Halloween Funnies

Recipe for a great Halloween:

1 x 11 year old
1 x 3 year old
1 x neighbor with a big bottle of wine and a couple of tumblers
4 x neighborhood kids
1 x patient husband

Halloween here isn't quite like it was in California (houses weren't decorated nearly as cool), but it was still fun.  Jon made it particularly funny.  Some of my favorite quotes:

"Mom. it's a wolf, hold my hand!" - referring to his friend Jack who had been trick-or-treating with us the entire time (to his credit, it was a sort of scarey wolf)

"Mom, I want to go home and lay on the couch and watch dora and take a drink."  Okay, buddy.

"Look mom, there's our house!  We made it around the world!"

Kurt - "We made it around China?"  Jon - "That's a bad word daddy"

Lake Placid

Well, it's Sunday. Kurt is at work and won't be home until well after I'm asleep. Micaela has packed all her clothes for CA, done all her chores, and is chilling out downstairs with the music we just uploaded onto her iTouch. Jon has played, ridden a train at a sort-of nearby park, watched some Dora, got a haircut (used Kurt's clippers), and is now splashing in the bath. I have made sure all of the above happened, done all the laundry, done a few household chores, and I actually have a few minutes of free-time (as long as Jon keeps playing nicely in the bath). I've decided to spend this free-time blogging since I've been so negligent lately.

Now, I should be telling you all the cute and funny things the kids have been doing lately, but if I don't write them down right away, I just forget.  Jon's a hoot though, and Micaela is just plain good and helpful.   If Jon does something funny in the next few minutes I'll be sure to capture it.

Okay, back to the purpose of this blog - our summer vacation to Lake Placid. Kurt and his friend Todd came up with this crazy idea to do the Lake Placid Ironman Triathalon. I think it was Todd's idea, I'm not quite sure how he convinced Kurt to do it seeing as how Kurt has never done a triathalon.. but Kurt's determined and has been working hard. We had to go to Lake Placid during this year's Ironman so that the guys could volunteer and get early registration for next year. That part of the vacation was kind of exhausting because the race starts at 7am and finishes at midnight and then there was the early registration. The rest of the vacation was nice though. The town of Lake Placid is very cute and reminds me a lot of Mammoth (one main street with one grocery store, one fast food restaurant, and a lot of little shops). We spend one day being the typical tourists and we got an Olympic Passport that gave us access to all the key sites. We only had time to visit the hockey rink, the downhill skiing mountain, and the ski jump area - but they were all great and we got some good pictures. I'm just going to post a bunch of my favorite pictures to give you a better idea.

Our Cabin (45 min from Lake Placid, middle of nowhere)

The screened in porch was awesome, Jon and Will did pretty well playing together

There was a small pond with a playground not too far from the cabin

 Micaela invited her friend Livy to come (which made the trip a lot more fun)

 This looks kind of scary... not sure what we were thinking

The Volunteers

The finishline, just before the midnight cutoff

 What you do the night after the "midnight finishline party"

Inside the Lake Placid Olympic Museum

Where the Miracle on Ice took place (I didn't really know about this until this vacation, perhaps I should watch more movies)

Shopping on Main Street

This is the view from a coffee shop we found while visiting the local shops - this is Mirror Lake, where they do the Ironman swim.  Lake Placid (the lake) isn't actually all that close to the town.

That same day we also happened upon a community band concert.  The oboe player was incredible.

 It's not a Weaver, Estes, Pedrick vacation without a game of wiffleball

The kids played in the woods while the guys played wiffleball and the ladies napped

They even found some wild blueberries that were really good

Picnic at Mirror Lake before touring the Olympic facilities

This is where they practice their freestyle jumps/flips, they land in a big swimming pool

Ski Jumpers are CRAZY

See comment above

This is the view from the top of the Gondola on Whiteface Mountain

That's Lake Placid in the background, and this was the only time we ever saw the lake

Possibly my favorite part of the trip.  It was a pretty tiring vacation, so this visit to the pub near the end was well timed.

Camping and more

This weekend we went to PA to see Kurt's parents (his dad just had a small surgery, but is doing well) and his sister invited us to come out to their campsite and spend a few days camping with them. It was my first time camping since college, and I now I'm realizing what an amateur I was. The campsite is really nice and had everything you could ask for. The adults spent most the day making breaks in the crick (not creek) so that the current would be slow enough for the kids to play in and they dammed it at one end to make it a little deeper for fishing. There was a field for the kids to play sports, places for all the tents, a nice camping kitchen, a big firepit, a screen for projecting movies at night, and even a camping toilet! The site was about 10 minutes from Kurt's parents so I even got to go back and take a shower and have a small break from constantly watching Jon (to make sure he didn't hit his head on the rocks around the crick or get hit in the head with a baseball from the older kids). There were a few kids his size though and it was really funny watching them run in circles thinking it was a game. Micaela did her job well as the oldest cousin making sure everyone played nicely, playing "older sister" to her little girl cousin, and helping out with whatever was needed. The week prior to this she had been out at the cabin with her Aunt who had showed her the ropes of camping, making her bait her own hooks and release her own fish, so she was well prepared :) I didn't think to take a camera so this is what I was able to take with Kurt's phone before it died. I have a video but blogger is giving me problems so I'll have to post it later.

The other pictures are older ones that I found on Kurt's phone from various other spring/summer outings including the half-marathon in VA Beach in March and our trip to DC with the Covaney's in April.

P.S. Am I the only one to just now realize you can upload more than one picture at a time?? That is one of the big reasons why I don't blog very often, how long has that been an option... geez.

Happy 11th Birthday Micaela!!

The metro (aka choo choo train) was really cool

Micaela and her best friend from Williamsburg, Jocelyn

This was, by-far, the best exhibit in the Air and Space Museum. The helicopter would fly away and then come back around (on a video loop). Jon must have watched for 10 minutes :)

Success!

Yeah!!!! We grew something besides weeds! Here's a look at how our garden project progressed. Hopefully next week I'll have some sunflower pictures and tomatoes and I'll take a picture of the baby pumpkin/squash (can't tell the difference because they've kind of grown together and taken over the garden).

Dinner Party

Yesterday we had our first dinner party in our MD house (having Georgia, Todd, and Mike over doesn't count, they are practically family). Kurt invited all the people on his team at work to come over and he cooked a Puerto Rican feast. While overall it was a success, there were a few SNAFUs:

Making mofongo is a little bit tricky and apparently a little bit dangerous. This is the result of hot old splashing up onto Kurt's hand (a pretty nice blister):

Next, we noticed a strange car driving up and down our cultesac about 20 minutes before we expected people to arrive. Eventually Kurt realized that it was one of our guests who was having trouble finding the house. The reason for his confusion... Kurt gave everyone the wrong address. Yup. That happened. I don't know who lives at 1404 (our address is 1409), but sorry for all the people knocking on your door last night! Oops.

Third SNAFU... forgetting to take the Mofongo (that was soo painful to make) out of the fridge until after everyone had finished thier dinner. It wasn't needed though, dinner was great without it. Kurt was pretty pissed though since it was so hard to make.

And finally, Kurt was proud to show off his geeky office to all his friends, but he forgot that this was laying on the endtable downstairs:

Perhaps I should explain... it came with my mother's day gift, but we don't know how it's supposed to be used, so we just left it next to the machine and forgot about it until last night. Too funny.

Overall it was a great night. The food was great, the Weaver cake (chocolate cake eaten in a bowl with milk) was a hit, and enough beer was consumed that we got all of Kurt's coworkers to do a round of Dance Central on the Kinect (which is always fun). Here are the rest of the pictures:

The reason for the party was to farewell Joe who is going to work in Texas for a few months. This is Joe blowing out the candles on his Lucky 38 cake.

Oh yeah, and as an early Birthday Party for Micaela / Going Away party for Avalon I took the girls to a spa and got them the "Little Beauty's" package where they got their hair, makeup, and nails done. It turned out really nice and the girls like getting spoiled by the hairdressers who thought they were adorable.

And just when I think the girls are 11 going on 16, they say something like this - "mom, can we rescue the frog that's stuck in this hole?" I said yes and they proceeded to play with it and chase it through the yard for the next 30 minutes until I make them put it on the other side of the fence so it can live in peace.