The long visit

The last morning with our wonderful house guests. These are some of Erin's balloon creations. And they bought our kids the super cool safari book that Zadie is holding.

My friend Erin is known for her long visits. She once spent 3.5 weeks visiting our mutual friend Jenna -- in Milwaukee! I'm not sure many people in their twenties spend nearly a month vacationing in Milwaukee.

The long visits have kind of waned as we've gotten older and life responsibilities got in the way. So it was much to my delight when Erin informed me that she and her fiance and baby would be staying at our house for a whole month! Hooray, nobody does that, especially when you live out in the suburbs. Lucky for us, they were transitioning from living abroad and we were part of their re-introduction back to America!

We all loved having her family stay with us and were quite sad to see them go. The kids thought Erin was like a funny clown, capable of all kinds of tricks like balloon animals, origami designs, painting, and so much more. The boys especially loved rough-housing with Micah and Zadie was really hopeful that he could help her figure out her Rubik's cube since he is an engineer (no luck there). And Tori and I loved having the adult company, the extended family meals every night, and of course all the laughs that accompany a visit from Erin.

It was a great time. We need more visitors!

Camping at Joshua Tree!

Ack! It's been too long since I've blogged. So I'll finally try to catch up with some updates.

Last month we spent a couple of nights camping at Joshua Tree National Park. We spent a Sunday and Monday night camping there, so it ended up not being very crowded and we got a great campsite in a corner away from other people. The best part was that the "backyard" of our campsite was acres and acres of slabs of rock to run around on. The kids were totally enthralled with all the adventure and exploration, which made us so happy.

It's a long story as to why, but we ended up pretending that Easter was on Monday morning instead of Sunday, so Tori packed all of the Easter eggs and then we hid them after the kids went to bed. Joshua Tree is not a very conducive environment for hiding Easter eggs, but we did our best and the kids were super excited. The only hard part was keeping their squeals of joy at a manageable level of noise given that it was 7am and noise carries in the desert!

The kids with their loot on faux Easter morning. Now try to imagine hiding plastic eggs in that environment!

On one of our many rock scrambling adventures!

Zadie showing off her moves.

Sweeping the Nation

Anyone who has spend much time with youngsters lately knows these rainbow loom bracelets are sweeping the nation. They're like the friendship bracelets people were crazy about when I was a kid (I wasn't part of that trend or pretty much any trends when I was little).

Zadie was thrilled to get her own loom for Christmas and she loves sporting a whole "sleeve" of bracelets. But apparently her school, along with many others, have banned the things. Granted I don't know the details on why, but that seems a bit overzealous to me!

Anyway, Tori really wanted me to post about Zadie's love for these bracelets and how focused -- and obsessive -- she is about making all the different designs. She likes to learn new designs on YouTube.

I love this girl's attention span and strong focus!