The Blog is Up!

Whew- we made it through the week and it was a tough one.  After a great but sleepless weekend last weekend, mom came down with my cold.  She has decided I am a little machine when it comes to cold viruses.  Although I didn't feel great, I was able to take some medicine and keep on trucking.  Mom on the other hand was completely wiped out by my little bug.  She missed work on Tuesday and went home at noon on Wednesday.  Lucky dad didn't even catch a sniffle.

Thankfully, everyone felt better by Thursday because dad was headed to Prescott, AZ for a mountain bike race and my best friend Claire was coming for a sleepover on Friday.  It was Claire's first time for a sleep over so mom was a little concerned we'd be making midnight run back to Claire's house but she did great.  She and I spent most of the evening locked in the guest room playing Minecraft.  It was a totally perfect night for everyone- Claire and I were totally occupied and mom had wine.  Meanwhile, up in Prescott, Dad was totally being taken care of by our friends who also went up to ride.  He got to feast on baked ziti and enjoy adult company.

Saturday was a quiet day. Claire went home about 11, mom and I ran some errands and then I took a good long nap.  I had to get rested for my 6PM softball game.  We did fairly well, only losing by one run.  I walked once and got a super nice, hard hit single.  I played second and actually remembered to cover first when the time came.  All around a good game.  

While we were napping and softballing, dad was racing his heart out in Prescott.  He actually spent some time riding with the women's 5 time world mountain biking champion.  It sounds like she was pretty impressive (as you would expect).  He finished with total ride time of 3 hours 16 minutes, not including the 1/2 hour bottle neck to go pedal up the first hill.  A good showing overall by team Goedel.

And while mom was drinking wine and eating cookies for dinner, dad was enjoying a well earned prime rib dinner.  Mom is really going to make an effort to be on this trip next year.

Dad came home on Sunday and mom and I headed out to see Newsies.  We switched our original tickets from Saturday evening to the Sunday matinee at 2 PM. We left a little early and stopped to get some ice cream and enjoy a relaxing afternoon.  We arrived at the theater, smile, smile, happy, happy at 1:30, plenty of time to get settled, go to the bathroom etc.  Only to find out the show started at 1.  Bummer. Undaunted, we headed in, snuck to our seats and watched the rest of the show.

I liked it but there was too much kissing in the second half.  Gross.

We got home earlier than expected to find out Grandma Sue was bringing us dinner.  Homemade lettuce wraps with sticky rice.  It was a two-fer.  Mom didn't have to cook AND we got a super yummy meal out of it.  Mom and I took advantage of the extra time and headed to the park to enjoy a perfect kite flying afternoon.

Hope everyone has a wonderful week!

All Around Fun Weekend

So not only are we getting the blog done on time, we are actually early.  It is 11 AM Sunday morning and mom is gettin' er done.  Mainly because we are pretty tired and she knows comes 5 o'clock tonight, there will be no blog writing.

We started our weekend with my school's spring play called "Rats!"  It's a really cute musical about a town overrun with rats.  I got to play Wendy Krinkle and although I only had two lines, I pulled out all the stops.  Everybody did a great job and mom is always amazed at what Ms. Faltico is able to coax out of us.

We worked so hard and for so many weeks on this.  I had such a great time that I was sad when it was over.
Because my softball game was moved from Saturday evening to Friday evening, we had a whole free weekend and decided to take advantage of it and go camping.  So after my play ended, we headed home, got our jammies on, loaded up Ginger and took the RV up to Rose Canyon Lake on Mt. Lemmon.  We made it to our campsite about 9:30 that night and it was a little hard to settle down so we didn't actually crawl into bed until about 11.  Ginger was a little (OK, a lot) restless and spent most of the night pacing and panting in mom's face.  We were up and going fairly early on Saturday- see previous sentence.  Dad made us awesome pancake and bacon breakfast out in wide open outdoors while mom took Ginger for a run to wear her out a little.

Once we all had full bellies, we walked down to the lake to do some fishing.  We thought it was going to be our usual of fishing all day and catching nothing but we found a pretty sweet spot and managed to catch two trout!  It was pretty awesome and I was so looking forward to watching mom and dad eat the trout for dinner.  ( I sure wasn't going to put that anywhere near my mouth- ew.)  But.  My parents disappointed me once again and gave the fish away to the family fishing next to us.  They already had about 8 so we figured they were actually going to do something with them.  I think dad was secretly glad he didn't have to clean them.

So despite the sadness of having to give my fish away, we had a really great day.  We all took naps, mom actually read a whole magazine, cover to cover- you know all the good stuff in life!
We headed home fairly early on Sunday morning and it's back to the grind.  We hope everyone has a fantastic week!

Springtime Update

All kinds of good spring time things to report.  And we figured if we waited much longer, it would the summertime update.

Spring is always so pretty in Tucson.  If you can deal with the obnoxious amounts of pollen from the Acacia trees, the Palo Verde trees and the Mesquite trees, it's almost paradise.

This is the view from mom's work- she just loves all the different shades of green.  

She calls this picture "50 Shades of Green".  See how clever she is.....

We headed  to Albuquerque for Easter.  We never go back at Easter but we had to see Uncle Adam and Aunt Erin's new house.  They moved down from the mountains and have rejoined civilization.  It's a great house and we spent all kinds of time there.  We also spent all kinds of time at the new Dave and Busters that just opened up.  That almost makes Abq. worth it for dad.  This D&Bs had a new Star Wars game that was awesome.  It made all of us a little motion sick but it was totally cool!

After a fun afternoon there, we headed up to Uncle Adam and Aunt Erin's to color Easter eggs and decorate the bunny cake.  This was Sophia's first time with both of those and she had an awesome time (we think).  She was all hands in on the egg decorating and showed a good liberal hand with the jelly beans on the cake.  Just how it should be.  I was a pretty good Big Cousin and tried to show her the ropes the best I could but kids are a lot of work......

( Guess which side is Sophia's?)

Easter morning, we all headed back down to the house for the egg hunt.  The Easter bunny did a great job hiding all the eggs and the whole gang got into it- even Moufasa.  I showed Sophia and Brendan the major "how to's" for hunting and Sophia got it like a champ.  Brendan had his own plan but had fun none the less.

 ( Could I look any more like my dad in this picture?  I don't think so.....)

In the afternoon, Dat dat and Mr. Walker headed out for a mountain bike ride and Nana, mom and I went for a walk to enjoy the sunshine.  We ended up at mom's favorite oak tree.  It's so pretty back there now- too bad there are houses and big PRIVATE PROPERTY!!! signs everywhere.

Everyone came up for Easter dinner and we got a few family pictures.  Nana and mom took turns closing their eyes during the pictures so none of them turned out totally, 100% good.  I think that's why they invented photo shop isn't it?

  (This is how dat dat made through a weekend with the Walkers)


We headed back home Monday morning and on the way into to town, we stopped to pick up Monkey.  We love sending her to this boarding place because she comes home so exhausted, she sleeps for 3 days.  It's awesome!  I was kind of tired too.....

It was back to the grind for the week.  Dad headed up to Prescott, AZ to test ride a course he is racing on in 2 weeks so mom and I were on our own for the weekend.  I had a softball game on Saturday at the beautiful fields in Oro Valley.  While I was warming up, mom took Ginger on a walk around the area and found this huge, flowering Palo Verde.  All those teeny, tiny yellow flowers.  That fall off.  And usually land in the pool.  But they are pretty trees.

Mom then found a sweet spot in the shade with a good view of the game and was able to watch us actually win a game.  We are now 1-3 which isn't too bad considering we have no pitching and no one has really hit a ball yet this season.

Dad got home Saturday night and we all slept in Sunday morning. In the afternoon,   I went to my friend Shelby's birthday party and had an awesome time.  I was the only one tall enough to drive the go carts so I was pretty popular for awhile.

After that fun afternoon, Grandpa Vern and Grandma Sue took me out to dinner.  It was a perfect way to end a pretty darn good weekend.  Hope everyone has a wonderful week!