Long time gone

Hubby flew to Sydney yesterday.  He's been in Melbourne, before that he was in Brisbane, before that he was in Wellington, before that he was in Auckland.  It has been a loooong couple of weeks.  He comes back home on Wednesday late afternoon.

Last week we kind of sat around.  This week we kept ourselves busy.  My niece, who we'll call Niecey, is Thing 1 and 2's most favorite person in the world, came up for a sleepover.  Friday night I took all three girls snowshoeing at night with a group from church.  Niecey had never been snowshoeing before, my girls had been once.  Turns out snowshoeing in the dark is predictably harder than going during the day.  Also it was steeper, in any event we didn't make it to the top of the hill to see the moon rise... Thing 2 became very frustrated and started falling down a lot.  Everyone was kind of stumbling, the terrain is irregular and the snow trips you up, but Thing 2 seemed to take it more personally than anyone else.  When she started loudly crying we turned around, as reports indicated the incline got much steeper from there.  And, having a sobbing kid that I'm driving forward at night on a trail full of people I don't know is certainly not my idea of a good time.  There were Banbury Cross donuts and hot chocolate waiting at the bottom.  We took Kelso, who was of course more of a problem than I had hoped.  He was fine once we got on the trail, he stayed pretty close to us, but he was going back and forth, and knocked Thing 2 down once when  he pushed past her, and he growled at people on the trail a couple of times, and I'm sure by the end of the night EVERYONE knew our dog's name as all three girls kept calling to him the minute he was out of their line of sight, even when he was quite close by and didn't need to be called back.  They were quite worried he'd run off.


Saturday afternoon the three girls played in their rooms a lot, and went outside a couple of times to play in the snow.  Thing 1 figured out a way to go snowboarding, sort of.  She's really excited about it, and I think it's time to put them in ski or snowboarding lessons.

My brother came up later on Saturday to get his daughter, it's always nice to have him up and I got to show the remodeling off to him.  I love how he has always been very positive about this house, commenting how much he likes it and how well it suits our family.  Which it does.
After they left we went to dinner at the home of one of Thing 1's friends.  Her dad was out of town so it was a girls party.  We just had Costco pizza, but it was really nice to talk to the mom, who I like talking to.  The girls had a few incidents where the friend turned off the lights, pulled some heads off her dolls, and apparently tried and succeeded in freaking out my girls, especially Thing 1 who has a low tolerance for dark and creepy.  She was ready to leave quite a while before we actually did.  But they made cotton candy and all in all I had a lovely time.  It's nice poking my nose in other people's houses, and though there are things I really like about their house, overall it's probably not one I would have really considered.

Today we're just sitting around.  I sort of "accidentally" forgot it's daylight savings time, and we missed church. 
Not a good excuse, I know, but it's what we did.


A nice weekend, despite Hubby not being here.


Not much going on, just thought I'd catch up a little.