How a Harried Mom spent the last week or so...

My wine glass is empty and I've had darn near half a bottle. The kids are sleeping, and Matt's off doing something somewhere with a friend, and I've fiddled away the last almost 2 hours trolling the internet, enjoying doing nothing and SO! Let's chat - how the hell heck did it get to be July 7th already?

It's been a busy, busy week and a half or so. Let me share with you :)

I received a surprise package in the mail from my nutty aunt! Yes, one of the packages was opened when I received it.

Who can't use an opened package of maxi pads?

William brought a 'dirt buddy' home from vacation bible school. He thought it would have flowers. Sadly, it's just grass. Maybe we can use it as sod once this heat wave we're having breaks, as our lawn at this point is crispy hay.
We had fun swinging at the park during the church picnic.

My Beauty. You can't see her temper from here.

I saw Eclipse twice - once at midnight last Tuesday the 29th, and then again the 6th in IMAX. TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY WORTH THE HOUR DRIVE TO SEE IT IN IMAX. I won't go into further detail because I think it irritates Matt, but he loves me anyway - as you'll see in a minute.

Me and friends who share my obsession - for the most part. Minus the friend who took the picture.

Evie had her first swim meet Saturday morning and had fun playing with her friends in between swimming...
and was SO COMPLETELY and totally excited to have won a first place ribbon for the relay :) Go Evie!

We had fun playing cards at the pool during swim team practice...

And I had a BLAST grocery shopping with Sarah!

The power went out Monday evening for 3 hours...if you 'embiggen' this picture and look closely, you can see the workers from one of the four trucks that was out there 'working' to fix our power diligently cleaning the windshield on their work truck. I think they cleaned it two or three times while we were watching...
Jason was super excited to get some Swimming Gobbles of his very own, to go along with his Baby Soup that he wears to the pool...
AND - we had a lovely July 4th weekend! With family! My younger sister and her family came to visit, and I was super happy to have my older sister's son come down too - it really tickled me that he wanted to come spend the 4th with us, and I hope he had a good time - I think everyone else did :)

My sister Becky :)
Or - this was a picture of my sister Becky until she asked me to remove it.

Her husband Steve, hamming it up for his wife who was having fun playing with our camera :)

The 3 youngest out of 11 cousins. Wonder what they're talking about.

Water slide fun

So that's what we've been up to! Sunday evening we had family and friends here for a cookout and then walked down to the county park to see our local fireworks display - there are definite advantages to living in Mayberry, even if you have bears and snakes and BATS (I found one next to the fence Tuesday morning, hissing at me after my run - what is UP with the wildlife around here??)

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So Matt spent a week in Korea right before the 4th, and of course he came back bearing gifts! The kids each got pencil cases, which are apparently all the rage over there, as well as Pokemon stickers & others, and Jason lucked out with a Thomas train (Sarah was very envious...) Interestingly, Matt found it difficult to find things to bring back that were 'Korean'. Apparently, being 'western' is so popular there he didn't have much luck finding things that weren't either written in English or just some every day thing you could get here. Even the Thomas train was packaged in the US packaging, with one little sticker on it in Korean.

Before he left, Matt asked me what I'd be interested in having from Korea, and knowing that Twilight is big over there & Eclipse was just released, I said I'd love some Twilight 'crap', really thinking stickers or a button or something. Well I hit the mother lode - he brought me - and my friend Kerri! - back a copy of Twilight in Korean for us to add to our bookshelves - how cool is that?? I also lucked out with some green tea, ginseng tonic, and he also brought back some cookies and egg biscuits for us to try. Yum! Now look closely at the 3rd item in from the left, next to the tea in the yellow box...

And look! There it is again! Matt traveled halfway around the world and brought those cookie sticks back from Korea in his luggage, and here they are, on the shelf of a grocery store in northern Virginia.
I stopped in this particular grocery store Tuesday night to buy gummy bears and water to sneak into the Imax theater (they didn't have concessions, it was at the Air and Space Museum - yes, I'm bad, and yes I need candy to watch a movie) before we saw Eclipse. I knew there was a large Asian population here, but how crazy is that?? It's a small, small world...