Carl and Lala

And then on to Cedar Falls to Grandma and Papa's house - and our night was complete when two of their other favorite people showed up for a little playtime.

Oh, the places we'll go!

With preschool done, we were free to hit the road and head to Cedar Falls for a week of fun.

(Well, those of us that didn't have to go to work.)

On the way, we stopped to see Sam's godparents (and their boys) who just happened to be in Cedar Rapids visiting family (instead of Atlanta where they live). Sam was beside himself with excitement when I told him what our first stop was going to be, as their son Mason is one of his favorite people on the entire planet.

Here are all the kids - scary to think Joe and I used to babysit for those boys when they were younger than our kids are now!

I guess Sadie was too busy calling someone on her princess phone to bother smiling for the picture.

Notice they are all somewhat color-coordinated (completely by chance).

And look at Tracy and I.
Great minds think alike.

Ready for something

I'm not exactly sure what, but I just love this picture.

Catching Up - Last day of preschool

Sam has been blessed with a wonderful preschool at our church this year. His teachers were so loving and kind, and it was fun to see how much he learned and grew over the course of the year.

Here are a few pictures from the last day, complete with a fun fair that siblings got to attend as well.

Sadie really enjoyed the face-painting and tatooing. She was their biggest customer.
His visor was even color-coordinated with his outfit! Nice work, Miss Caryn!
One final circle time together.
Sadie kept herself busy attempting to put on all the dress-up clothes at once.
Sam and his best friend at preschool - they played together every day.
And afterwards we headed to the mall to meet up with our neighbors (Sam's other best friends) for lunch and a carousel ride.

Catching Up - Preschool Program

So here goes the great blog catch up.....starting with the end-of-the-year preschool program.

Sam's program was the night that we flew home from visiting my brother. Probably not too many of the 4-year-olds started their day in New Jersey, so all Joe and I could do was laugh when our very tired son was up front for the performance part of the program.

The kids sang about 5 or 6 songs. Sam sang each one with equal enthusiasm - a blank stare.

He was such a sweetheart, though, when he would find us between each song, flash us a big grin and wave, and then turn back to resume the blank stare.

Foiled again!

Last Friday was supposed the day of my great big blog catch up. Joe was scheduled for kidney-stone blasting and I was looking forward to a few hours alone in the waiting room with my laptop and all the pictures on my camera from the last month.

Not that I was looking forward to the blasting for Joe.

Just the uninterrupted time. By myself. Not in my house. With nothing to clean, or laundry to fold, or children to watch, or episodes of Pawn Stars crying for my attention.

I mentioned this to Joe and I think he was a bit taken aback by the fact that I was slightly excited about the prospect of sitting in the waiting room while he had 3,000 shocks or sound waves or whatever it is that lithotripsy does delivered to his abdomen.

If I get that excited about 2 hours of free time, I guess I could go ahead and get a babysitter every once in a while.

It would be cheaper than this option.

And a lot less painful for my husband.

But anyway - that great big blog catch up never happened because they called the day before (I guess that would be Thursday) to inform Joe that somehow the lithotripsy machine had been overbooked and he would have to wait until Tuesday to have it done.

So there I was today - power cord plugged into the waiting room wall, anticipating hours of uploading - when I discovered my plans were foiled again.

I started out on the hospital wi-fi checking email and clicked through to try and read a comment on my facebook profile when I was redirected to a message that informed me that the content I wanted to look at was blocked.

I thought it had to be a mistake and tried to log in to FB directly and again received the message, this time reading the entire thing to see that social networking sites were blocked.

(Seriously?! We were just here in December...and October before that....and FB worked then!)

(Yes - this is the third blasting in 8 months. He had 22 stones total. Today the surviving 8 on the right side got done. But there are still 2 left on the left....)

That's ok. Didn't need to be distracted by FB anyway. So I typed in my blog address......

and got another message telling me that blogs were blocked.

Why do they even have wi-fi? What else could anyone want to do on the internet other than FB and blog-reading?

So much for my grand 2 hours alone.

Now my sisters-in-law are forced to go another day without new pictures of their favorite Sam and Sadie.

And I was forced to spend 2 hours reading year-old large-print Reader's Digests and salivating over dessert recipes from last August in Women's Day.

Though I did have a lot more fun than Joe did.

Lazy blogger

That would be me.

I have lots of pictures on my camera that need to get on the blog from our trip to Iowa last week, but just haven't had the motivation to do anything about it.

Instead, I have spent my evenings watching Pawn Stars with my husband.

And discussing the merits of Tupelo.

Much better use of my time, I know. :)

Tonight there is a Blizzard calling my name, so the pictures will have to wait again.

I will leave you with one quote from this week that horrifies me that it came from my mouth.

"We don't shoot people we don't know. Only shoot your friends - or your sister."

(That was in response to Sam getting a little overzealous while playing superheroes with our neighbors and Sadie at the mall play area and pretending to "get" some little girl innocently sitting in a toy car nearby. Apparently he had decided she was a bad guy.)