The Lieslands

Last weekend was a Gala-filled weekend. Friday night Susan helped set up, and then Saturday night was the actual event. I was on the committee, so I had to be there at 5:30. Susan was going to stay home with the kids, but at 6:30 she showed up and told me that my parents were going to watch the kids. She was planning on taking an intermission at 9 to go home and help with bedtime, but when she called my parents said that all the kids were asleep. She ended up going home at 11 and I was up until 1. It was a good time.

A couple nights ago I read an interesting article about parenting and modeling proper behaviors for our children.

Today I came across an article which I like, agree with, and think has the same message.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/14/beckfloridamichigan/

It is time again for my semi-annual complaint about the time change.

I am sure that to someone the time change seems like a good idea, but they must not have little kids.

So apparently we got a lot of snow. Seems like a lot to me. It started snowing Friday morning and didn’t stop until Saturday afternoon. I got to leave work early on Friday so I could enjoy the white stuff. Friday was spent watching it snow and hanging out in the kitchen. Saturday was spent digging out and playing, and then by Sunday it was all play.

Simon and Rachel came over on Sunday and we hit the slopes of Mt. Airy Forest, at the same place where we had our wedding reception. It was pretty warm and sunny out, so the snow was slow. We sledded for a while and then went for a nice winter hike. By the time we were finished we were all a little warm, so instead of heading home and having hot chocolate we headed home and had some chocolate milkshakes. It was a fun day.

On Sunday we got a bunch of people together to help us move the play set that we bought a couple weeks back. We found a used play set on craigslist and decided that it was meant to be in our back yard. The only problem was that it was still set up in someone else’s.

We started the day at 11, at our house, with a light breakfast. We headed to Florence, KY and started working around noon. It was raining lightly on us as we finished taking the play set apart and loaded it into the vehicles. Luckily we were able to fit a major part of the ‘clubhouse’ in the back of Will’s pick-up truck.

The drive back to Cincinnati proved to be a little more challenging that expected because Will’s truck was having a hard time making it up the Montana hill, so we had to turn around and go to the next exit on the highway.

Eventually we got all the pieces back to our house and started putting it back together around 3. We were just about finished as darkness set in, and we could have finished, but we came up three nuts short, so we decided to clean up and call it a night.

I was at Home Depot at 7am this morning, home by 7:30, and by 8 the kids were swinging. They have been having a great time on it already – last night while we were putting it together and today when it was finished.

It turned out to be a fairly large project, which I suspected it might. Luckily we had a lot of help, which made it a lot easier.

I added some pictures from the play set raising to the 2008 photo gallery.

On Saturday morning I thought I smelled something burning in the basement, but I didn’t see anything on fire. I smelled the same smell again on Sunday morning and thought I had better do a little investigating. I noticed that the smell was coming from the hot water heater so I looked at both of the elements and sure enough, one of them was overheating and melting the element and the attached wire. I turned it off and turned off the water.

Luckily I have been through this before, so on Sunday night I was able to drain the thing and put in a new element. I am glad the house did not burn down.

Last Saturday we participated in the first ever Cinciditarod. Tammy asked us on Monday if we wanted to do it, and we spent the next week preparing. The highlight of the race (for me at least) was the one-minute lip-sync and dance routine that we had to do. We had a great time and we actually gave our best performance during the race, which was nice. By the end of the day, we were pretty tired.

During the race we were already thinking of some ideas for next year. . .

Elliot was crazy Saturday night. On Sunday we saw a ton of goop in his ear and figured that his ear-drum ruptured. We called the Dr, who confirmed that was probably the case, so it is another 10 days of antibiotics.