Valentine's Day

Quiet Valentine's day around this house. We did our normal running around shuttling people to school, work and religion class. We celebrated in the evening. Of course, Annalise got dressed in her new Valentine's day present from Grandma and Grandpa TAller. It fits great (for a pillow case dress that she favors) and she loves it. Did you know there were pockets?
Evie had to finish her homework before she could participate in Valentine's fun.

We gave Evie the gift that keeps on giving. a 1000 piece puzzle. This should keep us busy for the next week or so.

Jim tries to steal a kiss from Annalise, but she was being too goofy.

Channeling our inner MInnesotan

Kind of a lazy weekend around here. Jim hurt his back this week so we just hung around the house and even watched a movie! Inception is really good if you are looking for a rental. My newest theory in life is that you are what you eat and if you eat junk, your body will hurt. Here's Jim's lunch. Meatloaf with BBQ sauce, a brat and a bowl of Velveeta. This is probably why his back hurts. He needs some lentils--which we had for dinner.
Evie and I decided it was a fine day to take in a skate. Evie's skills have really improved since last winter and she hardly feel at all!

We tried to get Annalise to come with us but she refused. Instead, she and dad went on a "date" to the candy shoppe.

Later, when we came home, it was 45 degrees! A lot of people were out chipping away at the ice and we decided to join in on the fun. Since the gutter on the front of the house was making a lake on the sidewalk, a channel needed to be constructed to direct the water away from the house. Jim and Evie did half. He had to quit because of his cheese ball induced back pain. I stepped in for the second half.

We finished up. This picture should be in the fleet farm catalog. I feel alive, Aunt Becky.

Sweet heart pops

Annalise was having quite the whiny morning. I think it is because she isn't sleeping well at night (yes, again) and having bad dreams. Dreams which she decides to get up and tell me about at 3 am so I haven't been sleeping well either. Tuesdays are our down days. Sometimes we get the groceries, but today we had a couple of errands. It was miserable getting her out of the house. But then suddenly, she turned the corner and was all skipping and cheerful and delightful. I think they call that a mood swing. Anyway, a while back she spotted this craft in the good old Family Fun magazine. Since she was being good, we stopped at JoAnns to get the supplies. We had some left over mini candy canes from Christmas.
We get started and she layed everything out.

Mom was in charge of melthing the candy and putting it in the hearts. Annalise did the sprinkles. I have to say, this took a whopping 5 minutes to make and bought me all kinds of peace this afternoon.

A closer look at ours. Didn't quite look like the picture, but that was ok with us.

Meanwhile, Annalise models her new boots that we found on super clearance at LandsEnd. We love you Lands End. I think she will be wearing these the rest of the winter and all of next.

After dinner, they ate their treats.

I guess they liked them

Best Wife Ever

I ventured out this morning to buy beer for the Super Bowl (Indiana has blue laws). I found a mini log of velveeta so I caved in and bought it for Jim under the condition he eats it all by midnight Sunday. Gross.

The Icy Aftermath

Finally, the kids went back to school today. The schools said that they had to remain closed through today because of the horrible task of getting the ice cleaned off the sidewalks so the children and teachers could enter safely. I do have to say that the city has done a great job getting the ice off the roads. The most trecherous street is the one that runs in front of our house. After that, it's pretty clear.So I decided that since the sun was out softening up all that ice, I would go out and do some removal. I also needed to capture some pictures to show Jim the conditions of the house/yard. This is the mound of ice in front of our house almost completely covering the crawl space vent and an outdoor spigot.
This has frozen pipes written all over it. Ugh.

The ice is melting off the roof, but the only downspout that is exposed is this one on the south side and you can see that it isn't doing much good. The gutters are full of ice. Ice dams are something I didn't think I needed to think about anymore. More Ugh.

And this downspout just goes under the ice. What are you supposed to do in a situation like this????

The north side of the garage has a healthy ice dam. Arg.

I blame the next part of my afternoon on the fact that I am a survivor. I lived in MN. I am trained and equiped to handle snow. So I pulled on my Sorrells, (wish I had some Choppers) and got out the "ICE MUTT" (real name) to bust out some of this ice. I can handle this! Hear me roar. Just wanted to show exactly how much Ice we were talking about. 1.5 inches.

And after an entire hour of pounding away, I cleared this much ice off the drive. Didn't even make it over to the sidewalk. I thought this was a pretty good accomplishment.....

...until I went to the end of the driveway. A drop in the bucket. I should have just stayed inside in front of the big TV.

The kids are enjoying the ice. They have found that even the smallest hill is pretty good for sledding and going far. It's just tough getting back up that hill.

Sledding action.

The uneventful update

There really hasn't been much going on around here. That's the reason for lack of updates. I can report on this. We survived the storm of the century of the month. We were hit with the ice on Monday night. Everyone stayed home on Tuesday. The kids played with the neighbor girls all day (we even ate dinner with them). I cleaned and washed and cleaned and cooked. I knew that we would be home a couple of days and I wanted to get all the work out of the way so we could play. Wednesday rolled around and we were in full on sloth mode. Evie read some books to Annalise and I was wearing my second sweat suit of the week. Bliss.
Jim stayed home on Wednesday too. He even delayed a trip to MN until Thursday so he could be sure to get out safely. While I was on my second sweat suit (and shower), Jim rode this storm out in the same clothes and no shower. Good thing he didn't wander too far from his computer with his stinky-ness.

Here's some ice on our trees. The kids didn't have school again today ( Thursday). Because of the difficultly of cleaning up this ice, they are on a two hour delay again tomorrow. They have really enjoyed skating around on the ice. i was impressed that no one had hurt themselves.....until tonight. We returned from gymnastics, which wasn't canceled--yay, and I decided to see if I could chip some ice off the drive. Evie was excited about the big chunks of ice. Perhaps too excited because she slipped and caught herself on her chin. She was bleeding and convinced herself that she spilt her chin and needed stitches. I am happy to report that she only scraped her chin and has a big old band aid now. Here's hoping that she's the only one that slips.

Annalise's Farm

It recently occured to me that Annalise gets the short end of the stick being the second kid. When Evie was this age, we spent a lot more time doing things one on one while Annalise was napping. Now Evie is at school and Mom wants to nap :) So I decided that going to Meijer or arranging playdates don't qualify as one on one time. I busted out a craft that I had tucked away. A 3-D foam farm! Can it get any better than this? I was lucky enough to hot glue each and every piece. Yeah me.
Annalise loved punching out all the pieces and getting them ready for the glue

Half way done. At this point, I had burned my fingers about 5 times and even Annalise got burned once. And, the table was a casualty also getting lots of hot glue on it.

Carefully placing stepping stones on the pathway so the Pollies can get to their cows

The Pollies and the cows love their new play set. This was well worth it. We really enjoyed working on this together.

Later, we had to go to school to take a quick pic of Evie's class for the upcoming silent auction fundraiser. they are a good looking bunch of kids.

The Palladium--The Carmel Center for Performance Arts

Today was the big day, the grand opening and ribbon cutting of The Palladium. We have watched it go from a hole in the ground to a pretty impressive building since we have moved here. And we have watched people complain about the tax money being used for this thing during a recession. I have to say, I was on the side of the complainers (give me more parks and stuff the entire community can use!!!). But I have to retract those statements because today we were able to go inside and check it out and it was amazing. This is the view from the outside--all covered in Indiana limestone. We read in the paper that the roof is a foot thick concrete!! This is our new town tornado shelter.
There are a ton of stair cases in the place. They probably could have cut the budget by millions if they just scaled back to 10 stairways instead of the 25!

This is looking down from the top of the stairs at the big chandlier. And al that pretty marble steps. When we walked in, I noted the floor looked like Nordstroms. That got me some serious looks from the Palladium lovers out there. I didn't mention that to the Mayor when I talked to him today. I just said, nice job, when's Melloncamp coming?

The inside view from the cheap seats--which really aren't that cheap at this point, but as you can see, not a bad seat in the house. Today, members of the community were performing. We sat for a while up here, but we weren't done exploring.

We wandered down to the lower level and checked out some bathrooms that have tile work to look like piano keys and then found a seat in the box seats. This is looking up at the acustical glass ceiling.

This is the view from the not so cheap seats. Pretty nice. Hopefully, someday, we can go to a concert there.

Talk like a Polly

We had a fun weekend with Grandma and Grandpa Seibert. First, Jim and Grandpa cut a bunch of half dead trees out of the back yard. Then after a quick Mythbusters nap, we went down town to go up into the Soldiers and Sailors Monument that is in the smack middle of Indianapolis. All of us opted to take the elevator, except for Jim. He walked up all 331 steps. He said that he was taking the Elevator down.
Before we went down, Evie points out our house to Grandma

Then we decided to go to Buca's for dinner (thanks Grandpa!). Annalise was kind of a pistol the whole time. She drank 2 glasses of lemonade, ate the bread basket and declared herself done. that was fine with us because that meant more tiramisu for me!

Evie works on the noodles. Unfortunately, this whole weekend, Evie was battling fever and headache. She even spiked up to 103 before we sent her to bed last night. So I made the mental note that we were going to the dr. on MLK day.

So after a fun weekend with Grandma and Grandpa Seibert, we stayed home in order to not infect many more people. Annalise got out the Pollies. You can't play with the Pollies without making your voice sound really high. There is also a farm bent to Polly because someone has to take care of all those cows and generally, some sort of natural disaster occurs when Evie plays Pollies with us. Why is there an ice cream parlor and Princess in a barn? Why not?

The disaster of the day was a tornado and a possible Jaborwacky attack.

Evie, after her dr appt (no ear infection--just the normal ibuprofen and rest), made this solar powered boat. Not a lot of sunlight in the bathroom after dark, so she had to chase it around the tub with the flashlight.

She doesn't look so sick anymore, but is ready for an early bedtime tonight.

And this girl. What a ham.