While he was away...

For the past ten days, Greg has been away in Colorado with a group of guy friends for some manly outdoor-adventures and fun.  Once he gets all of his photos sorted, he'll tell you all about it.  For now, we're just really glad to have him back home!

While he was away, we planned plenty of fun things to keep us occupied.  In the evenings I watched movies that he wasn't interested in seeing (catching up on the Harry Potter series, watching YouTube clips of Ellen), invited friends over for dinner, worked on projects in my studio (I have a new apron to show you tomorrow!), and read the The Hunger Games trilogy.

For our daytime activities, we planned playdates with friends, trips to the library, swimming, reading together (Mary Poppins Opens the Door), making playdough, etc.

The children and I ordered some ice pop molds from Amazon.com (Tovolo brand Star and Groovy) and had fun experimenting with all sorts of fruit juice mixtures, fruit and yogurt shake leftovers, pureed fruit (sweetened up with a bit of agave nectar), honey sweetened puddings, etc.



On Thursday we had a few families over for a Breakfast With Friends Potluck -- only 4 families total, but 13 children in all.  It was loud, but so much fun!






Early Friday evening, we brought dinner over to our friends Josh and Angela, who have just welcomed their brand new baby H into the world.





Jonah is still so very much my baby, so seeing him with this tiny little 5-day-old person was quite something.  (The other children were with us too, of course, but somehow only Jonah made it into the pictures.)

We had gotten our carpets professionally cleaned on Friday morning, so Saturday was spent scrubbing the rest of the house down in anticipation of Greg's Sunday return.

For months now our shower has needed re-caulking around the bottom edges, so I decided to surprise Greg by completing the project while he was away.  In retrospect, I probably should have just left it to a professional -- removing old caulking is no small task, and then the clean-up, bleaching, drying time, and finally caulking is incredibly time consuming.  But it's good to have a mildew-free shower at last!  (Many thanks to our neighbor Josh for some helpful tips as well as a tube of caulk remover.)

My first...and probably LAST home improvement project

After Greg arrived yesterday afternoon, we spent the rest of the day celebrating our togetherness.

We had fun while he was gone, but we are ever so glad to be back together again.