Wow!

Our weekend.  In a word, it was wonderful.  Truly.  Thank you Ohio University and our beautiful, special daughter for gifting us with time alone.  OU had some great things planned, but most of all they loved hanging out with Rebekah and her friends and feeling important in her life.  They made precious memories that will be with them the rest of their lives.  Thank you too for our son for letting us have a few more hours alone.  Yup, I took advantage of Jason's generous offer and he picked up J&J from OU today, leaving Mark a few more precious (and expensive!) hours together.

But, back to the beginning.  Friday night, Julianna had her first of 3 audition classes for ballet.  Whew!  If I had known how it was going to be, I might have discouraged her, though I'm not sure that would have been a good choice.  Twenty five girls are trying out.  There's not a definitive number as to how many they will take, they take whoever they deem "ready", but for comparison's sake, last year they took 12.  I did not realize that there would be girls there in 3rd, 4th, and even 5th grade.  The second graders, including Julianna, definitely have an uphill climb to be accepted in.  Five 2nd graders are auditioning, and honestly I would say each of their chances is somewhere between slim and none.  Hopefully she'll be able to look on it as a positive experience and be happy however it turns out.  Hopefully.  That's asking a lot of an eight year old.  We'll see how the next two Fridays go, but the odds are definitely not with her.


Saturday morning we got up, got J&J ready and headed down to OU, (cookies in tow, for those who were curious).  I decided that although mail-surprises are wonderful, practicality was going to win this time.  We quickly (lol) dropped off Jacob and Julianna and high-tailed it back to town.  We had lunch at a lovely pub in an area of town we don't usually spend time in, then headed to an outdoor mall to do some fun window shopping.  We spent an hour at the bookstore, just browsing, enjoying a coffee, doing nothing.  It was lovely.  We didn't even visit the kid's are once.  :)   We checked out some cooking stores, then decided to go see a movie.  Just Go With It was starting soon, so that's what we went with.  (Sorry.)  It was fun, light, everything we wanted a movie to be just then.  The movie let out around 6:40 and we were hungry.  We decided to go to a fancy place and get dinner.  We'd never really gone out for our Anniversary and that seemed like the perfect time to celebrate.  Fate had other plans.  We tried restaurant after restaurant after restaurant.  We were stopping in, calling like crazy.  All told we tried 35 restaurants before we gave up and believed the writing on the wall, there was no nice restaurant in our future that night.  Recession?  What recession?  Evidently it's completely over in Columbus, OH, trust me.  We finally settled on taking home a pizza from our favorite pizza place and watching a movie (It's Complicated, I love that movie) while we ate.  Also lots of fun.  :)  Reading in bed and lots of snuggling, and before we knew it Saturday was history.

kitchen paper--backgrd. compliments ven. plaster,

Sunday morning we had a ball.  We went out to brunch then headed to Lowe's.  At Lowe's we found wallpaper for our bathroom (we didn't even know we were looking for that, lol) as well as wallpaper for the wall from  H*** in our kitchen.  We decided to wallpaper the wall in the kitchen because it's scrubbable/cleanable and we're hoping we won't have as much of a problem with staining as we have on the paint.  Here's hoping anyway.   We picked a paint color for our bedroom (blue!  who knew!)   We ordered the wallpaper, got samples of the paint, and bought a snow-thrower.  Yup.  Weren't looking for that either, but Mark's finally admitting that the arthritis has gotten so bad that shoveling is just not something he can do anymore.  That's a big step for him.

bath paper.  Prettier than it looks.

Anyway, J&J got home safe and sound (thank you Jason!!), we got to hear all about the absolutely fabulous time they had at sibs weekend.  They had story after story after story about everything they did.  They definitely made some wonderful memories of that special time with their sister.  We had a great dinner (out!  We planned ahead and I did not cook all weekend, maybe it's not such a bad thing the fancy-schmancy places didn't work out, it left us money to go out with all weekend!), then home for stories and bed, and I declare the weekend a definite success.




added:  so, Jacob woke up at 1:00 am throwing up violently (so much for the 'great dinner out'), Julianna woke up at 4:30 with her headgear all messed up, and needed help untangeling it, Mark slept through his alarm at 5:30 and I had to get him up on the one day I get to sleep in.  Life is good.  : )