rees genre

The boys headed to a fathers and sons camp out last Friday and so Ellie and I took advantage of our boy-free zone and had fun playing together. We started the evening by driving to our new house and checking out the walking paths that are nearby. Ellie loved scooting on the bridges! We did a little shopping at a newly opened toy store and then grabbed some Asian fusion for dinner. Yum!  After dinner we went home and worked on the doll house that we found at the toy store. It was the perfect find-- relatively inexpensive and a fun project to do together.  We finished off the night with a little treat and half of a movie. Yay for girl time!!

I realized with dismay that it has been a solid year since I last posted on my blog. I love my blog and had always pledged to keep it going but life has a funny way of happening despite all of our best laid plans. That basically describes the last year. I'm making a new pledge to continue looking forward while remembering what passed but here is at least a quick synopsis (with more posts of pictures from the past year to come). About this time last year Chris and I started hatching a plan. Davin turned 10 and we were shocked to realize that we now had a child in the double digits category. Before we knew it he would be a teenager- hanging out with friends on the weekends, calling girls, driving, ahh!!! We realized that our house was not ready for teenagers and it was still very much in baby mode; we decided it was time to grow it up a little. We spent the summer designing, planning, interviewing builders, and eventually settled on redoing our entire main floor and building a new de...

Rowan's class honors each student with a week of their own; a student gets to be the star student for a week and he or she brings in pictures from home to talk about themselves and gets to take home the class Skippy John Jones stuffed animal for a weekend to record their adventures in the class journal. The "star student" list was populated by the alphabetical order of last names. Rowan has been counting the weeks since August, waiting for his turn to finally come, and that is a lot of waiting for an "R" kid. Finally it was his turn to be the star student!  Rowan made a star student poster. He said that he wanted to be an astronaut when he grows up and his one wish would be to have a quadrillion dollars.  Skippy John Jones had an impressive adventure the day he spent with Rowan. He got to hang out at Dr. G's cool office (dedicated to all things comic books and sci fi).  He caught one of Rowan's baseball games and enjoying cheer...

April blazed its way forward and I hardly know where it went. We had a couple of important meetings at school to clarify what therapies the boys are receiving, etc, and all went well. It gave Ellie and I the excuse to enjoy a couple of lunches with Chris, something we won't pass up.  My mom surprised us with this lovely mandavilla and Ellie was quickly enamored with it. Also, one of the shoes in the picture belongs to my dear friend, Amanda (and not pictured at all is her equally dear husband Justin). We shared our Charlottesville experience with these two and then they headed north while we headed south. It has been a few years since we last visited but Justin came for a conference in Charlotte and brought Amanda with him. With all that there is to do in Charlotte, we were honored that they chose to spend their time with us and we had a great time catching up.  Rowan was my cute date to the school carnival. It was so fun to have some "me and Rowan...

We were lucky to see Grandma just before her birthday so we dedicated the rest of her trip to celebrating, well almost. She got to watch Davin's soccer game with Ellie, which is always a party. Mom and I took advantage of a gift certificate that I had at a nail salon and pampered ourselves.  Later that afternoon we decided to do a craft project together as a gift for Grandma. We ended up at Michaels and collectively came up with a glass mosaic project that involved gluing glass stones to some lovely jars. It was fun to be creative together! We finished the jars on Sunday just in time to make them the centerpieces for our Sunday dinner.  The next day Mom, Ellie, and I walked some lovely neighborhoods in Charlotte and we went shoe shopping. Ellie is an expert when it comes to shoes. She was very helpful and knew just what to buy. She was disappointed that none of the shoes came in her size! ...