Coming & Going

This week was full of comings and goings.  First Mike left.  He had his annual NHance convention.  It was in Florida this year.  He opted to stay an extra two days for the sales seminar.  He left on Sunday morning.  I stayed home from church with sick kids.  On Monday Calvin stayed home sick, but he was feeling much better that afternoon when our friend Rachel came over!  She was in Richmond visiting for a week!  We got her on Monday afternoon and then again on Tuesday night through Wednesday afternoon.  We had a lot of fun visiting and thrift store shopping!  We missed Dave and the kids but had fun with 'Aunt Rachel' as the kids call her (or Rachel Gordon as Lilah calls her).  On Wednesday evening our super babysitter came to see us - Anne came with belated Christmas gifts and stayed for dinner and bedtime.  I had a grouchy baby on my hands and was glad to have some help during dinner.  The kids loved seeing Anne and they love their cereal bowls with the built in straws.  Late on Friday night Mike came home and then Aunt Jenny (Mike's sister) came for a visit.  The kids were so excited to wake up Saturday morning to see Daddy and Aunt Jenny.  We played and went to a civil war battle ground for a 'hike' and some history.  It was a fun (but kind of hard) week for everyone to not have Dad around but to get so many fun visitors!

Other things - it rained ALL week and on Thursday evening the water backed up in our utility room.  It's a sunken concrete room with a drain actually built into the floor so the water does occasionaly back up.
When the ground is so saturated then our washer won't drain.  I really needed to do laundry on Friday (and since it snowed the ground wasn't going to be drying out anytime soon) so I had to haul out the washing machine drain water in 5 gallon buckets in order to do laundry.  It was not my favorite way to wash clothes, but I take that over scrubbing them by hand in the river =).  I had kids stay home on Monday and Wednesday and school was cancelled on Friday - so I didn't get everything done that I thought I 'needed' to get done - but sometimes things don't really 'need' to get done =).  I was so glad to see Mike!

I didn't do so well with taking pictures - there were lots of great moments I thought of taking pictures but didn't =(.

I did get a couple of pictures from our snow day on Friday:

Lilah wore her fancy feathery gloves with her ring!

Our family spotlight this week is Lilah.  Lilah is at a good age - she has outgrown the terrible 2's & 3's and hasn't gotten into what I call the emotional 5's yet.  She is helpful and fun to have around.  Lilah is more social then I realized.  She really misses her siblings when they go to school.  She plays when Celeste is around and enjoys her even though she complains about Celeste taking her toys or ruining her play.  As soon as Celeste goes to bed Lilah is bored and subdued.  She either lays around doing nothing or follows me around the house.  She doesn't really play with Celeste, but needs to have someone around in order to play - so funny.  Lilah is one of our  more serious kids, but just cracks us up.  She has a somewhat dry sense of humor and expresses her every thought with her beautiful brown eyes.