Drew turns 2!

We really enjoyed spending the weekend in St. Louis with the Trits (David's sister's family). We celebrated Drew's 2nd birthday with great food and an awesome train cake that Andrea created! We even took some time to watch some NCAA basketball during the festivities(pictured above). David and his dad went to the women's final 4 games Sunday evening as well!

We are looking forward to relaxing this week in Florida for spring break!

Family Weekend

Marissa's family came in to town for the weekend and a lot was accomplished! The wall was cut out of the coat closet and we now have storage under the stairs! We were even able to clean up the garage a bit and alleviate some of our embarrassment over that space by breaking down boxes and utilizing the peg board. The glider that Marissa's dad made was partially stained as well!!!

New Fixtures

We are slowly but surely replacing bathroom hardware. The 1/2 bath downstairs is almost done with only the mirror to rehang (thanks to Marissa's apparent inability to hang a light fixture where it should go) and the faucet to be replaced! Here are a few pictures of the new bathroom stuff -- it went from chrome to bronze in just a few hours! The new light fixture that broke a few weeks ago is finally up now as well -- what a gruelling process! We took the first fixture we bought back to the store after making several attempts over the coarse of a week with no success. We bought another fixture today and had it up within 40 minutes -- 20 minutes less than the instructions said it would take.

more pictures

More honeymoon pictures....

Belated Honeymoon

The Domincan trip was FABULOUS! Here are a few pics we had taken. :)

Lobsters

We're both teachers and sometimes the kids we work with come up with some great answers. For example, this week in my class we were learning all about the 'L' sound, as in the word 'Lobster'. Of course, we have to have a real live lobster visit us, which some thought was super gross as others relished in the fact that they got to hold this creepy looking crustacean. Needless to say, we had to learn about Lobsters. We discussed all of it's body parts like the antennae, the claws and legs (a.k.a. the 1st-5th appendages), the abdomen, and I tried to teach them the word cephalothorax but that didn't go over so well....you'd think 4 yr. olds could pick up on 5 syllable words like that -- apparently that's a little on the challenging side. Anyways, we also talked about where lobsters come from and this is where the lesson gets interesting.
I pose the question, "Where do Lobsters come from?" This is what I get .....
"The Grocery Store!!"
"My mom sometimes cooks them at my house!"
"I ate a lobster before!"
and to top it off one of them came up with the ingenious answer of....
"Red Lobster!"
(finally one of the kids told us that they come from the ocean ...but by then it didn't really matter)
**picture to come soon! :)

Christmas Tree!

Today we went to the farm, rode in a wagon full of hay, and searched & searched & searched for the perfect tree....and we found one! Then David cut it down and we hauled the thing home. Very exciting day for these newlyweds!

We got the tree into the stand and wrapped it with lights, then hung all the ornaments -- I even tried to position the thing so that the massive holes (that I swear weren't there when we picked out the tree) were against the wall.

Unfortunately there is not a picture of the incident that occured while I was attempting to put the star on top -- probably because David was upstairs as I was screaming for help because I was trying to hold up the toppling tree that weighed more than I did..... We managed to secure the tree back in place in no time :)