A Visit from the Rusaks

Andy's youngest sister Julie came to visit this weekend with her family. We had a great time! Julie was 14 years old when I first met her. Now, she's all grown up and an amazing mom to three sweet boys as well as a cherished friend of mine. We hadn't seen the Rusaks in three years, which means we had never met this cutie pie...


Upon arrival, Jake immediately entered a nerf dart gun war zone. He was quickly trained by his cousins and placed on the front line.


After nerf guns, playing soccer, climbing in the tree house, and much chatting around the kitchen table, we headed down to San Marco on foot for dinner.


Chelsea wouldn't let anyone else near the stroller - she wanted sole responsibility for Cooper. She did a great job of putting him to sleep so that Julie could enjoy a dinner using both hands! Matthew, Henry, and Jake enjoyed having their own table at Pizza Palace.



After dinner the kids climbed around on the statues of the lions while the boring grown-ups continued our chatting. Actually, Julie and my mom were in deep conversation, Andy and Dave were talking sports, and I was eavesdropping on both conversations while taking pictures of the kids.


The more than mile walk home didn't dampen anyone's spirits!


When we got home Matthew gave a little violin concert for the crowd and Chelsea performed some gymnastics tricks. Patrick, of course, wowed us the entire evening with his texting skills.

After a liesurely breakfast and a little time on the wii on Saturday morning, we headed out to Matthew's baseball game. Matthew showed off for his extended family by pitching two scoreless innings that included his throwing a runner out at home, throwing another runner out stealing second while catching, and hitting an impressive 3 run homer. Quite a game for Matthew! Unfortunately, his team (the Knights), went down 9-8 in a hard-fought game.

A heart-felt thanks to the Rusaks for taking the time and making the effort to drive up to Jax to see us during their busy week's vacation visit to the family homestead in Central Florida. We had a blast!! Here's hoping it won't be three more years until we see them again!

Quick...someone hit the pause button!

So much to do, so little time to blog about it!! This is going to be a quickie, I am determined to get to bed before midnight for once.

So....let's see. Science Spectacular! This is an event that the middle school Patrick goes to (a science and math magnet school) puts on at Chelsea's elementary school. It's basically a marketing ploy - to get the kids interested in science and in their school. Patrick goes as a student volunteer, Andy goes as a parent volunteer bringing Matthew along with him, and of course Chelsea is there at school as a participant(they all did this last year as well)...so everyone in the family ends up there except me! I guess someone around here has to earn a living, right? Matthew and Andy got to man the Coke and Mentos experiment station (pretty good gig!!)



We got new carpet in our family room. Matthew and Chelsea had some fun on the dollies that we moved the furniture around on. Then, the day after it was installed, I was doing the breakfast dishes and Andy said to me, "Stop what you are doing right now, and go get a picture of this. The boys are playing a video game together happily, without fighting - on the new carpet. You'll need this for your blog!" LOL...now that's the spirit!!

The couch and drapes will be going shortly too, don't worry ;-)

Lots of sports going on these days. Matthew is playing basketball and getting ready to start another baseball season. Patrick had his first soccer game playing for his middle school team, and is also playing in a recreational flag football league on the weekends.


No pictures of this yet, but Chelsea very recently started taking a gymnastics class again. She broke her arm 2 years ago at her first competitive gymnastics event, and hadn't gotten back on that horse since. She was suddenly ready to give it a go again, and she is loving it :-)

Okay, midnight is fast approaching. To bed.