A great weekend.

Hello all who are sweet and wonderful enough to read my blog! I hope you all had a great weekend. Mine was pretty great. I just LOVE the weekends my husband, Christopher has off work! (I have Fri and Sat off every week, and Christopher has every other Sat and Sun off and then one day during the week.)

Actually the good times started on Friday. I saw online that there was supposed to be a Home Goods store in Morristown (about 45 minutes away), and my two younger girls were getting cabin fever. The older two happened to be home (for once!) and we all took off to the mall and try to find the Home Goods store.

First place we stopped was a strip mall with the most amazing of stores.. Pier One! Thankfully I had remembered to take my camera so I took pics to record our girls day out together. All the girls had a great time trying on the Mardi Gras masks...






and testing to see if the chairs were comfy enough.


And I just had to check out this great ruffled apron! I've seen a lot of sites showing adorable aprons and how they seem to be coming back into style for hip SAHMs. Got to have one!
After Pier One we headed over to the huge Dollar Tree store where they each got one thing.
Then we headed over to the mall to see if the HomeGoods was in there. They do have a Kohls!!! I was very happy to see that and quite upset I don't have room in the budget for some new stuff for a while. No, none of it was stuff I *needed*, but I sure found a LOT of stuff I felt like I couldn't live without! LOL

Next to Kohls in the mall is a Claire's Boutique. I let Faelyn and Zoe go to the play area just outside the store while the two older girls and I went in and looked around. They had fun checking out the hair accessories.



I had been wanting to see if they had any pashmina scarves like Pioneer Woman's kids were sporting in New York. I thought they looks so nice. Well, they did have the long scarves and I contemplated getting one even though I totally didn't need it. Just after this picture of me was taken by Corina, the clerk at the counter said we weren't allowed to take pictures in the store. Can you believe that? In this day and age where people have camera phones and carry cameras for Facebook and blogs, they don't allow pictures? Did I mention we were the ONLY customers in the entire store? Oh I was so ticked off. Rhiannon had found a bag she wanted and told her (probably too loudly) that we were not buying anything there, and I left with my head held high (probably too high).

After looking through the bookstore I was ready to go home. Never did find the Home Goods store. Hmm. Got home to find Christopher had folded laundry! I need to leave him home alone more often!

Friday night was our date night. Since our built-in baby sitter seems to be at her boyfriend's house more than her own, we hardly ever go out on a date anymore. It's too expensive to go out anyway. We spend a little money on our fav snacks like port wine cheese and crackers, hummus, chocolate, and home popped popcorn, then pop in a DVD and watch movies til 1 or 2 in the morning. It's been a tradition we've had for a long time that's kind of changed as our schedules changed, but we refuse to give it up. We watched Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, and it was wonderful! We both really liked it. I highly recommend it. I'm definitely getting the book asap.

Saturday was our completely free day. Neither of us worked late the night before and neither of us worked at all on Saturday or had to be up terribly early Sunday morning. We had planned earlier in the week to spend the day with our gaming buddies at the home of the couple who have the finished basement with the bathroom and wetbar with microwave and mini-fridge in the game room. We ended up taking Zoe and Faelyn and even Sophie our rat terrier along with us.
It was so great to be with other adults and talk about whatever's going on in our lives lately, have some excellent food one of them brought in a crock pot and just enjoy playing a game that lets us feel like little kids playing pretend for a few hours.... well ok we played around 12 hours. I still can't believe it, but it was so much fun.

I think we were really past our limit by the end though because we made some really bad tactical mistakes. We might get to do a do-over. Yay! This photo is one of our miniatures and the bad-guy miniatures in place on the play mat. Most of the ones in the shiney armor are the bad guys (kind of like the orcs in Lord of the Rings), and they were a lot harder to dispatch than we'd thought... we do look a little outnumbered here. That big guy in the back had just shown up too. Not good. We had a ton of fun though. Nothing like getting to be 10 years old again for a little while. :o)

Fortunately, we did not have to get up too terribly early for church. We were going to a new one and just wanted to attend worship service to see if we liked it and it felt right. Service started at 11am and the church is actually about 40 minutes away in another town. I was going to go into a very long post about our church background, but I will write a separate blog about that. It was a good day at church to say the least.


After church, we headed home and changed clothes and grabbed Corina's fiancee TJ and Sophie too and took off for Horse Creek. Well, we stopped at Wally World and got a 16 pc fried chicken meal first for the picnic. The girls had been begging us to go to the pool ever since Memorial Day, but $4 a person is a bit steep, and the creek is free!

We set up at the same table we always do since Corina loves the big flat rock in the creek to sun on. But she was hardly ever around since TJ wanted to go fishing and she followed him around. Next time, we'll get a table with better access to the water. Zoe liked the rock and pretended it was a surfboard.

Rhiannon caught a salamander. I'm not sure what she thought she was going to do with it, but it sure wasn't coming home with us!


The middle two, Rhiannon and Faelyn wanted to swim in as deep a pool as they could find. They have outgrown their water shoes and we haven't gotten new ones yet. Completely forgot to get some actually. So, the rocky bottom of the creek and the trout nibbling their toes were not highlights of the day.

Rhiannon had even decided to wear her beat up old dress shoes in the creek to save her feet... they floated away after a fight with Faelyn. I think the fight happened right after that pic of the two of them was taken. Rhiannon had just splashed Faelyn, so Faelyn threw her shoes. Such love between them... She got the shoes back, but Faelyn decided she'd had enough swimming. She went for a walk with Christopher and I on the walking trail through the campground. Sophie went along as well. Corina, Rhiannon and TJ took Zoe up the other direction to find another swimming hole.



By the time we left, we were all worn out buy happy. We'd had a great day together as a family and made some memories.