August....September....October :)

Hi, all. Long time, no post. There are three big, month long sets of pictures to peruse. I labeled them instead of describing here since there were so many. Hope everyone out there is having a good fall so far. We have been having a good time with our new minivan (Moby), new windows, lots of swimming and a number of little weekend/day trips. The start of school has been going well also. Virginia loves 1st grade and has a really nice teacher. She is also taking religious education (in preparation for 1st communion in 2nd grade), dance class and will soon be starting rehearsals for the school holiday musical program again. AND she has homework every week. She loves to be busy. John has started preschool this fall with Miss Darlene. He loves her very much. "Miss Darlene is funny. She's very silly." He is also taking a little sports class through the parks and rec again. Chris will hopefully be posting some pictures and a description of his solo backpacking trip soon. I am keeping busy taking the kids around, volunteering in V's classroom, getting the hang of being a room mom and thinking ahead about all the holiday madness coming up soon!

PICTURES 8/30/09
PICTURES 9/23/09
PICTURES 10/4/09

Auntie Ellen--2009

This past week my sister Ellen was in town!! Our first order of business was a trip to Disneyland... and that's the only event I have any pictures of. :) We had a really lovely day. The kids were well-behaved, the lines were mostly short, the food was good, the weather was cool in the morning, warm for the afternoon. Just pleasant...we stayed 12 hours. After recovering on Friday, we had a fun girly afternoon on Saturday...Virginia, Ellen and I got pedicures together. Virginia got little flowers painted on her big toes and ring fingers and didn't want to wash her hands lest they rub off. :) Sunday we went to church, finally got Ellen back to El Cholo for lunch (we didn't make it the last two years), and then spent some time at the Getty Center. It was a beautiful day for taking the in the view, the gardens and some famous artwork. There was an exhibit of French bronze statues that was very cool (Louis XIV, Cardinal Richilieu, Voltaire...) and it's always amazing to see Van Gogh, Monet, Cezanne, etc. in person. Even when you're hauling around a very antsy 3 year old. We also managed to get some baking in...always important.

PICTURES 7/31/09

Moby, etc.

Check out V boogie-boarding, more playing trains and our new minivan!! It is a big, white 2009 Kia Sedona. We call it "Moby". My sister Ellen and I thought "Vanna White" was a pretty good name too, but Chris wouldn't go for it. :) We have also named our silver Civic "Squirt". We have been enjoying the spaciousness of Moby and the ability to carry more than 4 people...even though Chris did make Ellen a little car sick in the back seat. And it is definitely more challenging to park Moby than Squirt! But we're learning to swing wide. So come on out and see us... we can drive you around!

PICTURES 7/26/09

Weekend in Long Beach

In this set of pictures there are a few of V & J with their friends Olivia and William playing in the water in our backyard, followed by a bunch of pics from our little trip to Long Beach this weekend. We attended the wedding of an old friend who grew up in KY, lived in our dorm at UK, attended Berkeley for grad school and who has now married a girl from SoCal! So, in general, he's been following us around for years! It was so nice to be able to attend the wedding here in town. They were married on the beach and the flowers, in particular, were lovely, having been brought back personally from Hawaii by the bride's grandparents. The gold circles you'll see are the traditional 1000 paper cranes, glued together to form a beautiful design. You'll also see that there was no wedding cake, but instead...wedding pies!! It was a lovely wedding and we had a good time. The kids had fun at the wedding, but maybe more fun staying in a hotel room for the night. :) On Sunday, we headed over the Downtown Disney and walked around there for a while before heading back home. As an aside, the traffic was SO BAD on the 405 going to Long Beach that we got off the freeway ASAP and ended up doing Mulholland Drive. It's a gorgeous drive with sweeping vistas of the LA basin and Hollywood hills. You can see why people would pay millions to live up there.

PICTURES 7/19/09

Chris's Gordon Conference Trip

During the middle part of our trip back East this summer, Chris attended a Gordon Conference at Salve Regina University on the coast of Rhode Island. At the conference he stayed in the college dorms, ate in the cafeteria, attended lectures and poster sessions and socialized with his chemistry colleagues. His mornings and early evenings were taken up with the science, but most afternoons, he had some free time to spend touring. Included are pictures of the summer mansions dotting the cliffs right on/near the university campus and from his trip to Newport, RI. Of course, as most of you know, Chris's FAVORITE unofficial conference event was the cliff diving! One afternoon, since it had finally stopped raining, Chris and four other attendees hiked out to a well-known cliff-diving spot. Chris jumped twice (about 15-20 ft). The jumping in was apparently no problem...it was the getting out again that caused some trouble. Since it had been storming the past 24 hours, the swell was quite high. After his first jump, while Chris was trying to get hold of the rocks and climb out of the water, the waves pushed him up against the rocks. He hung on tight, but got some nasty scrapes on his arms, legs, torso and fingers. There's a nice picture of that too. :) After his second jump, he found a better method...letting the waves lift him up. Chris had great fun telling all our family members about this adventure once he returned to KY/OH and showing off his wounds! The final pictures in this set are our friends from college, Dawn and Greg and their two children, Sawyer and Gwen. Chris realized (via Facebook) that Dawn and Greg lived quite close by and was able to drive out to visit them before catching his flight home. If you'd like to hear more about the chemistry he saw at the conference, you'll have to ask him. :)

PICTURES 7/3/09

2 Weeks Back East

All right, there is one gigantic photo album attached to this one blog entry for our entire trip! Good luck.

First up we have our day of boating on Indian Lake with Mom & Dad B, Emily, Bill, Jenny, Ethan and Adam! It was a gorgeous day and the kids spent 6+ hours on the pontoon boat Chris's parents rented for us all! We drove around the lake, pulled into a lakeside restaurant for lunch, and stopped to play and swim at a beach on the lake. There are also some pictures and a video of all the cousins playing in gma and papa's backyard. There are no pictures, but we took a couple of pleasant walks from their house down to the lake shore where the kids had fun throwing rocks, bark, etc. into the water. On Saturday, Chris took his dad to see Star Trek as a belated Father's Day event.

After Indian Lake, Chris caught his plane for Rhode Island where he attended a Gordon conference all week. There will be a separate post of his pictures from the conference and a description of his cliff diving adventure!

The kids and I headed down to NKy where we had a quick bridesmaid dress shopping session with Em and Erin after Mass and breakfast. Then it was off to a picnic supper at the park with Heidi and another old friend from grade school and high school.

On Monday, we joined Jenny, Emily, Bill, Adam and Ethan for a trip to the Cincinnati Zoo. I personally enjoyed seeing the elephants get a bath and watching a peahen and her chick walk around under the table where we were eating lunch! The kids loved the kid-size cave near the polar bears and I think we all enjoyed two train rides around the zoo.

The next several days were spent visiting with Sarah who was kind enough to drive up from Lexington, taking my dad to see Star Trek for Father's Day, getting groceries for the wedding shower my sisters were giving Erin and making Erin's Mickey Mouse shower cake. We got to spend some nice time with "she" and "the papa who lives here" (i.e. Ellen and my dad) and got to meet my mom and all my sisters at St. E's hospital for lunch. You'll see some pictures of our portrait-taking session with Grandma Otte and all her great-grandchildren: Virginia, John, Ian, Lorelai and the newest baby, Aurora.

Chris returned that Friday, beaten up from his conference, but having had a good trip. The 4th of July was a wet day but we still made it to the Ft. Mitchell parade where we saw lots of fire trucks and the kids got tons of candy. In the afternoon, there was Erin's bridal shower, which Virginia and I attended while Chris and John got to hang out with Papa, Aunt Jenny and Ethan! The shower went very well and then all the boys came back for a 4th of July family party. Em had bought sparklers and we managed to light them by keeping out of the rain on the front porch! We rounded out the holiday with a trip to emergency room for Chris's nose, broken by John.

The next day we headed down to Lexington to visit Ben and Erin Gold and their twins, whom we hadn't seen since the day they found out they were pregnant with two instead of one. :) Then back up to Cincinnati to hang out at Rob and Julie's house. Uncle Rob and Aunt Julie very thoughtfully bought water guns for everyone to play with and there is a great video of J and Chris shooting each other in the face. :)

That next Monday was Erin's 21st birthday and we all celebrated by going to Miyako, a japanese restaurant that took over an old Bob Evans. It is decidedly weird to eat sushi in an old Bob Evans. We then had strawberry short-birthday-cake and Em, Ellen, Rick, Erin and Tyler and I go to go to a movie.

On our final day in town, we went to visit Aunt Mary and take her out for some Skyline. Then it was packing, a quick dinner at Frisch's and off to the airport.

Sorry if I forgot anything! It was a lovely long visit. Thank you all.

PICTURES 7/7/09

June/July whatnot

Hi, all. Here's some summer whatnot photos. In the 6/22 set you'll see V sleeping in her princess tent. She was not liking sleeping in her big bed all alone, but she was cool with sleeping on the floor, inside the tent. :) She slept in there for weeks. In the 7/14 set, there are photos of some stuff we got at IKEA including the canopy we got for V's bed so she'd sleep in it instead of her tent. And her new bright red big girl desk with matching chair. She loves it and had lots of fun organizing her drawing paper, markers, etc. Also there are pictures of Virginia's sunflowers. She started the seeds in a plastic cup at school and when she brought them home we planted them in the garden. They've obviously done well! We're thinking of having a whole sunflower forest next year! Finally there are some pics of the kids in a giant outdoor work of art at the LACMA (which we visited last week on it's free admission Tuesday). They had lots of fun weaving in between the strands of plasticware. They also quite enjoyed the modern art paintings inside the museum and had a good time interpreting each painting. "It's a firework! It's a pig! It's a microwave!"

PICTURE 6/22/09
PICTURES 7/14/09