Wildlife Preserve

It's Official! We have the worst yard in the neighborhood! David has now deemed this uncontrollable plot of land that our house sits on 'The Noblesville Wildlife Preserve.' Which isn't too far from the truth. Our lawn is filled with a ridiculous amount of dandelions, clovers, and a variety of other weeds which probably have names that no one can really pronounce. We are crossing our fingers that all of these weeds are in the process of dying a slow and ruthless death after this week's dose of Weed-B-Gone. We've also noticed that our lawn is striped....yep, striped! Thick horizontal stripes of light green and dark green span the yard from back to front. Looking around -- no other lawn has this effect! We must be special. So special in fact that we have the pleasure of housing a rabbit under our deck. This rabbit has not only etched a path in our backyard to the fence line, but is also a very determined little thing. We tried to block the access holes around the deck only to find new holes made a few days later! I'm thinking we should give our little rabbit friend a name...any suggestions? I'm also waiting to see little baby bunnies hopping around the yard. Planting our garden this year will be interesting...That is if the kildeer don't attack us as we are bent over digging holes in the soil. Those things LOVE our yard almost as much as they love waking us up on the weekend at 6 a.m.!....must be the abundance of weeds to eat. We currently have a nest with 4 eggs by the littlest tree in the yard. Cross your fingers that David doesn't come out of an afternoon of mowing the lawn with puncture wounds from an angry momma bird in addition to the back ache that he already has because our yard is extremely uneven. Needless to say, we don't plan on bothering the nest.
Despite all of this we are still very determined (even more so than the rabbit) to undo this mess. With the help of Scott's turf builder we hope to have our lawn in better shape by the end of the summer. We'd rather not be the embarrassment of the cul-de-sac this time next year!

OK -- done with my rant ....

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! :)