I asked her to tell me about it again and hears what she said: My Mom was always tired of my Dad's over planned vacations with no room for flexability, she wanted to stop at every place that looked interesting but he'd never stop. So one day she came and got us all out of school after lunch and took us on what she called her Gypsy Jaunt. She had two envelopes one with N,S,E,W and one with numbers 100-500 (100, 150, 200, 250 etc.) Then she would let one of us choose a direction and one draw the numbers. So whatever we got, N 300, we'd go N 300 miles. And then whatever was there, or closest to it, that's where we'd go. If it was fun, we'd stay, if not, we'd draw again. She found some of the coolest, little known places around. We usually ended up in Utah, but sometimes in Idaho and Colorado too. We did it probably two or three times a year. So, that's that.

I'd still love to hear about any of your family traditions too!

100 Things (81-100)!

81. I can’t stand girls that go by the nickname “princess”, but Larry calls me princess all the time and it never bothers me.
82. I stayed up until 2 am Sunday night reading the manuscript of a book my friend is working on because I had to know how it ended!
83. From around kindergarten through second grade I loved dressing up in bags. I would draw different outfits on them and poke holes for my arms and head, and don’t you worry I have plenty of pictures to document these outfits.
84. I have a weakness for cute shoes that is almost as serious as Larry’s weakness for jackets and coats. He’s from Orange County, how did he get so obsessed with jackets and coats before we even moved to Ohio?
85. In undergrad I took all of the classes that I needed to graduate with honors, but I didn’t finish my thesis because I graduated a year early so I didn’t graduate with honors.
86. My thesis defense for my master’s degree ended with hugs from both of my advisors who then told me that they thought that I should be a writer (and one of them has headed the Caldecott Award committee!). It one of the best days of my life.
87. People ask me all the time if I have colored contacts.
88. Larry and I have never set a budget. When he was in medical school we didn’t have a lot of money and we just tried to spend as little as we could and a budget wouldn’t have changed anything. Now we need to, but it just seems so complicated to me.
89. The day Larry matched at OSU for his residency we were both a little depressed so we went couch shopping with the money we had saved for moving expenses.
90. I couldn’t pronounce the letter “R” when I was little so I had to take three years of speech therapy. I still have a little trouble with it when I’m really tired. Maybe that’s why I love the picture book Hooway for Wondey Wat so much.
91. I’ve only really had one crush; Mike Winget, eighth grade. I’m blushing right now just thinking about it!
92. I went through several years when I was young that I was a total slob. I had a large bedroom and you could barely see any of the floor. My mom made me seriously clean my room about twice a year when grandparents were coming to visit and it took ages. She later confided that the reason I had such a big walk-in closet was that if I had to I could shove everything in there and guests wouldn’t know how messy I really was.
93. I still have a really big walk-in closet. Hmmmm . . .
94. When I was about four Candice, her friend, and I left some food out in a kudzu patch for the Cabbage Patch Kids (because everyone knows that’s where the Cabbage Patch Kids live) and the next day it was gone and I was convinced the Cabbage Patch Kids were real.
95. The reason I don’t really wear make-up isn’t that I don’t think I could use some, it’s that I don’t really know what I’m doing when I try to buy makeup or put it on. I always just feel ridiculous.
96. Something about unfinished puzzles drives me crazy. I get sucked in and have to finish them.
97. Rebekah and I are working on starting a writers’ group via blog (yes, another blog, but it will be so different from my other blogs and I’m really excited about it).
98. I’m spending the weekend with Candice so we can work on designing some printable card kits. We help each other out with things all the time, but this is the first time that we are officially working together as graphic designers. It should be fun as long as we can buckle down and get some work done.
99. When I turned 16 I didn’t want to get my driver’s license. I was the youngest of my friends, and I never went anywhere by myself, and they could all already drive. Two months later my dad finally overheard me on the phone with my driving instructor who called to ask me if I wanted to take the test yet, and my dad interrupted and said that I HAD to take my driver’s test.
100. I’m doing pretty well with most of my goals that I’ve told you about, except for writing more thank you notes. I’ve only written two. Why is it so hard for me to remember to write thank you notes?

Book Club is Tonight

I’ve been skipping the blog a lot lately, not because I have nothing to say, but because I’ve been busy during my lunch breaks, and that’s usually the only time I can find to post. Today I had to run some errands but I’m trying to sneak a post in anyway.

My head is not at work, my head is at book club. I’m sort of the leader of a children’s literature book club for grown-ups (“sort of” because we’re pretty democratic and don’t need much leadership). It all started when two of my friends, Cassie and Natalie, said that they loved being stay-at-home moms, but they missed teaching elementary school and felt like they couldn’t keep up to date on the children’s literature world anymore. Natalie asked me if I would help her start a book club and I accepted. I didn’t know then that Natalie is full of brilliant ideas, but left with little time for follow through so before I knew it I was in charge with Cassie as my secretary. Luckily some amazing women joined our group and they are always willing to volunteer help. I can’t believe this club is already over three years old!

We meet on the first Tuesday of every month. We vote every six months or so on different topics we want to cover and a different member hosts each month and chooses books that go with one of the topics we selected as a group. Tonight’s topic is multicultural literature and as usual we are discussing some fantastic books. Here are a few pictures that Krystal took for me at last month’s meeting.



Have a told you how much I love these girls? Not everyone is in these pictures but at least you get to see some of their smiling faces. Membership is always changing, people always come and go, but this year we are losing the rest of the members who started with me. Their husbands have graduated from school and are ready to move on with their careers so I feel a little selfish wishing they could stay. Things just won’t be the same without them, and for a day or two, I wasn’t sure that I wanted to continue book club without them. Luckily I know some of the newer book club generation will keep things going strong and we have fresh faces all the time. This month Brooke Beazer (who always has the most wonderful things to say) and Rebekah will be attending (After meeting Rebekah I told her that she needed to be my new best friend and not only did that not scare her away, she invited me over for dinner and reminisced with me about the Baby-sitter's club. Does friendship get any better than that?). So I will go and I will be enlightened and I will grow closer with some women I am lucky to know and book club will move on, whether I want it to or not.

They're here! They're here!

Dayna and Brennan Peterson are here! Let me tell you a little bit about Dayna. She was one of my roommates my Freshman year of college and she was the ringleader of all of the trouble that we got into that year (although this weekend she claimed our other roommate Em was really the mastermind, but we all know the truth!) Dayna is hilarious and she is the queen of pranks. One Saturday morning I woke up early for a lacrosse scrimage only to look down and find my whole room was filled with styrofoam cups full of water, and if I wanted to get out of my room I would have to start a flood or drink my way out. I opted to skip practice and go back to sleep and let my roommate Jasmine deal with it.

Another time Dayna and Em found some glamour shots of our roommate Katie and they made tons of flyers with the picture that said “Good luck on finals Hollywood Katie Thayer” and hung them all over campus and each place she had a final. Katie was a little late for her first final and she missed the flyers and when she got to class they all started clapping and she didn’t know why. Later when they went to help her take all of the flyers down she was a little traumatized that tons of them were missing so on April Fool’s Day, Dayna and I found the cutest guy we could in the cafeteria and we sent him to her job at the copy center where he asked her to blow this flyer up as big as she could. She saw they flyer of herself and wanted to know why he would do that, that was a picture of her on the flyer and she was not going to blow it up for him. Then he told her that his roommate saw that girl all over campus and had a huge crush on her so he kept a copy of the flyer and wanted to blow it up and hang it over his roommate’s bed for April Fools Day. He asked Katie for her phone number instead which she was happy to give to him. I know right about now you’re thinking that was kind of mean and Katie must have been mad, but she wasn’t because he was seriously cute and he now had her phone number.

Then there was the time that Dayna and Em came home from the grocery store and they each had a new loaf of bread so they decided to make a million peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and take big bites out of a few of them and then leave them all over our friend’s kitchen in the middle of the night so when they woke up it would look like it rained sandwiches (which became even funnier when the girls heard them in their kitchen in the middle of the night so they hid in their bathroom for two hours and then came out only to find random sandwiches everywhere.

Oh, and let’s not forget the time we had an opening for a new roommate and girls came by to meet us and check out the apartment and Dayna and Em each made up a weird personality defect to scare away each perspective roommate like when they were giving the tour the would pretend to be a total klepto and steal things from each room as they were giving the tour or they would pretend to be a pathological liar and keep spurting out all sorts of conflicting information about themselves. And it totally worked. We never got a new roommate and I had a room to myself for the rest of the year.

I could go on and on for ages. On a more serious note, Dayna is just so much fun to be around and I was so excited to hear she was moving to Columbus. She arrived with her husband Brennan late Thursday night. I planned on heading over after work on Friday to help them get settled, but due to a power outage I got to leave around two and spend all afternoon unpacking with Dayna while Brennan shopped for things they needed. They worked really hard to be ready for the arrival of Dayna’s mom and aunt who were flying in on Saturday with Dayna’s twin daughters. We did convince them to take a break for dinner and Thurman’s (since we were starving) and a short tour of Columbus.

Here's a bad picture of Larry looking like he ate too much.

Saturday was my friend Jessica's baby shower (actually she called it a sprinkle since she was having baby #2 so she already had the necessities and just needed some clothes for a baby boy instead of a baby girl).

And finally, here's a picture of my new bulletin board made with the shutters I bought ages ago. Maybe not the most exciting news to you, but I had to show that I finally hung them up.

Jeni's Ice cream

Larry was on call on Wednesday so I had a girls' night and headed to Jeni's Ice Cream in Grandview with my friends Katherine and Rebekah. Here they are sampling before we ordered.

You have to sample at Jeni's because they're famous for their unusual flavors like Salty caramel, Thai chili, and blueberry lavender. If you're adventurous you can get three small scoops instead of one large scoop. I went for buttermint, lime cardamom, and my personal favorite, Passionfruit yogurt. This ice cream is soooooo good. They have a shop in Grandview and a booth at the North Market and it's definitely worth the trip.