Fun Weekend with Family

We had such a fun weekend with family: Grandma & Grandpa Nichols, Serenity and Alex, as well as Grandma and Grandpa Hawley. They all came to see Emma perform her final dance show of the year on Sunday. Everyone arrived Saturday afternoon. Of course we also woke to 3 inches of snow.. ugg.. its almost May! By the end of the day it had pretty much all melted away tho. We also had dinner and Uncle Ray, Aunt Leah and Cousin Olivia joined us. It was nice to see everyone and the cousins had a great time (being very loud I might add!)

I have pictures posted of Emma's dance performance. I decided to go with black and white for something different. She did so well and I know she's sad to see dance come to an end, but next year she's signed up for Kick and Jazz so she has that to look forward too. I could tell when she danced that she was having fun (she's even smiling in some of the pictures instead of that concentration face all the time!). I know it meant so much for her to have family at the performance. I caught her looking up at everyone cheering her on!

Hawley Cafe

The girls came up with a creative idea to play restaurant tonight. Literally. So Emma made up some menu's that consisted of items we had in the fridge and that she felt qualified to make. Katelyn played waitress. Both had kitchen towels wrapped around their waists to look like aprons. Katelyn had her post it note pad to take our orders but usually had to ask how to spell what we ordered. Darin had PBJ and pineapple and I had tomato soup and pineapple. They did a great job preparing the meals. I did have to let Emma know much later that you have to add milk to the condensed can of tomato soup tho! After running out of milk from the kid sized cup , I reminded Katelyn that a good waitress would come back and check up on their customer to make sure everything was all right and if they needed anything else. She brought me another 2 ounce cup of milk and said (with her hands on her hips) "if I wanted more I'd have to get it myself because the milk was all gone and she couldn't handle a new full container!" What service! haha They even had a desert menu! #1 pick was ice cream. Katelyn came to take my order for desert shortly after delivering my food. I asked her why so soon and yet again with the hands on the hips she proclaims "so we can get it ready for when your done!". After our 2 course meals they even cleaned up the kitchen and got a couple of tips from their customers. I'm not sure if they made themselves dinner tho..I saw them sit down with ice cream at the end and thought to myself what the heck they deserve it!

Its moments like these that I love having a blog to write down these occasions. In 5 years I probably wouldn't remember this special night but now I will!

Goodbye Old Friend

Well we knew this day would come sooner then later but it was a sad day today at the Hawley house. We had Leo put down by the vet today. :( The past few years Leo has had it rough and his age really been showing. He was limping, always tired.. often he would stay downstairs at night sleeping because it was too tiring to walk up the stairs. He even let himself go as far as grooming and would let matts form on his hair that we would cut out. And then there is his habit of peeing in the back hallway downstairs which ruined our carpet. I tore up the carpet and he continued to pee there. I tried everything to get him to stop... I even bought some pharamone spray (that cost a fortune) but it only worked for 2 weeks. But alas we just couldn't put up with it anymore and all the reasons added up. I think Darin has known awhile that we needed to do this but was waiting for me to be ready. I told him this weekend we had to do it and that I couldn't take him in.. it would just be too hard for me. Darin volunteered showing his chivalry. I had been preparing Emma for a month or so that if we couldn't fix Leo's bad habit we would need to have him put down. She understood but hoped we would find the solution. Unfortunately we didn't find that solution. Emma had lots of questions. Kate handled it very well.. she said he was old and asked if we could get a new kitty? haha She also thought Leo could play with Juno in heaven. Marie was here cleaning today and said maybe Leo is trying to tell us he's in pain by peeing. That hit home for me and reassured me that we were doing the right thing. I guess I'm looking for anything to justify what had to be done because its a hard decision.

So today when Darin got home from work.. we all said goodbye to Leo. He was of course being super cute. He climbed in the piano basket which is much too small for him. He picked a fight with the dog too. We all laughed and cried inside.

The rest of the evening was quiet. I took Kate to dance and then the girls and I went out for a bite to eat. Darin was frantically busy preparing for his upcoming GMAT test. Christmas has been quiet and has been sticking to me like glue all evening. She would always keep an eye on where Leo was and where I was and trying to keep us all happy. She's so funny.

I have pictures of Leo throughout his 15 years with us. Course my photography abilities were not so great in the beginning. We got Leo a month after Darin and I got married. He lived with us throughout most of it.. but there were a couple of years when we were in collage where he stayed at the Grandparents house. So goodbye old friend.. we will miss your loud demanding meows and your insistence of laying on our pillows at night.

Fun Day in Minneapolis

Today after Church we decided we wanted to go to a museum of some sort and spend the day together as a family. I have this book I bought when Emma was little called "Exploring the Twin Cities with Children". We look through every once in a while to get ideas and today I wanted to go to the Bakken Museum but it was not open on Sundays.. so we'll have to catch it another time. Darin looked up other museums and discovered the Weisman Art Museum on the U of M campus.
The museum was small which was great for Katelyn who has a shorter attention span. There was a neat mixture of photography and paintings. The kids favorite was a the Petterman Apartments which is an interactive art piece. Its basically a apartment hall way. Emma figured out after standing in the hallway if you put your ear to the door you can hear voices inside. In one room was a person listening to baseball game, in another was a person laughing and another was a family eating dinner. The peice even had the smells of musty carpet and cigarretes reminscent of the era.

My favorite exhibit was the Paul Shambroom: Picturing Power who is a photographer mainly portrait style of the post 911 homeland security training and readiness.

A painting liked by all of us was a wall sized painting of thousands of chickens each in their own cages stacked up on opposite walls. We figured out that no two were the same and that if you stood as close to it as you could you felt like you were inside the painting and their were chicken cages all around you.

Overall we had a good time. It was nice to experience the museum with the girls. They are getting old enough now where we can do these kind of excursions and all of us enjoy it. I could tell Emma liked it, she would remember her own art work and compare them. She would also talk about the different brush strokes... I'm always amazed and appreciate how much they learn at school and the benifits of the Art Magnet school they both attend.

After the museum we walked around a little of the campus which was on the bank of the Mississippi River and very close to the 35W bridge that collapsed. We saw a clearing on the other side of the river where there were green scraps of metal layed out on the ground. We realized that this was where they layed out the remains of the bridge..probably trying to figure out what happened. It was amazing how small the pieces looked and that they were once a massive bridge.

Once we left the museum we drove through campus some more and ran into the building where Darin hopes to attend graduate school this fall, Carlson School of Management The kids enjoyed seeing the buildings and invisioning their daddy carrying a backpack and working on homework there! haha

Finally we stopped for a late lunch at the historical Grandma's Saloon. I had a yummy Monte Crisco and the girls talked their dad into a chocolate truffle for desert!

Thats about it for our day in the big city. Even tho we can't wait for spring to arrive it was nice to take the time and to live close enough to enjoy these things with our family.

A new Cousin

This weekend we traveled up north after hearing of the newest Nichols cousin was born on Thursday. Elijah Joseph Nichols is adorable and has his own look. While we were there he was under light therapy for jaundice. So he could only come out of the lights to eat. We stared at him thru the lights tho and admired how little and cute he is.

We stayed at the Holiday Inn in Fargo so the kids could have fun playing in the ship pool. Which they did. They were in the pool at every opportunity! Serenity and Alex spent the night and Grandma Nichols and I stayed at the hotel. Darin went back to Ben's house to make sure Bronson was ok. Much to our surprise the kids had a hard time going to bed (we thought they would be exhausted from swimming). But I think they were too excited to see each other.

We drove back Sunday afternoon during a terrible snow storm. For the first 80 miles until Alexandria the road conditions were treacherous. We saw 2 semi's upside down in the ditch. One truck spun out in front of us and a semi (luckily it was fine). Darin handled my freaking out and the road conditions well so we made it thru safely!

We can't wait to get to know Elijah more. Mom and Baby were coming home when we left.

Take a moment

Ok so maybe its because the business has slowed down so I can smell the roses, or maybe its because its that time of the month, or maybe its because I've been watching old movies from when they were little.. but this morning I just kept saying to myself how cute she is. My heart melted when she was outside waiting for the bus all alone in her perfectly cute purple easter dress that I figure she may as well wear to school and get crayon all over it before she grows another foot. She had white tights on, her dress shoes, her dress jacket and her hair pulled back just so. And there she was rolling snow into a snowman that was as tall as her waist. The snow was perfectly white.. she was adorable bending over to roll the snowball and her ankle length dress poofing up in the back. I wanted to yell out to her "your feet are going to be all wet!". But I wanted to get a picture first (I'll admit for the blog!). I go to get the camera to get a quick shot and there is no memory card ..uggg... I panic maybe there is an extra on the strap or under the batteries..nope. Maybe I can run downstairs and get one in time.. then she sees the bus. Runs over to her backpack jumping up and down in anticipation for all her friends that await her. She's off for a day of fun at kindergarden.. I look down and notice she has stuffed her teddy bears into the box I was suppose to mail today... how cute!