On Our Way to London

Anja and myself are sitting here in the business lounge at O’Hare with my class colleagues, Joe Zurenko and Ben Swartz, we leave for London in about an hour. I’ll be there for a week for class and Anja will spend the week between Gran and Grandad and Uncle Keith and Auntie Sam. Everybody is really excited. I’ll be posting updates as we go along.

Ice Cream is an Excellent Study Diversion....

It has been way to long since I posted a few words. Sorry but life evidently is getting in the way of blogging …about life!!

It has been crazy busy here, the kids are on summer holidays obviously, Lynne has been travelling, last week to the East coast and today she left for Europe. Pat has been visiting and a great help and I have final exams in three days, two of them. These are just some of the highlights. I will detail more of this on Sunday, I’ll have returned from Chicago and have license to relax for a few days.

We did get a little break from it all tonight after dinner. I decided on the spur of the moment that ice cream would be an excellent diversion from study, so ice cream it was. There were no disappointed cries!!

Happy Birthday Lynne

Today is birthday day here in our house; Lynne turned another year this morning. Happy Birthday Lynne. We actually celebrated it with the usual presents, cake and candles last Saturday. The girls and myself had baked her favorite cake, a carrot cake but the highlight for the girls was clearly making the icing, mixing the colors just right to yield Mommy’s favorite color, purple. She received a new MacBook Air for her birthday. Lynne and I went out for a very relaxing, quite dinner for two last night which was great.

Hail Purdue

On Friday evening we had the annual Spring Program hosted by the Montessori School. Quite basically, each class stages a song or two for the adoring families looking on. Isabel’s class gave us a rendition of Purdue's fight song, Hail Purdue.

Circus

The kids went to the circus this afternoon. The Kelly Miller Circus was in town and Brooke very generously offered to take them (thank you so much). They were so excited this evening at dinner. We had tales of elephants, trapeze artists and of course the clowns. They had a wonderful time.

Jane Ziegler

With great sadness we bid farewell this week to Lorraine’s mother, Jane Ziegler who passed away last Saturday evening, may she rest in peace. She lived a wonderful life, it was only a couple of weeks ago we celebrated her 90^th birthday. We did not know her that well but we do know that she will be sadly missed by many friends and dearly remembered by all her family.

Happy 8th Birthday Anja

Today we had a hectic yet very enjoyable day. We celebrated Anja’s 8^th birthday. We had at least 15 children running crazy around the house; we had wet weather so most of the time we were confined indoors. We had all the usual fare, grilled food, lots of drinks, fruit, veggies, sweet treats and cake and ice cream of course. Lynne did a treasure hunt again, Brooke did flower pot painting and Kenia who kindly gave Anja a piñata for her birthday.

Thanks to all who came to celebrate with Anja, many thanks to Brooke as always for doing the “giant cupcake” birthday cake and of course to Granny Owens who sent Anja her beautiful clothes for the big occasion.  I took many more photos than those shown below, they can be viewed here.

Anja, we hope you had a wonderful birthday, we're so proud of you, so grown up, Mummy and Daddy love you so much.

Updated Picture of Connor's Eye

We are in final preparations for Anja’s 8^th birthday party here, but shown below are a few shots of Connor’s shiner this morning. He is extremely proud of it.

Blue Egg in My Eye

Just in case we were not busy enough this weekend, Connor met with a little accident this morning. He was playing with a neighbour friend, they were swinging a golf club and of course three year olds are not very good at seeing danger.  He was hit just above the eye socket, in the eyebrow, and it started swelling immediately. Lynne took him to the doctor who said he was just fine; it looked a lot worse that it actually was. It will be ugly tomorrow. He is now going round telling people he has a blue egg in his eye!!

Dance Recital

We have a hectic weekend ahead of us that just got even more hectic. This morning the girls and I went to rehearse for their annual dance recital at Purdue. There will be over 250 children and young adults dancing in what is normally a very good hour-long show. Our girls absolutely love going to this. Something about dressing up in fancy clothes, dancing to pretty poppy music and then of course watching all the bigger girls doing much more sophisticated dancing, really appeals to them. This is all prior to Anja’s 8^th birthday party which is tomorrow.

Final Weekend Post

Last blog post of the day. The kids are now all finally in bed. It was a busy and hectic weekend. We said a sad good-bye to Gran who went home on Friday morning, we got together with lots of friends, spent some time cleaning up, pruning and planting in the garden, had some great food, great company and even managed a 90^th birthday party. Time for work and school again tomorrow but before we do, a few pictures below from an enjoyable few days.